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.
One of our clients recently created an infographic presenting data around the end-of-life support for Windows XP. It included a lot of nitty-gritty technical data that would typically make a reader’s eyes glaze over. But when the data was presented in a bold, brightly colored infographic it transformed into interesting factoids that caught our attention – as well as the journalists we pitched it to.
Lately it seems like infographics are everywhere, and for good reason. They present information in a simple, easy-to-understand format. Whether it’s step-by-step instructions, an annual report, or facts from a white paper report, an infographic is sure to make your message clearer and help it reach a wider audience.
For PR pros, infographics are a great way to get your client’s message out. They are eye-catching, embeddable and easily shared. Wondering how to create them yourself? There are several free tools that make building a professional-looking infographic quick and easy.
One of the most popular tools is Piktochart, an infographic design app that claims it requires very little effort to produce simple and high-quality graphics. I decided to test this claim by creating my first-ever infographic using the tool, and it certainly lived up to its assertion.
I simply had to choose a template, drop in my data and scale each piece to fit. Piktochart even provides graphics to illustrate your data.
It only offers a couple free themes to choose from so there are probably quite a few other infographics that look like mine, but if you’re willing to pay for a subscription your options expand immensely.
My infographic may not be the most visually innovative, but Piktographic is a great tool for people with limited design skills who want to build their own infographics.
Below is the infographic I created on what makes infographics such a powerful PR tool.
One of my goals in 2014 is to more regularly connect with former colleagues, clients and journalists. It is not always easy to find time to network, but to keep a pulse on the business community as well as to maintain personal connections with the people who have made a difference in my life, it is important to take time to connect face-to-face.
As I was considering my goal, I began thinking about best practices for maintaining connections and relationship building. Here are my thoughts.
- Make Connecting In-Person a Priority. Working in the deadline-driven world of PR is often ridiculously busy and, like most careers, time-consuming. Given this, it is not always easy to make time for lunch or coffee with a former colleague or client. However, if you are going to maintain relationships, you need to connect in-person on a semi-regular basis. This might be once a quarter, twice a year or annually. Determine what makes sense for you and the people that you value, and set up alerts or reminders so you do not forget to reach out to them. LinkedIn has a wonderful new tool allowing users to set reminders to take place in a day, a week or a month.
- Focus on Developing and Maintaining High-Quality Relationships. I am a firm believer in quality over quantity. To develop quality relationships, it is important to understand people’s business and personal goals and to think about how you can add value to the other person’s life. In advance of meeting, I recommend coming up with the questions you want to ask so that you are honing in on the things that the person will be excited and proud to share. You must ask the right questions. These are ones that make the person feel good as opposed to making them feel as if you are wasting his/her time. For instance, you might ask: “What are you focused on that is important for you?” Listen carefully to the response and follow it up with a question to find out why it is important. A wonderful resource for questions to ask to deepen relationships and for advice to hone one’s listening skills is a book titled, “Just Listen,” by Mark Goulston.
- Promptly Follow Up and Follow Through. Send a thank-you note and recap any action items that you promised to execute or identified coming out of the discussion. Ideally, you are going into the meeting with the goal of adding value and offering the other person an upfront benefit, so you should be coming out of it with some ideas of things you can do. This may be sharing an interesting article or book, or brokering an introduction to someone in your network. Do not expect anything in return, but instead be pleasantly surprised when the person returns the favor.
Finally, I recommend staying current on networking best practices. There are a number of wonderful articles on this topic on Harvard Business Review’s website. I especially found Dorie Clark’s post, “Three Mistakes to Avoid When Networking,” interesting and informative, especially when trying to make new connections with people who don’t know you or are perceived as above you in status.
Networking takes work, but the results can be extremely rewarding with new or reaffirmed friendships and business relationships. The key is to make sure you make it part of your regular routine, invest in preparing and follow through. Taking these critical steps can make all the difference to building meaningful and long-lasting relationships.
April Fools’ Day is tomorrow and along with it will come a flood of pranks and hoaxes from many well-known brands and companies. You can always count on some brilliant spoofs from Google and one of my favorites from last year was Scope’s bacon mouthwash. When executed well, April Fools’ Day pranks are a great way to build buzz and to get people talking about your company or brand.
