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Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
Ever wonder what the best day of the week is to pitch media or if you’re pitching at the best time of day? Whether you’re just starting out in PR or you’re a seasoned professional, chances are you’ve found yourself asking the same questions and wishing for a bit more insight. Fortunately for us, Business Wire recently released its annual “Media Blueprint” report, with media survey results for 2016. Based on a survey of more than 600 members of the media from more than 40 countries, the report analyzes trends that surfaced among particular media groups and includes best practices for working with journalists. The survey even went so far as to classify media into subsets based on years of experience, beat categories and outlet types.
Read on to find out my five most surprising takeaways from the report with links to helpful resources:
- Early birds get the worm and the reporter’s attention. According to Business Wire, 61 percent of journalists prefer to receive pitches in the morning. However, afternoon pitches are more popular with 42 percent of media newcomers (less than 5 years of experience) and Gen Z respondents. Recommended read: How to Successfully Pitch Via Email
- Tuesday trumps Monday for the best day of the week to pitch media at 34 percent. A couple of things surprised me about this result. First, I didn’t expect such a large number of reporters to be so enthusiastic about receiving pitches on a Monday, but the beginning of the work week also earned top marks from media groups such as local/national (44 percent), Millennials (42 percent), newswire (42 percent), TV (42 percent), and newspaper (37 percent). I was also caught off guard that media cited Friday as a better day to send a pitch than Thursday, so if anyone took the survey and would care to explain that to me, please feel free to leave a comment below. Recommended read: Timing is Everything: When to Send a Press Release
- Another day, another overflowing inbox. Journalists have no shortage of emails to sort through, with 47 percent reporting they receive more than 25 emails a day. Broadcast journalists reported the highest number of unsolicited pitches each day with 53 percent receiving 1-25 a day and 16 percent with more than 100 daily. Recommended read: The Art of the Pitch
- Hold off on that funeral for the press release. One of the more heated debates in PR is whether the traditional press release still serves as a relevant tool to journalists or is a relic of the past. Detractors may want to hold their tongues as a whopping 91 percent of media listed receiving a press release as their preferred method for receiving breaking news from an organization. Telephone calls received only 1 percent, with company blog posts showing no signs of making any headway with media as a source for news with zero percent. Recommended read: Writing the Winning Press Release
- Six mistakes to avoid with media. Finally, when you’re attempting to build relationships with key reporters, it always helps to start off on the right foot. By spending a few minutes reading their recent articles and scrolling through their Twitter feed, you can avoid committing what 73 percent of journalists named as their biggest pet peeve – not knowing their beat. Other common grievances included cold calling, sending a pitch with typos and not having a press release. Recommended read: Why Slow PR is Crucial for Building and Maintaining Relationships with Journalists
Business Wire’s full survey results can be found here.
Veterans Day honors and thanks all the military personnel who have risked their lives in the service of protecting the United States. The day is marked by parades and community events throughout the country, and many places fly the flag at half-staff in remembrance and support of those who lost their lives on behalf of the country. Officially observed every Nov. 11, the holiday marks an important day in history – the 1918 armistice between Germany and the Allied nations and the end of the First World War.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 18.8 million civilian veterans in the United States last year. As this population begins to age, it is crucial to start planning for senior care, and more importantly, to understand what resources are available to ensure that veterans can live in a high-quality assisted living facility without struggling to pay for basic care costs.
In honor of Veterans Day, VeteranAid.org, a free A&A Pension resource and forum, and A Place for Mom, the nation’s largest senior living referral service, teamed up to raise awareness of a little-known benefit pension that helps vets pay for senior care costs.
The Veterans Aid & Attendance Pension
The Veterans Aid and Attendance (A&A) Pension is an allowance for veterans and their spouses to help pay for senior living and home care. The benefit provides financial support to lower income veterans and their spouses who require another person’s aid with daily living activities such as medication management and meal or care support. Both in-home care and senior housing are covered by the A&A Pension, which can provide up to $1,788 per month to a veteran, $1,149 per month to a surviving spouse, $2,120 per month to a couple, or $1,406 per month to a veteran with a sick spouse.
