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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.

New Year’s Resolutions PR Pros Should Consider

Every January about one in three Americans make resolutions to eat healthier, hit the gym more and manage their stress better, among other self-improvement goals. This year, PR pros may want to consider adding a few of the following professional goals to their list of resolutions as well.

  1. Tap into your creative side. People remember what they see more often than what they read, so including a visual element in your pitches, press releases and blog posts will grab your audience’s attention more effectively. This year, skip the stock photos and create a unique visual element to help tell your story. Did you include data in your press release? Visualize it in a chart or graph. Does your pitch describe how your client helped one of their customers? Include photos of the customer in action, or better yet a short video clip.
  2. Meet new people. In the public-relations industry, maintaining professional relationships and building new ones can lead to new business leads, increase your skillset, help recruit new talent to your agency and build your reputation. Despite the numerous benefits, making time to network is often easier said than done. In 2015, ensure that you meet your networking goals by signing up for conferences in advance and joining professional groups that hold regular meetings. If you’re not sure how to find local professional groups, Meetup can be a great resource.
  3. Learn from last year’s campaigns. It can be easy to jump into 2015 without a second thought to what happened last year, but sometimes it’s best not to leave the past behind. This January, take some time to look back on 2014 and analyze your efforts. Which campaigns were the most successful? What made them such a hit? Which efforts didn’t garner the results you were hoping for? What could have been done differently? Make note of your successes so you can repeat those actions, and identify what didn’t work so you don’t repeat your mistakes.
  4. Plan strategically. As PR becomes more integrated with marketing, it’s important to consider every aspect of a campaign—measurement, target audiences, objectives and more—from a marketing perspective. In 2015, make strategic planning a priority by ensuring every campaign aligns with the company’s overall goals and marketing messages.
  5. Measure your progress. There are a variety of different ways to measure success in PR, and every client values different measurement methods. As you nail down your quarterly plans for 2015 with each client, be sure to identify which metrics matter the most to them. Then find a tool that effectively measures those metrics so your hard work doesn’t go unnoticed.

These are just a few of the many New Year’s resolutions PR pros can make. What PR-related resolutions have you set for yourself?

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Founded by Former Microsoft Data Executives, Parllay Launches to Help Fuel Social Media Management

Much to the dismay of marketers around the globe, the social media landscape has become extremely crowded and noisy. Today, there is an over-abundance of social tools available that include monitoring, analytics and publishing for brands and agencies to drive and manage brand engagement. What has been missing is a way to unify all the disparate platforms into one suite that combines audience engagement, content discovery, and publishing from first interaction to sales.

While Microsoft has been at the forefront of technology over the last several decades, perhaps one of the most valued and less publicized contributions to the tech community comes in the talent they help to produce. Parllay CEO Tarek Najm was the founder of Microsoft AdCenter and the Bing Knowledge Web, and also served as a technical fellow when he left the company to form Parllay, a new social engagement company that launched this month.

Parllay uses semantic knowledge to connect content and display it in an elegant way for brands and agencies to curate content on social channels. Najm created an integrated social media platform that helps brands cut through the social clutter, establish meaningful relationships with their customers, and build branded communities at scale. He founded Parllay to unify fragmented tools and provide brands the ability to create their own social channels, blending user-generated and editorial content in a beautiful online medium.

As a result of our product launch campaign, Communiqué helped to secure the following results this month for Parllay.

Original Articles (11):

Press Release Reprints (8+):

 

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Looking Back on 2014 – A Big Year for Communiqué PR

2014 has been a momentous year for Communiqué PR, bookended by two significant milestones:  the firm’s 10-year anniversary in February and moving into new office space in December!

We look forward to celebrating both of these milestones with an open house in Q1 2015! (Stay tuned for more information.) However, before jumping into the New Year, we’d like to reflect on some of the highlights of 2014.

Throughout the year we were extremely fortunate to work with a variety of interesting, exciting, and dynamic companies. Here are a few highlights from the year:

2014 was a great year of growth with several new full-service clients coming on board including AnswerDash, Apical, PointInside, Rational Interaction, Revel Systems, Vālant, and VoloMetrix. Additionally, we provided PR counsel and support on several project accounts including know’N’act, OpenCar, Parllay, sphingotec, Sworl, Syntonic Wireless and World Diabetes Day Seattle.

We also continued to expand our international reach by collaborating with PRN member agencies Proof and Sympra on several projects and participating in PRN member meetings in Germany (January) and Italy (July).

Among the many highlights of the year were brown-bag meetings we hosted with key media from GeekWire, Puget Sound Business Journal, Seattle Business, Seattle Times, and other media outlets, which helped facilitate deeper relationships among our team and these journalists.

Best of all, we took time to celebrate with our amazing (and growing) team of PR professionals: kayaking on Lake Union; attending the 2014 Seafair Foundation Breakfast and the Blues; running the Seafair 5k; barbecuing at the office during the summer; attending the GeekWire roof-top party and Sounders’ game; visiting New Day Northwest; carving pumpkins for Halloween; joining the fun at the GeekWire Gala; and cooking together at our holiday party at the Hot Stove Society.

Thank you for your support in making 2014 a huge success. We look forward to a fun and prosperous 2015!!

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AnswerDash Transforms Online Customer Service With Zendesk Integration

This week was an exciting one for our client AnswerDash, the provider of contextual answer technology for websites and apps. Fresh off the heels of revealing its general availability this fall, AnswerDash just announced its integration with Zendesk, a major player in improving online customer service. The integration makes it easy for websites to display help content from the Zendesk Help Center on actual web pages, rather than in siloed FAQs or knowledge-bases. The effect is that website users will have access to the Zendesk Help Center wherever they have questions, with just the click of a mouse or tap of a finger.

