Contact us

Insights for Leaders Navigating
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.

How to Drive Meaningful Coverage Without Hard News

One of the most exciting and challenging aspects of our work in PR is driving coverage in the absence of hard news. Without funding announcements, partnerships, or new products to announce, how can PR pros drive meaningful coverage for their clients?

With a little persistence and a clear plan in place, PR professionals can drive stellar results for clients even without formal announcements. This is of particular importance for clients in the service industry, such as consulting firms or advertising agencies, who have compelling stories to tell but may not have hard news to announce regularly.

For these clients, we recommend an integrated approach focused on the following strategies and tactics:

  • Build thought leadership platforms for the executive team – Get to know the executive team’s interests and areas of expertise by scheduling short one-on-one brainstorming sessions with each key executive. Come prepared for these sessions with specific questions, and recap what you heard from the executive after the meeting so there are shared expectations.

By developing thought leadership platforms for each executive, PR pros can effectively offer the executives as sources to journalists, develop bylines on their behalf, and pursue targeted speaking opportunities that resonate with the client and their audiences. Taking the time to become rooted in your clients’ platforms helps you establish them as thought leaders, particularly in the absence of hard news.

  • Monitor and leverage relevant industry trends – For each executive, monitor industry trends that are relevant to his/her thought leadership platform. For example, is he or she interested in dealflow and financial trends? Invest a certain amount of time each week to reading key publications (e.g., Marketwatch, The Financial Times, etc.) to understand what’s happening in the space and identify opportunities to insert your client’s perspective.

When you find a relevant story or angle, do the heavy lifting of flagging the opportunity and outlining a potential perspective for the executive based on what you know from your brainstorming session. When the angle is agreed on and clearly articulated, move quickly to share the perspective with key journalists in the space to book briefings and drive coverage.

  • Build thought leadership through contributed articles and speaking opportunities – Contributed articles are a wonderful way to drive coverage and establish thought leadership, especially in the absence of hard news. They also have the added benefit of helping drive additional editorial coverage; once an executive has been published in a number of publications, it can be easier to secure journalists’ interest in briefings. Based on your brainstorming session with the executive team, develop a plan that includes potential topics, outlets, and timing for bylines for each executive. When there’s consensus on the plan, begin drafting! You’ll find that the more bylines you develop for an executive, the more natural it becomes to capture his/her tone, perspective and style.

Bylines can also be repurposed for speaking abstracts at targeted events for the executive team. Speaking opportunities require a large time investment, often involving travel, so it is important to identify opportunities that are a good fit for the executives’ thought leadership platforms and that reach their respective target audience(s).

  • Establish a process that works for your client and your team – As with any PR program, it is crucial to execute on account activities in a strategic and sustained manner. With hard news, there’s the inevitable date that the news crosses the wire, forcing the PR team to act aggressively prior to the announcement. With proactive pitching and bylines, however, the lack of a deadline could create a lack of urgency – the PR team needs to create a rhythm for these activities and stick to it.

It is important to establish regular times throughout the week to keep these activities moving forward and clearly delegate roles and responsibilities across account teams. For example, dedicating a certain amount of time per week to reading relevant industry news is crucial to driving coverage, so the team needs to have a clear process in place for identifying and flagging proactive pitch angles.

By becoming rooted in the executive team’s thought leadership platform, monitoring industry trends, aggressively pitching reporters proactively, and crafting contributed articles and speaking abstracts, PR teams can secure fantastic coverage – even without a single press release. The key is to strategically plan these activities and delegate across the account team, so you can create a steady cadence of coverage for your client.

Read More

3 Steps to Success: Your First Year in PR and Onward

“We are excited to have you onboard,” one of the founding partners told me as I was settling into my new role. Little did I know, what I was about to embark on would change my perception on PR, business and what it means to do what you love.

It all started with my fascination with how stories are told and how perceptions are built – PR helps make things possible. I was going to school full-time just learning the ropes of the industry and suddenly I was working full-full time trying to climb them. Luckily, it was a smooth transition.

As my first year dedicating about 260 days (which equates to roughly 2,080 hours and 124,800 minutes) to PR comes to a close, it’s important to reflect on the accomplishments and failures in order to plan for success in the future – because if you don’t love what you do and strive to do it better, why do it? I’d like to share three pieces of advice for the up-and-coming PR pro that I wish people told me when I was starting out.