To qualify for the A&A Pension, a veteran (and his or her spouse, if applicable) must have $80,000 or less in total assets, excluding one home and one vehicle. Additionally, the veteran must have been discharged honorably and have served 90 consecutive days, at least one of which was during an approved period of war.
As it stands, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) only looks at a veteran’s current income, assets and expenses at the time of application. However, under newly proposed eligibility requirements, which are anticipated to be implemented in 2017, the VA will likely examine the past three years of an applicant’s financial history to determine eligibility for the pension.
Raising Awareness
APFM helps more than 200,000 families find the right senior care solution each year. Approximately 40 percent of these families come from a military background, and it is estimated that more than 70 percent are not aware of the A&A Pension. It’s anticipated that the proposed changes to the pension are anticipated to affect some qualifying veterans and prospective applicants as it will require additional financial thresholds to be eligible, potentially disqualifying candidates who were previously entitled to the benefit.
To help inform vets about the pension, VeteranAid.org and APFM created the “VA Benefits & Long-Term Care” eBook, which is now available for download. They also embarked on a media outreach campaign to raise awareness about the pension, garnering a slew of original coverage from media outlets across the country:
- The Senior List: Are You Eligible for the Veterans Aid and Attendance Pension? Proposed Amendments Could Make it Harder to Apply
- Long-Term Living Magazine: A Place For Mom joins effort to promote veterans’ LTC resources
- The Daily Ardmoreite: Changes will potentially affect many veterans’ ability to access special pension benefits
- Alamogordo Daily News: Veterans A & A Pension to undergo changes in 2017
- Courville Communities News: How to Honor Senior Veterans on Veterans Day
- The Daily American: Little-known veteran aid program could be changing
- McKnight’s Senior Living: Veterans A&A pension eligibility requirements expected to change
- HomeCare Magazine: Changes Coming to Veterans’ Care Pension Program
- KGAN-TV Cedar Rapids: Veterans miss out on little known benefit program
Communiqué PR is proud to support APFM and VeteranAid.org in their efforts to help the vet community find affordable care and are hopeful many families will learn about and benefit from the pension as a result of our efforts.
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Whether we’re kicking off an engagement with a new client or executing an announcement for an existing client, the first step is setting expectations and establishing what success look likes for our client. Depending on the company’s business objectives, an article in a top-tier business publication or a series of bylines placed in an industry trade could be exactly what they are looking for.
However, more and more we are finding that companies want to dig deeper into the results achieved and quantify the impact of a specific campaign. So how exactly do we do that? Do we track the number of shares an article has? Or perhaps we look at the number of followers the influencers who shared the article have on social media.
One thing is for sure: As PR becomes increasingly digital, tracking effectiveness and impact is evolving. For instance, a post shared via LinkedIn long-form measures the number of likes, shares, comments and views. This allows you to begin quantifying the impact of the article and understand the reactions to it. However, the question remains: How do we interpret this data? Is it more valuable to have shares because it expands the reach? On the other hand, a higher number of views could be considered more impactful because you know the audience engaged with the piece.
One alternative that we’ve found helpful, especially for clients that are not very familiar with PR, is comparing the cost of an ad in a publication to the cost of the PR service fees for placing an article in the same publication. I want to emphasize that this is not an exact science, however, it provides context for the client. In addition, it gives us an opportunity to highlight the added benefits of earned media vs. paid media. With an article, key messages are communicated and the company or spokesperson is validated because the information is through a trusted outside source. There are a variety of items to measure, but ultimately, it will be determined by the client’s needs and preferences.
In order to provide you with more ideas on what to measure, we want to share a recently published infographic from George Washington University that observes outlined guidelines from recognized PR authorities, including PRSA, AMEC and the Institute for Public Relations.
Earlier this month, my colleague Beth Mayer and I had the pleasure of presenting to a marketing class at the University of Washington. Specifically, our presentation focused on owned, earned and paid media – and how to leverage each to support a company’s business objectives.
