PR Insiders

Athletes are always on stage and they carry a tremendous amount of responsibility by representing not only themselves but also their sponsors (and their sponsor’s customers), their sport, their teams and their countries, which means they have much to lose when things go awry.

If it’s your job to create and share content on behalf of a brand, then you know the feeling of shooting in the dark. You’re constantly asking yourself if a content idea will resonate with your audience. In the search for great content that inspires engagement, we so often forget to look in the most obvious place.

If it’s your job to create and share content on behalf of a brand, then you know the feeling of shooting in the dark. You’re constantly asking yourself if an article or blog post idea… Continued

In today’s content-driven marketplace, airtime is pretty competitive in just about any venue and even more so on the web. From my experience, the process of developing a position of credibility for a particular market space comes down to three key factors. Once you have your three factors down and you have a clear picture of why you are different, what you specialize in and how you will produce content to support your “smartness,” it’s time to execute.

The pay wage gap in the public relations industry has recently received a lot of attention. There is no denying that the PR industry is predominantly comprised of women in the workforce—70% of the workforce, to be exact. Yet women hold 30% of C-level positions in the industry, according to the Holmes Report. How can a change occur? Many women, especially in the public relations industry, are establishing their own businesses and capitalizing on entrepreneurship to find success.

Any discussion of “thought leadership” should start with an acknowledgement that virtually everyone outside the communications field hates the term. Editors and producers see it as a symbol of all that’s wrong with public relations. Yet in spite of the cliché, positioning your executives as, well, leading thinkers remains a critical component of any successful corporate communications effort—especially when your company has passed the “media darling” stage when it’s making all the news.

Always be careful of what you put in writing and what you say, in person or over the phone. With all the hacking going on it’s now more important than ever to remember that “mum’s the word.” Information not to be distributed to the media should never be discussed in public places and should only be discussed on a need-to-know basis.

The best client-agency relationships are those that thrive on building and executing programs that start with a firm foundation in positioning and messaging, and are designed from the top down with clear business objectives. And then: PR strategies that are clearly designed to achieve these objectives. And tactics also, of course (plenty of them, actually). But tactics that are only in the plan because they clearly tie into agreed-upon strategies.

Writing—and the rules associated with it—is, without a doubt, one of the most-argued-about tasks for any public relations professional. Between obeying basic grammar expectations, observing the rules of AP style and adapting it all for individual client preferences, writing press releases and other material can be a bit confusing. Some rules should always be followed. Here are a few that can (and often, should) be broken.

As communications professionals, we must make sure the connection between PR and the customer service department is solid, guaranteeing that when the rare but potentially inflammatory incident occurs, all possible reputational ramifications are addressed.