PR Communications

PR ideas, PR planning

A useful site for PR ideas and PR planning.

Advertising your way to a top ranking

Several new advertising networks give the advertiser the opportunity to boost their ranking on search engines. Here's how, each magazine devoted to an industry will get a good ranking on the search engines, as magazines have lots of relevant content. When you advertise on lots of web sites with a good ranking and keywords your audience use, your web site will receive a boost in link popularity. The trick is to find an advertising network that syndicates your ads across a whole industry for a reasonable cost.

Word of mouth advertising

The clutter of advertising is making word of mouth advertising more important not less in today's world. The Internet gives product advocates more tools to reach more of their friends.

Read this article in the New York times about word of mouth advertising in youth markets.

Yahoo! switches to a new search engine

Yahoo has switched from Google results to their own new search engine.

Advocating pays!

After twelve years in sales, marketing and PR, I have noticed that some techniques give a better ROI than others. One thing that stands out is that when a customer wants to buy, they will do what ever they have to find the right vendor. Typically a customer will listen to their most respected colleagues, friends and family. How then do you influence the influencers? How do you turn a paying customer into an energetic advocate? Or for that matter how do you turn a non-customer into an advocate. You don’t necessarily use a vendor’s service or product to advocate for them. Here are some ideas:

· Start and continue a conversation with the advocate.
· Reward advocates.
· Suggest to the advocate share the good news.
· Make it easy to advocate the value by telling stories.

The Saturn Case Study on advocacy

I was talking with Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR about creating customer advocacy, and we briefly touched on the subject of Saturn.

Saturn Motor Company was an example of how a car company changed the model of how a company marketed its cars. Saturn decided to listen to its customers when developing their cars and marketing programs. The active involvement of customers from the genesis of Saturn created the perception that Saturn was not just another car company attempting to get the most money out of them, to a company that wanted to cut a fair deal by listening to its customers. Saturn asked the question what do you want, and what would be a fair price? The customers responded, and Saturn in turn produced cars and a way of selling that was fair bargain for the customer to receive in terms of value, and Saturn to grow as a profitable and viable car company. Saturn’s strategy was to involve its customers. This involvement created customer advocates that brought sales and success. Saturn’s advertising strategy was simple; tell the story of how a car company can listen to customers, and what an individual customer’s experience was in buying from a car company that actually involved them in the process of building a product. Customers became advocate because a genuine relationship had been built between Saturn and its customers, one where customers knew that the company listened to their needs and responded. The success with Saturn did not last however, General Motors decided to bring the division within the existing hierarchy, and this change altered the relationship between the company and its customers. General Motors had a different strategy of how to develop cars and programs for its customers; they did not listen to Saturn customers as much as when Saturn first started.

I noticed this great article about Saturn, the article talks in more depth about the strategy of getting Saturn workers and customers more involved in the development of products.

12 laws of media relations

James Buchanan's PR article about the 12 laws of media relations is useful to remember.

1. Every reporter is a "key" reporter.

2. Don't ignore online publications.

3. Respect deadlines. 4. Make/show your news to be newsworthy.

5. Humanize your quotes.

6a. Know the publication and its target audience.

6b. Don't trade one magazine against another.

7.Think long-term.

8. Share your sources.

9. Know your competition.

10. Follow up intelligently; don't be a pest.

11. Prepare all of your press materials according to the magazine's and reporters' requirements.

12. Be ethical.

Searching for the competition

Another way besides wordtracker's KEI rating of determining what sites are competitive to your web site on search engines.

Crisis Management, Internet Style

Crisis management is very important in PR, having a plan when a crisis hits will help you to manage the situation. Here is a good article about crisis management planning.

Persuasive blogs, forums & digital social networking

Elizabeth's post on blogs and persuasion gives a good overview of some of the issues in blogging and other Internet cultural devices for community building, PR and business blogging. Basically asking the question do these cultural devices actually work and persuade people to act. Elizabeth suggests a strategy for success when the goal is action:

"blogs (and other internet communications forms) are powerful communications tools, but they must be used in conjunction with other informal and formal tactics in order to create action."