As a former teacher, I enjoyed dusting off my pedagogical skills and collaborating with Beth to engage undergrads around the topic. From thinking through which examples would resonate (embarrassingly, Kim Kardashian made her way into the deck), to how to describe the benefits of each media type, it was fun for us to take a step back and unpack the role of PR in a company’s marketing mix.
In the professional world, it’s easy to get focused on the day-to-day tasks. But teaching forces you to take a step back. What are the implications of our work? And ultimately, how does it move the needle for companies? As an intellectual and professional exercise, teaching the class led to healthy conversations internally about the role and value of owned, earned and paid media.
As part of our lesson, we analyzed the disadvantages and advantages of each media type – and how a company may choose to utilize each to achieve its objectives. Here’s a high-level recap of the advantages/disadvantages of each media type. How do you leverage earned, owned and paid media to achieve the right marketing mix for your company?
Earned Media – A Third Party Tells Your Story
Earned media is generally perceived as more credible than the other media types, in that journalists and editors choose to cover the brand and therefore validate its significance. Earned media also allows for more complex stories – consider a story in The New York Times versus a billboard. The former allows for a rich story, with nuances and different viewpoints. However, editorial staffs are spread thin these days, often leaving the heavy lifting to PR teams, who need to find third-party resources to serve as sources within a piece. There’s also no guarantee of coverage. Particularly with broadcast, a story may get bumped in the wake of a severe storm or – especially these days – political news.
Owned Media – You Tell Your Story
Owned media includes blog and social media content, as well as internal communications including company newsletters. The genius of owned media is that you can control it – the timing, look and feel, and content. The rub? To create content that’s of value, it should mirror earned media, leveraging in-house expertise and third-party resources to validate the significance of the story and add credibility to a company’s claims.
Paid Media – You Pay to Promote Your Content
Paid media’s value is determined, in part, by where a company is in its lifecycle. Particularly if a brand is well known, paid media can reinforce key brand messages and reach large audiences, depending on the medium. If a brand isn’t well known, however, it’s important to consider the value of an advertisement that can’t tell the brand’s story or fully explain its value proposition.
And, in case you’d like to see, here are some pictures of Beth and me in action. It’s heartening to see that the student on the bottom right does appear to be taking notes, not browsing the internet!
As the 2016 presidential election unfolded last Tuesday, many a jaw hung open in disbelief as more and more states turned red throughout the evening. When the results were in and the media confirmed that Donald Trump was indeed our 45th president, half the nation wondered how had this had transpired. Especially since many respected pollsters and news outlets predicted Hillary Clinton would win – The New York Times, one of our nation’s most trusted news sources, said Clinton had an 85-percent chance of winning. How did they, and every other major news outlet, get it so wrong?
The answer to this question is multi-pronged and complex, but part of the explanation pertains to the changing media landscape in our country. As the newspaper sector struggles to find new revenue models, newsrooms across the country have been shrinking and shutting their doors, leaving a workforce that is 20,000 positions smaller than it was 20 years ago. At the same time, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become common sources for news about government and politics. It’s a significant shift in how we get the news and information that inform our opinions, and this election was the first time our country felt the full impact of it.
Major metropolitan dailies across the country have been steadily closing down for years. The list of deceased daily newspapers is depressingly long, including the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the Indianapolis Times, the Minneapolis Times, and the Tampa Bay Times, among others. This means that the media in America are now mainly concentrated in major coastal cities like New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.
All of us are now well aware that our country is deeply divided: Coastal cities have radically different economies, lifestyles and political leanings than communities in the heartland of the country. The media are surrounded by likeminded people in liberal cities, so it’s difficult for them to understand the opinions and frustrations of people in other parts of the country. This is not an excuse for their shortcomings. It is the media’s job to represent all sides of the story, and there is no question that they failed in that regard this election season. But it seems that it would be easier for the media to have their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in Middle America if more of the media still lived in Middle America. Instead, they relied heavily on data guesstimating that Clinton would win.
