Congratulations! You’ve done your media outreach correctly and now, a journalist wants to interview you.
If you’re like most people, this will be a “happy problem” for you. You’re excited to get exposure, but at the same time, you’re nervous about nailing the interview and appearing in media, especially if it’s a live interview on radio or TV.
To help ease your fears, here is a checklist for your interview:
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.
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…
Lady Gaga is a celebrity phenomenon. She rose to stardom on the wings of social media and has achieved so much in little time compared to her predecessors. Consider this:
If that’s not enough, the University of South Carolina has created a course, “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame.”
Clearly, we can learn a thing or two from someone who has accomplished so much. What can Lady Gaga teach us about getting PR in a social media-driven world?
For over 20 years, we’ve been fortunate to be part of many product and company launches, with many lessons learned.
Earlier this year, we helped our client Glen Canyon Corporation earn over 30 feature articles and 150 news release postings within a span of 60 days, resulting in exceptional lead generation for them. We began pro-active outreach to media and analysts just two weeks prior to the first news release and executed the company’s formal launch at an industry trade show.
While every company is unique, our experience has shown us there are key elements essential to the success of every start-up’s PR launch: Read More→
Our biggest challenge in PR is getting our stories published in the news. But to get in the news, we must first be “newsworthy.”
Unless your business is related to politics or celebrities, chances are you need to work at being newsworthy. Don’t despair, even the most mundane of businesses can be compelling enough to land the news.
What does it mean to be newsworthy anyway?
So you’ve written a very easy to read and keyword optimized SEO press release. You get it all ready to send out and upload to your website so you can start raking in the dough, but you hesitate. Suddenly it occurs to you that you have no idea how to actually track this press release’s level of success.
How many eyeballs will the press release reach? How effective will your keyword placement be? Did you anchor your links properly for optimum SEO? So many questions, and they all make a huge difference to your company’s well-being. So how to track how well your SEO press release does?
Search Rank
The easiest way to tell just how great your SEO press release is doing is by how far up you’ve moved in your search ranking! If you started out buried on page four and suddenly find your website listed on page two, then you can rest assured your SEO press release is working, barring any extenuating circumstances.
Keep in mind this might not happen all at once, and not for every single web crawler. All use different algorithms to search the Internet and may provide different results. As a result, you’ll want to check each search engine to see where you rank. Over time this will change, hopefully for the better.
If there is little to no result, you may want to go back to the drawing board with your SEO press release. Again don’t expect everything to happen all at once, but if days and weeks go by and your site has gone nowhere, give it another shot.
Trackers
If you’d rather not spend half your day looking at multiple search engines, then you may want to give an SEO tracker a go. These automatically crawl around the web looking to see where your site ranks, and can even let you know when other sites and bloggers mention you.
They range from the inexpensive, like Sheer SEO, to the free yet a little more complicated, like Google Analytics. The more expensive ones are naturally going to be more in-depth and headache free, and most will do everything you need without you lifting a finger.
Remember when I mentioned looking at the different search engines to see where you are? Technically, that’s almost impossible to do by yourself, as there are over 700 search engines. You’d literally do nothing all day long if you tried to do that! However, it’s important to recognize that three search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo!) comprise more than 95% of all search traffic. Focus on these engines and don’t get distracted by the others.
Also, some higher end tracking software can suggest related keywords to use in the future to increase your page rank. This can give you a better idea how to get to that coveted “page 1,” which can often make a huge difference in how easily potential new customers find you.
This guest post is by Mickie Kennedy, the founder of eReleases – home of affordable, next generation press release distribution. Mickie also publishes PR Fuel, a PR-centric blog that showcases advice and articles on all things social media, PR publicity, and online marketing.
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.
In today’s guest post, PR professional Laura Ward takes us back to basics by explaining the key PR tools to consider and how to choose the right ones.
So you’ve decided to add public relations to your marketing mix. Or, you’re considering it. Either way, fantastic! Congratulations on making (or, getting ready to make) a very smart business decision.
Public relations helps build brands, generate awareness and visibility, and drive bottom line results. However, simply realizing you need and want public relations doesn’t make developing and executing the right plan any less intimidating or overwhelming. PR is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it for the lazy.
Most times, upon answering questions about what they do for a living, PR professionals are the proud recipients of responses such as, “Oh, that’s nice. So, you write press releases.”
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.
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.
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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