  1. Keep a list of all the reporters you build relationships with and keep notes of your correspondence. I began building my personal media list about six months after I started pitching reporters. Note, it’s crucial to remember what reporters tell you (what stories they like, what clients they’re interested in, what they don’t like, editorial guidelines, etc.). I recommend building a list in Excel – I’ll discuss organization later.
  2. Exceptional writing skills are a must. I wish I had known how important it is to have strong writing skills because I would have taken it more seriously in school. I felt as though I was pretty good before I started – now it’s good I’m up for a decent challenge. You do a lot of writing in this job, so if you don’t like to write, this may not be the right career for you.
  3. You will need to learn a lot about many industries really fast – and it doesn’t slow down. Try not to get too overwhelmed and just do your best. The more you can read and learn about your client’s industry, the more valuable you will be to the client, the reporter and the agency – don’t forget that.

In addition to reflecting on what I wish I knew, I also wanted to share some advice about ways that you can plan for success in the future, because the planning should never stop. I suggest setting yearly goals; every year, evaluate your progress and set measurable objectives to reach your targets. We should never stop striving to become a more improved version of ourselves! Never stop working for tomorrow, but always live in the now – it’s a healthy motto to live by. Here are a couple suggestions to help keep everything together as you continue your journey in PR.

  1. Create and maintain an integrated organizational system. Sync your email to your phone, laptop and iPad/tablet and keep your inbox organized so you can find things quickly. Also, create a well-kept organizational system for your office space that works for you. It’ll be important to plan for ways to be prepared for anything as quickly as possible – staying organized is critical in this industry.
  2. Take time to smell the flowers. Take time for yourself and your life outside of the office. It’s important to be successful and I promote doing what it takes to get the job done, but do so at the right pace. Have fun with your coworkers and get to know them because it’ll make working more enjoyable if you work around people you know and like. Enjoy your time off and take care of yourself by going on vacation, going to the gym and eating healthy food. It’s important to uphold a workhard – playhard (aka) work-life balance lifestyle. You’ll make yourself happier as well as the people around you.

If you have any advice, tips or stories that’ll help me, and those who will soon cross the “I survived my first year in PR” finish line, please share!

Read More

2015 – Communiqué PR Year in Review

As we look back on another year there are numerous successes, big and small, to celebrate.

2015 has been a year of growth for Communiqué PR! We settled into our new, larger office space, added several new clients to our portfolio as well as a few new PR professionals to our stellar team.

We saw the culmination of our work result in successful exits for three clients: Mobidia was acquired by AppAnnie, VoloMetrix was acquired by Microsoft, and Attachmate finalized its acquisition by Micro Focus.

Our work drove awareness and demand for several clients’ products, including:

In addition to providing excellent results for our clients, our team continues to be a resource for marketing and PR professionals and students through our book and agency blog. Our book, “Strategic Public Relations: 10 Principles to Harness the Power of PR,” is being used as a text in university courses at Xavier University, University of Wisconsin-Madison (School of Journalism and Mass Communication), Liberty University, and the University of New York in Prague.

We also continued to have several of our blog posts syndicated by industry media outlets, including PRDaily, which published the following articles from Communiqué PR team members during the year:

Ensuring a positive workplace environment is always a priority and this year Communiqué PR was named one of Washington’s Best Places to Work in 2015 by Seattle Business Magazine. We are particularly proud of this award, as it is based on survey responses provided by our team. We also took time out during the year to celebrate our successes with several fun outings, barbeques in our courtyard and our annual holiday party!

As the year ends, we remain grateful for our close relationships with one another, our clients, and the many journalists and analysts with whom we work. We are fortunate to have long-standing relationships with people around the world and look forward to expanding our network and opportunities for our clients in the coming year.

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for a Wonderful 2016!

Read More

Ensuring a Steady Drumbeat for Flowroute With a Proactive Approach

PR is all-too often defined by the almighty press release. Without hard news, many companies make the mistake of going dark and waiting until their next big announcement, not wanting to “bother” busy reporters or reprioritizing efforts away from PR until there’s a reason to pay attention to it again.