We love a good joke at Communiqué PR, but when it comes to corporate pranks, we advise our clients to proceed with caution. A lot of caution. We’ve blogged about PR and April Fools’ Day pranks in the past (check out the links below to those posts) and thought it would be worth revisiting the topic. Here are some additional tips to consider if you’re planning your own April 1 hijinks:
Make it unbelievable. The point of the prank is to make people laugh, but there’s a thin line between fiction and reality. To ensure that people will eventually realize that you’re pulling their leg, you almost want to make your prank so unbelievable it can’t be true, such as this April Fools’ 2013 post from Southwest Airlines. But beware: Promoting untruths about your company’s financials and other key metrics could land you in hot water. Also consider adding a disclaimer to your blog post, graphic or whatever medium you use to deliver your prank, just in case people miss the punch line.
Skip the press release. Wire services will be on extra high alert so don’t expect your fake press release to make it past their editors. Plus, the last thing you want to do is dupe a reporter. Instead, use your blog or social media as your platform, which also makes it easier for others to share the fun.
Be prepared for the backlash. Even the best laid plans can go awry and not everyone has your sense of humor. Monitor social media and be prepared to quickly address any negative reaction.
Looking for inspiration for April 1? Take a look at AdWeek’s list of the top April Fools’ Day pranks from 2013.
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For many PR practitioners, describing our profession often includes some sort of caveat that PR is more of an art than a science. According to a recent article in Ragan’s PR Daily, this accepted understanding of the industry may be changing.
In “Words that makes (sic) your headline more shareable,” writer Adrienne Erin shares a list of words and phrases that have been proven by scientific methods to be most effective at capturing attention and encouraging engagement. In many cases, the success of specific words in encouraging the desired response (e.g., reading an article, sharing with others, clicking through on links) may not be especially surprising, but as a practitioner, I appreciate being armed with the knowledge that these words actually do have an impact.
Here are a few words that will make your headline more shareable, per post type:
Blog Posts
100 popular blogs were analyzed by Startup Moon to quantify which words and phrases make a headline more successful. Key takeaway: Many of the words suggest that the information will make a reader smarter. Here are the results:
- Surprising
- Science
- Critical
- Huge
- Hacks
- Smart
Facebook and Twitter
More than 10,000 of the most retweeted tweets were analyzed by “social media scientist” Dan Zarrella* to determine a list of the 20 most retweetable words and phrases on Twitter. According to the article, successful or highly shareable content on Twitter would seem to offer valuable knowledge in a short amount of time as readers are on the go and scanning for words that imply the content won’t take much time to review. A few to ponder include:
- How to
- Free
- Top
- 10
- Great
- Facts
According to a study conducted by Marketo and based on more than 31,000 data points, the following types of content are most likely to be shared via Facebook:
- Inspirational content such as quotes and advice
- Uniting content that makes readers feel part of the story and encourages sharing
- Funny content that is acceptable to most groups
- Giveaways, contests, discounts and special offers
- Amazing content with a wow factor such as unbelievable photos or facts
- How-to style content such as quick tips and engaging advice
Other trends to watch:
- Facebook and Twitter have seen an exceptional increase in the popularity of infographics.
- Action words, especially verbs, are more widely clicked and shared than are nouns or adjectives.
- Numbers are popular and the number of shares for a piece of content has a direct correlation with the size of the number in the title, so go big!
- Controversy causes clicks. Readers often click on a headline that they believe will challenge them or their beliefs.
After reading the article, I was eager to put this new research to a test. I pulled the top five “most read” blog headlines from the Communiqué PR blog and found that none of them included any of the key words highlighted by the research. I did, however, find that the headlines included words such as “studies,” “tips,” and “lessons” which imply that the content would make the readers smarter.
I will further test this new research by incorporating the key words and trends (as appropriate) in everything from email subject lines when pitching, to headlines on news announcements – starting with the headline of this blog post! Feel free to leave a comment about my creative use of the top words for blogs. If you don’t have time, don’t sweat it – I can always pull the number of visits and analyze the results like a scientist.
*Readers who scan may think this article is a shameless self-promotion written by Dan Zarrella. We are not the same person, we just have the same amazing name.
