PR Insiders

“Either go live often, or don’t go live at all.” So says Bilal Morris, director of local social media strategy for iHeartRadio, about Facebook Live, the social media giant’s live broadcasting feature, which it just… Continued

Relationships should be just as much a part of your brand strategy and business plan as your basic production model. These relationships form both internally and externally and require a keen emotional intelligence.

Increasing competition and a rapid shift in technology have made both the mobile app and journalism industries particularly volatile in recent years. Mobile app market saturation is at an all-time high, making it difficult for app creators to enter the industry and gain exposure. Meanwhile, the journalism industry is struggling with monetization as the advertising landscape evolves, being forced to re-evaluate the way it serves online content.

What the best PR does is amplify brand stories and messaging in ways that connect with the target audience, whether the brand defines that audience as pure consumer, professional or a hybrid. And think about what connection meant 40 years ago—if you weren’t connected via membership in a school club, a religious or professional organization, or at the very least to the households who shared your party phone line, then the extent of your connections would likely have been limited to family members, schoolmates and work colleagues.

With startups growing and, oh so often, failing fast, it is more important than ever that ingenuity and passions are partnered with PR prudence and a tight communications strategy. It all seems to boil down to two major thought pillars, under which all else falls: messaging and relationships. Understanding how to create a message and have the relationships that will make your message matter are the foundation to creating a successful communications strategy at a startup.

RFPs can be complicated and time-consuming, so it’s best to try and get them as clear and concise (yet descriptive) as possible the first time around. Here’s how to make sure you can set up your RFP for success and receive the best possible proposals.

Our job is to develop the visual and verbal brand an organization will use to tell their story, and to write, design and produce the communications that will bring that brand to life. But unless we start with a shared understanding of how brands are built, grown and promulgated, we won’t be as successful as we—and our clients—want to be.

The next time you think you are having a tough day in PR dealing with media in the U.S., count yourself on the lucky side. You could be dealing with media around the world. Time zones, language, culture and other factors make dealing with international media much more complex and difficult than strictly doing U.S. media outreach.

Impacting an audience starts with understanding that audience. So, if you want to encourage a specific behavior with your audience (such as making a purchase), then you need to understand their preferences, concerns, and behaviors.

It’s imperative that as communicators we showcase our good work, we prove our worth, we take integrated communications seriously and we don’t squander the leadership position in content marketing and social media. To get there, we need to brush up on measurement, data and analytics.