A successful PR program needs constant attention and creative input; it cannot be driven by news announcements alone. PR’s value comes from maintaining a steady, consistent flow of activity and coverage, which requires creativity, tenacity, resourcefulness and, above all, proactivity. PR professionals need to think of press releases as just one tool in their arsenal to help build awareness and mindshare for our clients.

For our client Flowroute, which describes itself as a “software company that happens to be a carrier,” the team took a multi-faceted approach to ensure that Flowroute was being consistently being seen by the right journalists, analysts, and influencers. Below is a summary of the results we’ve been able to secure for Flowroute over the past four months, and suggestions for ways you can keep your clients top of mind, without relying too heavily on press releases.

Identify the influencers: Industry analysts can be an important ally in your communications efforts. They have the ability to influence potential customers, offer third-party support to add credibility to news stories, and raise awareness around new product categories. Stay up to date on breaking news impacting your client’s space and pay attention to which analysts are being quoted by reporters. These are the people those journalists turn to for perspective on trends and breaking news – they should be on your radar! To date, we’ve secured briefings for Flowroute with several analysts from Current Analysis, Forrester, IDC, Infonetics, Nemertes Research, and Ovum.

Be flexible in your “ask” to reporters: Typically, we pitch reporters in the attempt to secure initial interviews/briefings for our clients. The reporters, in turn, write stories based on those interviews and (hopefully!) include our client in the final story.  But be mindful when reaching out that not all pitches have to result in a briefing. Reporters are busier than ever, often being tasked to write multiple stories a day under very tight deadlines. They simply don’t have time to speak with everyone. For Flowroute, we sent out a proactive pitch to a select group of journalists, and offered either a briefing with an executive, or a contributed article/byline. This approach resulted in our securing a byline for Flowroute co-founder and CPO Sean Hsieh in RCR Wireless’ Reality Check column (“Busting myths and misconceptions about SIP trunking security”).

Read. Read. Then read some more. Keeping the drumbeat going requires you to be aware of the other instruments being played – that means paying attention to what competitors, partners, analysts, and your client are saying on a daily basis. That means regularly checking Twitter and other social feeds as well as HARO queries that come in daily. This allows you to offer your client as a source when news breaks, or when a trend is just starting to gain momentum. For Flowroute, our team keeps a close eye on their blog for potential story ideas – in one case, we developed a proactive pitch based on a post that CMO Dan Nordale wrote about the a new model emerging in telecom that Flowroute is calling “Be Your Own Carrier.” It resulted in our securing an introductory briefing with SD Times, one of the major publications aimed at software developers. Leveraging existing content like blog posts, white papers, case studies, and other materials can help secure media interest and coverage without depending on hard news or press releases.

I hope that our success to date with Flowroute can offer some new ideas for keeping momentum going, even when there’s not a huge news pipeline. Press releases on their own don’t guarantee coverage or media interest, but rather it’s the cumulative mix of proactive and news-driven outreach that keeps the steady drumbeat going for our clients. Let us know if there are ways you’ve helped keep a client’s visibility up outside of press releases – we’d love to hear from you!

Read More

Hello From the Other Side: What Adele Can Teach Us About PR

I’ll admit it. I’m a sucker for pretty much anything Adele does. So when Inc. Magazine recently ran a column about “6 Great Business Lessons from Adele’s Branding Strategy,” you know I was all over it.

I’d like to think that almost everyone can learn something from Adele and that includes PR and communications professionals. Since we only have a few short weeks left in 2015, its time to offer a few PR resolutions to consider in the year ahead, inspired by one of the biggest newsmakers in music this year.

Stay authentic: Adele doesn’t try to be something she’s not. Neither should you. Your clients, teams and media contacts expect you to be a trusted advisor, not just to agree with whatever they say. Trust your gut and don’t be afraid to take a stand on a creative pitch idea, press release direction, or infographic content that you feel strongly about. That said, your opinion should always be well-informed, grounded in facts and coming from a position of intellect rather than emotion or quick reaction. Do your research, be able to defend your stance and be flexible to compromise if necessary.