The disconnect between conservatives and liberals is further exacerbated by social media. Facebook reaches nearly 2 billion people each month and has become many people’s main source of news. This is concerning for a couple reasons. First, Facebook doesn’t filter out fake news stories so people end up reading “news” about Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump and other such untrue nonsense. Second, Facebook’s algorithm filters dissenting opinions out of our news feeds so we only see news stories and status updates that support our view of the world. Our news feeds are virtual echo chambers, and each time we open them we become more confident that everyone thinks the same way we do.
We need media to give us an accurate, unbiased picture of what’s happening across the country and the globe. But if the mass media business continues to decline, will they be able keep fulfilling this role? And will enough of the country tune in to mass media for it make a difference, or will we continue to become more siloed in our thinking by relying on social media platforms for our news?
The answers are unclear, but one thing is for certain: As we enter the Trump era, we need mass media more than ever to serve as a watchdog over our government officials.
Deadlines are an important aspect of any job and PR is no different. In a field that is fast-paced and news-driven, meeting deadlines can be the difference between a successful campaign and a failed one. Staying on top of different deadlines for various projects and ensuring everything meets those deadlines can be stressful and daunting, so here are a few tips to keep you ahead of the game:
1. Stay organized
You’ve heard this advice before, we all have. It’s been engrained in us since our first homework assignment was due. The reason “staying organized” has been following us around for so long is because it works. Unfortunately, it is easier said than done. The important thing is finding an organization tool or method that works for you. Some people might need a calendar that breaks down what should be completed by the hour, or some people might need to set alarms at weekly intervals before something is due to keep it fresh on their minds. Whatever method you use should keep you on top of your deadlines and help you avoid any surprises.
2. Break the project down
The saying goes, “You can only eat an elephant one bite at a time.” If you are starting a challenging new project, the best approach is to break it down into manageable pieces. Imagine you are about to start an embargoed pitching campaign around a product announcement for a client: You can break that down into researching the product, building the press list, creating the embargoed pitch, getting approval from the client, pitching, and follow up. Breaking the project down and focusing on one aspect at a time will help keep you organized and make the project less daunting.
3. Develop a well laid-out plan and delegate
After you’ve broken the project down, create a work-back plan. Make sure there are clear goals and specific dates for each section of the project and deliver the complete timeline to your client before you start the project. Set realistic expectations for yourself and for your clients. Based on previous projects and your experience, you can estimate how much time each section will take you, and use that to estimate the total project time to deliver to your client. You can create mini-deadlines for each individual section, which will give you a good indication of whether you are on track to meet your hard deadline.
Creating a clear timeline will also help you delegate tasks when necessary. Delegating can be a great way to take some of the deadline pressure off of your shoulders and ensure the project is completed on time. Assign some of the smaller sections to an employee, but make sure they know the deadline for their assigned section by walking them through the timeline and highlighting key dates for their portion.
3. Make sure you have the time and budget a little extra
Before you even accept a project from a new client, you must ensure that you have enough time to actually do it. It can be extremely hard to turn down a project, but it is far better to turn a project down than fail to meet the client deadlines and hurt both you and your company’s reputations. If you are working two projects that are due at the end of the month and are considering a third, maybe it would be better to decline the new offer and ensure that your current projects turn out perfectly.
That being said, when you do accept a new project, you should budget a little extra time as a cushion. Take the project breakdown mentioned before and add an extra hour or so to each section. If you know it will take 6 hours to develop a press list, give yourself 7. This will add a nice cushion to the whole project in case of a surprise, and the client will be pleased if the cushion isn’t used and the project comes in under the expected budget. It’s a win-win.
Deadlines will always be a critical aspect of any career, but if you manage them appropriately they have the potential to make you more efficient and productive. The biggest mistake you can make is biting off more than you can chew – know your limits and your abilities and be sure to stay within them. As long as you are organized, the plan is well thought out, and you have the capital to complete the project, meeting client deadlines should be a breeze.