Stories by Karen Bromley

As PR pros we take a big chunk of our time creating exciting campaigns with a solid strategy that meets our clients’ goals. We pitch our most trusted contacts and strive for A-list media coverage. But even when we do get coverage in the top media outlets in our field the expected traffic does not follow.

In today’s world, advertising is evolving towards ‘storytizing,’ which is driven by earned media, not paid. In earned media, our customers are deciding what is relevant, what they will share and whether they will, quite frankly, pay attention.

In an increasingly mobile (and hyper-busy) society, the trend in content format has been to serve messages in smaller and smaller morsels that consumers could accesss without committing much time.

Pre-Web, the marketing and communication vehicles were largely defined by media relations, advertising, print and events. But in a digital age, the rules have changed for communicators.

In 2010 Toshiba America Business Solutions (TABS) created the Helping the Helpers Technology Makeover contest, which pitted nonprofits against one another to win a full-blown technology makeover.

If you want to get on the fast track in your organization via communications, you need to master two of the most traditional PR skills: written communications and media relations.

It’s not enough anymore for PR pros to get their brands and organizations exposure in appropriate media channels. Communicators need to provide their organizations with a ROI.

The promise of Big Data is slowly giving birth to a generation of metrics-driven PR professionals who have embraced stats and trend lines as powerful story telling devices.

Whether they are social media trolls looking to start trouble or people with a legitimate gripe about your products and/or services, PR managers need (in most cases) to address detractors in a dignified way, one way or another.

Today’s communicators need to practice a kind of integrated leadership that allows us to collaborate with others and see the connection points in everyone’s role.