Look to the past, but don’t linger there. Adele isn’t afraid to review her past (ahem, obviously), but she moves on. It happens to the best of us – sometimes a pitch or press release just falls flat. Like any setback, it’s okay to be frustrated, but the key is to get back up and learn from what happened. Take time to talk openly with your teams and your client to evaluate campaigns or pitches that worked, as well as those that didn’t, so that you can learn from them and adapt your strategies accordingly next time. Quarterly or annual reviews are the obvious time for program evaluation, but don’t limit those conversations to just a few times a year; it must be an ongoing conversation.

Don’t call (reporters) a thousand times. In “Hello,” Adele notes that “I must have called a thousand times….but when I call you never seem to be home.” It can feel that way some days for PR professionals when it comes to media outreach. If you’re being met with radio silence on a pitch, there has to be a reason for it. This is one of the most basic – but critical – parts of PR: pay attention to what reporters cover, do your research each and every time you reach out to them, and tailor your outreach accordingly. This includes knowing how they like to be contacted (email versus texts or Twitter DMs, for example), and what they’ve written about recently. Tenacity is important in order to break through reporter’s flooded inboxes, but so is respect and knowing when to move on to a new outlet or take a new angle/approach.

Be thoughtful – and even exclusive – about whom you share your news. Much of the buzz around Adele’s latest album “25” is around the fact that she chose not to have it streamed on any digital music services. Despite this, the album (as of today) as sold over five million copies. This type of approach might not work for every artist, but the fact that she took a bold risk about how and where her album would be distributed should be applauded. Consider this too with your clients – are there instances where a story or announcement could be offered to an influential, trusted reporter as an exclusive rather than being distributed to a larger pool of journalists? Often times, one, in-depth, exclusive article in a targeted publication is far more impactful than several quick mentions based off of a release.

Connect with a large audience. Adele’s music speaks to pretty much everyone– as the Inc. article mentions, people from grannies to teens to CEOs can all relate to Adele. When you’re thinking of a pitch, try to consider the bigger story your client is trying to tell, or the broader problem they’re trying to solve. It’s easy to get bogged down in product tech-speak and industry-specific jargon, especially with very tech clients – but keep your eye on the bigger picture. What does this widget/technology/feature enable people to do that they couldn’t before? Why does that matter? Why is this company/executive interesting? It’s important to strike a balance in your messaging between more granular, specialized points of interest versus those that can be appreciated by a broader audience.

Be smart about social media. Adele doesn’t drunk tweet (anymore). Neither should you. Just don’t do it. It’s common sense, but never forget that your social posts can be read by everyone from your ex, your roommates, your boss, your cross fit instructor, your clients and your client’s clients. Be authentic, but be aware of how far those tweets and pictures and updates reach.

I hope this provides some good reminders for you and your PR teams in the year ahead – with her 2016 tour kicking off shortly, there will surely be numerous times throughout the year to revisit and reinforce these lessons by singing along with Adele loudly in your car and on karaoke stages across the country.

Read More

People Analytics Pioneer VoloMetrix Acquired by Microsoft

 

Celebrations are in order! Our recent client VoloMetrix, a leading people analytics technology company, announced earlier this year that it has been acquired by Microsoft to bring deeper insights into worker productivity. VoloMetrix’s technology provides unprecedented visibility into how people spend their time, offering enterprises a data-driven way to quantify employee efficiency and engagement.

VoloMetrix’s technology will power Microsoft’s new Delve Organizational Analytics platform, which will allow companies to cull Office 365 data to unearth workforce trends. By measuring productivity, the tool will also help companies better understand engagement and work/life balance issues facing their employees.

Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president of Outlook and Office 365, put it best when he shared in a blog post today: “Giving people access to real data and objective, personalized feedback can lead to a virtuous cycle of improvement for both individuals and their company.” Click here for Jha’s complete blog post announcing the acquisition.

VoloMetrix’s acquisition highlights the crucial role that PR can play in driving awareness of a company, particularly by potential acquirers. Through a strategic blend of rapid-response pitching, hard news and byline placements, VoloMetrix garnered significant coverage in business and tech press. Here are several coverage highlights we’re proud to share:

VoloMetrix is truly a revolutionary and innovative company, and we wish them a huge congrats on their acquisition! We can’t wait to see VoloMetrix and Microsoft improve how enterprises around the globe operate and function.

Read More