The modern public relations practitioner has thousands of ways to reach his or her audience. There are mommy blogs, industry blogs, analyst reports, social media, national dailies, niche market outlets and glossy magazines—not to mention your company’s or client’s own online newsroom.
With so many options available, it’s critical to start with one simple question: Who is your audience? We have been taught to ask this since grade school-level writing courses, and it’s still important.
Our team begins all projects by identifying the audience segments that are most critical to a project or a campaign. We ask: Who do we need to reach to move the needle for our client? The answers can vary widely—a testament to our varied client base and multitude of projects.
Sometimes, the goal is to put a story in front of as many eyes as possible, and an above-the-fold story in the Wall Street Journal or USA Today is the best possible outcome. But there is, understandably, incredible competition to feature your story in these outlets and in many cases, there are a number of smaller, more targeted publications or blogs that would make a great home for your story. And this is where identifying the right audience becomes so important.
Take, for example, the marketing efforts to sign more young people up for the Affordable Care Act (aka, Obamacare). For the system to work, it needed more and more young, healthy people to sign up. To that end, marketing efforts focused intensely on this group. The result? President Obama’s now famous sit-down with Zach Galifianakis on the comedic interview show, “Between Two Ferns,” and a slew of targeted YouTube videos aimed at reaching young viewers. One, for example, featured a number of YouTube celebrities encouraging young adults (their primary audience) to sign up for health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act. Another featured celebrity moms in an ad chastising young people for not signing up. AdWeek aptly quipped that its tone was, “We’re-making-you-feel-guilty-haha-no-but-seriously.” It was an effective message targeted toward a very specific audience.
Of course, these ads led to a cavalcade of pundits analyzing their impact (“Did they work?” “Was it presidential?”). Nonetheless, they are a great example of content designed to reach a specific audience—a concept that public relations practitioners exercise each day.
In our work for our client Twisted Pair Solutions, for instance, we targeted our outreach to media based on key sales markets for the client. By starting with the most basic question—who do we need to reach?—we were able to develop content and pitches that we knew would resonate with a specific and impactful audience.
Editors and journalists have to ask the same question. Reporters receive a tremendous number of pitches each day. To evaluate which pitches are a good match, they’re going to ask a number of questions including: Will my readers be interested in this story? By defining your audience up front and tailoring your message and content to meet their needs—before you even click “send” on a pitch—you can make sure that you’re sharing content with reporters who want it, and whose readership will be interested.
If you’ve done your homework, it also means that you’re reaching the audience who can have the biggest, most positive impact for your company or client, and that’s a critical piece of any public relations campaign.
You can read more about our work for Twisted Pair Solutions in a previous blog post, here.
I recently wrote about “non-sexy” brands gaining popularity on social media. One of the ways they were doing this was by focusing on having conversations and interacting with their followers rather than simply fixing their
Image courtesy of @Wendy’s
followers’ attention on product promotion. Ragan’s PR Daily has highlighted yet another secret to gain momentum on social media: Use popular hashtags—specifically, Throwback Thursday, better known as #TBT.#TBT has become one of the most consistent and popular hashtags on social media and brands are taking advantage of it. People magazine posted my favorite example of a brand’s #TBT on Twitter. The post was a picture of the
dashing Justin Timberlake during his ‘N Sync days, highlighting a young face with bleached hair and a stylish ‘90s sweat suit. This post generated almost 600 retweets as well as 461 favorites.
Another interesting example was a picture tweeted by Wendy’s from 42 years ago, displaying the chain’s first drive-thru window. It was nostalgic, like other #TBTs, and imparted a sense of history of the company, giving viewers the chance to feel a more intimate connection with the brand. Younger fans got to glimpse “the old days,” and an older generation could relive them.
These types of posts mimic advertising, but with some significant advantages. Like advertising, these posts appeal to customers’ emotions and help build brand reputation. Unlike advertising, social media is inexpensive and time efficient. Posts such as these also do not have the same tone as an advertisement, giving the brand and company a more peer-like feel rather than coming across as strictly out to make a profit.
#TBT is proving to be a valuable tool on which brands should capitalize. Not only is #TBT one of the most popular and regularly used hashtags—effective for helping promote your brand—but also it shows that providing an interesting conversation topic on social media can be more effective than merely placing an advertisement in front of consumers.