The integration also makes it simple to transform Zendesk support tickets into new AnswerDash contextual Q&A. As users ask questions via Help Center tickets, the Q&A will appear in the AnswerDash tab. Commonly asked questions will no longer require a unique response from a customer service agent, as Q&A will “live” on the webpage or app contextually. This frees up customer service agents to answer complex or unique questions, rather than routinely responding to the same Q&A.

According to AnswerDash’s CEO Jake Wobbrock, “For most online businesses, 80 percent of support ticket volume is due to just 20 percent of the most frequently asked questions, leading to customer service agent fatigue and inability for support teams to cost-effectively scale. Our integration with Zendesk helps transform traditional assisted customer service into highly efficient customer self-service, reducing the number of help tickets and enabling support teams to scale.”

Key features of the AnswerDash/Zendesk integration include:

  • Bringing Zendesk Help Center Articles to Users’ Point-of-Action—Customer service teams now can sync their Zendesk Help Center articles into AnswerDash’s point-and-click contextual answer service, providing users with instant access to Help Center content on relevant objects on websites. Syncing occurs every 10 minutes to ensure that AnswerDash surfaces the most up-to-date Help Center content.
  • Answering Commonly Asked Questions Once—The AnswerDash app that plugs into Zendesk allows customer service teams to turn frequently asked Zendesk tickets into AnswerDash contextual Q&A for all future visitors to see. By enabling common questions to appear in the interface as contextual Q&A, those questions see a 60-percent reduction in turning into support tickets. By empowering customers to self-serve, redundant questions are deflected and support agents are freed to focus on valuable high-touch customers with more personalized needs.
  • Delivering New AnswerDash Questions as Zendesk Tickets—New questions asked via AnswerDash are delivered as Zendesk tickets. As each ticket turns into AnswerDash self-service Q&A, ticket volumes decline for the most common questions on a site.

The integration news garnered coverage, including the following original articles:

The following publications also reposted the press release:

For more information about how to integrate AnswerDash with Zendesk, please visit: https://www.zendesk.com/apps/answerdash/

 

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Helpful Apps & Resources for PR Pros

As 2014 ends and the new year begins, finding creative ways to stay organized always seems to be top of mind, particularly for PR pros. Start off the new year fresh with these helpful apps and resources.

What I have used this year and love:

theSkimm— this bite size email newsletter arrives daily at my computer and helps me quickly process the most recent happenings in the world with a bit of humor added. This email helps me stay current with the news, highlighting the big stories and providing links to longer reads if I want to research the topic further.

Flipboard—I recently downloaded this app and am pleasantly surprised with the versatility and enticing user interface. The personal magazine aggregates a wide range of topics—users specify which of the over 30,000 topics they want displayed in their newsfeed—that users can then “flip” through. The social newsreader has allowed me to easily filter relevant topics for myself and access timely news, as well as fun and light-hearted articles, photos and videos.

Wunderlist—this website and app has helped me stay organized with my upcoming tasks, allowing me to set reminders on my to-do list. This simple-to-navigate resource keeps me on track and ensures that I don’t miss upcoming deadlines, even emailing me reminders.

What I want to try out in the New Year:

Tweetdeck— managing clients’ mentions and/or tracking competitors’ tweets is no easy task, especially when multiple clients are involved. My colleagues suggested this powerful Twitter tool that allows users to track, organize and engage in real-time, allowing users to find exactly what they’re looking for on Twitter and successfully manage multiple accounts.

AP Stylebook—the popular PR resource is now accessible through an app, available for iOS. While the app is somewhat pricey at $24.99, I think most PR pros could benefit from having this tool easily accessible.

Staying organized and informed is crucial in the PR industry. The apps and resources that I have used have proven to be extremely helpful, keeping me up to date with condensed information that is easily accessible, and the tools that I have not yet utilized will hopefully aid my continuous pursuit of organization and informative resources. What are other apps or PR resources you can’t live without?

 

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Lessons Learned From the Sony Security Breach

Not a week goes by when there isn’t a story in the news about a high-profile security breach. Inevitably, after each incident knowledgeable PR experts weigh in on how the crisis could’ve or should’ve been handled. There are always new lessons to be learned.

Perhaps it’s the influence of the work that we do on behalf of clients in the enterprise technology space, but the latest wave of hacks to make worldwide headlines actually prompted a different PR discussion in our office. In addition to thinking about crisis communications takeaways, the data breaches are an important reminder about the care PR practitioners must take to protect sensitive client data and information.

No organization, no matter its size, is immune to a data breach. According to a 2014 study by the Ponemon Institute, one of the leading privacy and security research centers, a whopping 43 percent of companies have experienced a data breach in the past year. While PR agencies may not store credit card information, agencies are entrusted with confidential information about clients’ future company and product plans, as well as sensitive data about employees.

What can you do to ensure your organization doesn’t become a data-breach statistic?

Think twice about using consumer cloud apps for work activities. From Google Drive to Dropbox, there are a number of free services that allow employees to store and transfer company data in the public cloud. These services are great for transferring large files to external partners, but they are not bulletproof and could be a major exposure to your organization. Instead, consider using private cloud or enterprise-grade file transfer services which have a higher level of security.

Only use IT-sanctioned apps. PR people juggle multiple priorities and move at break-neck speed. When something needs to be done ASAP, in the absence of immediately having the right app or tool, it’s easy to go rogue and turn to services that have not been vetted by IT. For the sake of your computing network, don’t do it.

Don’t forget about mobile. BYOD (bring your own device) has given us the freedom to use the mobile device of our choice to get our jobs done and has forever changed the way we work. However, for many in the security industry BYOD actually spells “bring your own risk.” To address this, security experts recommend implementing a number of safeguards including the ability for IT to erase a device’s internal storage remotely and passcode locks.

 

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