Confronting Your Time Management Excuses

In today’s guest post, Karen Southall Watts once again forces us to face the truth — no matter how painful — so we can achieve our business and personal goals.

The challenge of time management is not new. Increasing pressure to “do more with less” is the hallmark of modern life. At some point everyone faces issues about how much to do or how to prioritize the items on their to-do-list. And the resources we need are all around us. There’s a wealth of information on the internet (much of it free), thousands of self-help books and CD’s and legions of gurus willing to tell us how to get it all done.

So, what’s the problem?

Often we merely give into our excuses. It’s time to confront those ideas, thrash them and move on.

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Tools to Monitor Your Online Reputation

In a previous post, we talked about the different factors that form your overall online reputation.
In this post, let’s talk about the actual tools you can use to monitor how your online reputation is doing.

By using these tools regularly — daily in fact — you’ll know:

• what PR, branding and marketing strategies are working

• what your prospects and clients are saying about you and your competitors online

• what makes up the current discourse about your market or industry

Think of these tools as your way of keeping your ear to the ground and your finger on the pulse of your industry.

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How to Write a Media Pitch Journalists and Editors Will Love

What if your media pitches always stood out from the pack? What if the editor’s eyes perked up every time they saw an email from you? You can bet this would improve your chances of getting coverage.

In this post, we’ll go over a few things you can do with your media pitches to make journalists and editors love them.

What journalists want in a story pitch

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Signs Your PR Sucks

We’ve written quite a bit in this blog about the importance of PR metrics in  monitoring and implementing successful PR.

However, while numbers and measurements surely have their place in your PR management, there are “soft,” non-numerical indicators that are worth looking at, too.

These are signs and symptoms that help you see whether your PR is going the right way.

Below, we offer you the…

7 Signs You Could Be Doing Better in PR

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7 Press Release Mistakes PR Newbies Make

Even though the public relations industry is changing fast, some things never change.

That includes the need to write a clear, compelling, and relevant press release.

Unfortunately, while press releases are straightforward, factual and objective, they aren’t always easy to write. In fact, if you’re used to writing other pieces — advertisements and fiction for instance — you’ll be at a disadvantage when writing press releases.

Below are some of the most common mistakes I’ve seen on press releases.

7 Worst Mistakes to Make on Your Press Release

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Changes In Media, Changes In PR

Public relations professionals need to keep our finger on the pulse of the media. But with so many changes happening, and the speed with which information travels, it’s hard to keep up.

Fortunately for us, Vocus, maker of cloud-based marketing and PR software, puts out an annual State of the Media Report. These reports give a summary of big changes that took place in media in the previous year, as well as trends to look out for in the year ahead. The 2012 report is now available for download, for free, here.

Below are some of my take-away insights from the report:

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Top 10 Marketing Blogs for The PR Pro’s RSS Reader

One of the best ways to keep abreast of any expertise is to populate your RSS reader with feeds from high-quality blogs.

Below, I share the 10 blogs I think would be most helpful to PR professionals or business owners who do their own PR.

I culled this list from AdAge Digital’s Power 150 blogs, a ranking of the top English-language marketing blogs. Each blog is scored depending on quality of content, as well as how frequently the posts are shared in various social networks.

Let’s get started!

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How to Do Social Media PR in 2012

Social media has become the new arena for PR. And the characteristics of social media, which continue to evolve as users shape it, are changing the way we are doing PR. Expect the PR landscape to shift and change quickly. If you don’t keep up, you’ll get lost.

Social media is changing the way we connect with journalists, as well as our prospects and customers. It’s placing new demands on companies and PR professionals — demands that require new skills and expertise. In some ways, PR is getting easier because of social media. But in other ways, it’s also becoming unfamiliar, strange, and even scary.

In this post, I’d like to point you towards several key ways our PR work will change this year, as we harness social media for PR.

5 PR Shifts To Make In 2012

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Sleep Better and Save Time in Your Business

Sleeping allows us to refuel and restore our bodies. Sadly, we often deprive ourselves of needed sleep time, thinking that reducing this time is the only way to achieve more during the 24 hours that we have at our disposal each day.

But what if our sleeping time could help us save time during the workday?  Would we then permit ourselves to enjoy a full night’s sleep?

Time management expert Kathryn McKinnon has provided us with a strategy to make sleep work for us during the workday in her best-selling book entitled Triple Your Time Today:  10 Proven Time Management Strategies to Help you Create and Save More Time!

Kathryn introduced me to the possibilities that lie within this concept in her answer to a question that I posed to her on LinkedIn.  She said the following:

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Put an to End Meaningless PR Metrics

Ever wonder what PR metrics really mean?

Gone are the days when the success of PR is measured only by outputs: number of articles published about our company; number of people who were reached by the publications, TV programs and radio shows we appeared in; etc. The problem with these metrics is, we’re never really sure exactly how many people we’ve reached and, more importantly, what effect such exposure has had on consumer behavior.

Even Advertising Value Equivalency or AVE (the cost of editorial coverage if you were to pay for it as advertising space) is far from an accurate measure of exactly what results our PR efforts bring. The only thing you find out with this metric is, you probably spent way less for that exposure through PR than if you had paid for it in advertising.

Pretty impressive, but the next question is, so what?

The integration of social media with traditional media in PR has made measurement much easier. We can now trace exactly how many people clicked on a particular link and, upon getting to our landing page, how many took the action we wanted — whether it’s signing up for an email list or placing an order.

Yet social media measurements aren’t perfect, either. We still can’t capture “more favorable attitudes” or “increased awareness” towards our product or service, for example. That’s because knowledge, awareness, and attitudes don’t always translate into behaviors we can observe and measure objectively.

Given that there is yet no perfect way to measure the impact and effectiveness of PR, we can’t lose sight of the fact that we can at least make PR measurement more meaningful.

That is, we can measure and track those metrics that help us get to know our prospects and customers better, determine what works and what doesn’t, and have a reliable basis to make future PR, marketing and business decisions.

Our Approach to Measuring PR

In my own experience with clients at Cross Border Communication, the key is first understanding the business outcomes you need to produce. Pick that outcome apart into its underlying components.

This exercise can turn something as intangible as “building awareness” into a concrete objective with observable benchmarks, such as increase in social discussions, improvement of search engine ranking, number of downloads of a white paper, proliferation in the use of our hash tag, etc.

Therefore, metrics are meaningful because they support our PR/marketing and business goals. It becomes clear why we’re measuring something, and what the metrics mean in relation to the results or outcomes (vs outputs) we want to accomplish.

Developing some discipline around measuring the metrics that describe our benchmarks and tracking the data over time can give us powerful insights and market intelligence we can use to improve future campaigns. Company executives can also better understand and appreciate the results PR has generated.

How Do You Measure PR?

What have you been doing to measure the effectiveness and success of you company’s PR? How do you feel about the metrics you currently track?

I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments below. You can also send me a message via Twitter, or post a comment on our Facebook page.

photo credit: aussiegall

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