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.
Last night was the official launch party for Colleen and Jennifer’s book Strategic Public Relations. The event took place at the Palace Ballroom and featured tasty tidbits from Tom Douglas. Books were flying off the table and despite the fact it was tax day, the turnout was fantastic. It was wonderful to catch up with past and present clients as well as friends of the agency.
Strategic Public Relations is written for a broad audience from CEOs to PR practitioners and outlines how to maximize the impact of PR. The book also contains insight from business leaders at such companies as Alaska Airlines, Clearwire, Deloitte Services, Edelman, Nike, Seattle Children’s Hospital, Starbucks, and many other brand-name organizations that are using PR to accomplish their most important goals.
Strategic Public Relations has truly been a labor of love for Colleen and Jennifer, as well as the agency. As a fairly new addition to the Communiqué team, it’s been really rewarding to see the book come to life in its final stages and to celebrate that milestone with Colleen and Jennifer.
We also celebrated another milestone last night, the fifth anniversary of Communiqué PR. In her speech at the party, Colleen recounted how Jennifer approached her on Thanksgiving Day 2003 with a vision and business plan in hand. While starting a PR agency may not have been the highest priority in her life at that time, she said, “The balance in our relationship has enabled us to arrive at this point: when one of us was holding back the other one was there pushing or pulling the other forward. It’s this teamwork and partnership that allows us to stand here today to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the agency.”
A big thanks to all of you who attended last night’s festivities. The party was an overwhelming success and we were so honored to have you celebrate these milestones with us.
To purchase your copy of the book, click on the cover above or go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. You can also become a fan of Communiqué PR on Facebook!
We will provide an update and link to the photos from last night when they are available.
On February 26, Alaska Airlines announced the trial launch of its new satellite-based wireless Internet service, Alaska Airlines Inflight Wi-Fi. The launch of this service, which can be used by passengers to browse the Web; access online music, games, podcasts and webcasts; send and receive e-mail and connect to Virtual Private Networks (VPN), garnered more than 45 print and broadcast mentions.
Yesterday (April 14), the company announced the initial survey results of its Inflight Wi-Fi service trial – and the positive data from this study illustrate consumers’ excitement over this service. Since the service trial launch, more than 2,100 passengers have logged on and used Alaska Airlines’ Inflight Wi-Fi. Of those passengers who tried the service and completed a survey during or after their flight, more than 96 percent intend to use it again.
A few of the other key findings from the survey include:
More than 78 percent of those who tried the Inflight Wi-Fi service are either “extremely likely” or “very likely” to recommend it.
More than 75 percent felt the service was either “excellent” or “very good.”
About 35 percent of passenger accessed the service with portable devices such as smart phones. Other passengers surfed the Web on devices such as notebook computers.
As a consumer, who easily gets bored and antsy on flights, this service is just the thing that I need to help keep me occupied and productive during flights. If you’d like to read more about what journalists are saying about this service, read some of the great coverage Alaska Airlines Inflight Wi-Fi Service has received:
The Associated Press (AP) announced on Monday, April 6 that it would crack down on Web sites and search engines that use the work of the news organization without first obtaining permission from them and agreeing to share profits. In an effort to “exercise some control” over the practice of reposting articles and gaining profit from selling packaged news feeds, the AP plans to take legal action against these sites.
According to a New York Times article, AP executives said they were “concerned about a variety of news forums around the Web, including major search engines like Google and Yahoo and aggregators like the Drudge Report that link to news articles, smaller sites that sometimes reproduce articles whole, and companies that sell packaged news feeds.”
While this new policy applies to organizations whose work is distributed by the AP, it will focus on developing a system to help revive the ailing newspaper industry and implement a system for shared revenue between newspapers and sources that are repurposing news articles. Up until now, news aggregators and search engine companies safely repurposed headlines and portions of news articles under the legal doctrine of fair use.
The AP continues to work out the logistics of the new policy, including how to limit use of articles and how to share revenue, AP Senior Vice President Sue A. Cross said the goal of this new policy isn’t to work against aggregators – it’s to “tackle bigger economic issues at stake.”
As the economy and changing media landscape continue to impact the newspaper industry, the prospect of gaining revenue from search engines such as Yahoo! and Google is tempting for many news organizations. Yet some executives at these organizations argue that this policy is “misguided” and state that much of their own Web traffic is generated through links on search pages. Others argue that although they appreciate the Web traffic generated through search engines, they believe they should receive some of the profits from these sites such as Google News, which rakes in profit from the reposted content by selling ads on the site.
I expect this debate will continue as news organizations search for ways to stay afloat. Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, predicts the newspaper industry will eventually resemble television, “where some content was free, some was purchased by subscription and some was paid for every time it was viewed.”
Do you think Web sites and search engines should share revenue with news organizations when they repost the headlines and pieces of articles? We would love to hear your thoughts! E-mail us at [email protected].
Twitter can be an invaluable resource. From chatting with friends to connecting with new people, this social network provides a way to instantaneously share information. But the sheer volume of conversations and links can be overwhelming, and many people find it difficult to navigate.
So we were pleased to learn about a Twitter feature designed to address this problem. Twitter users can use hashtags to group topics, events, communities, industries, locations or any number of other categories, thus creating organized, uninterrupted conversation chains that are easy to follow and find. For example, by searching for “#publicrelations” in Twitter Search, you can find all tweets that people sent with that hashtag. To insert your comments into the conversation, simply end your tweet with the appropriate hashtag: “Peter Shankman’s HARO is a great PR tool #publicrelations”.
Hashtags can also be used for industry conferences, such as #sxsw for South by Southwest in March, an annual music festival in Texas.
In her blog post on Twitter hashtags, Heidi Sullivan notes that while anyone can create a hashtag, as a best practice they should do some research to make sure a hashtag doesn’t already exist for their community or topic. Heidi recommends searching the Twitter Fan Wiki/Hashtags page for an up-to-date list.
Have you found Twitter hashtags helpful? We would love to hear your experiences or tips to get the most from Twitter.
The uncertain economic climate continues to affect marketing and public relations budgets. However, a recent study from Text 100, a global boutique PR consulting firm, illustrates the positive impact public relations can have on a company’s brand value.
The study, outlined in a recent PRWeek article, found companies that produce more complicated products benefit more from PR than those companies in sectors like personal care and apparel. In fact, 27 percent of a brand’s value is tied to how often the brand name appears in the press.
Products that are more complex such as computers and cars are more affected by media coverage. For example, if a consumer conducts research on a product before making a purchase, media impressions (public relations efforts) have a larger impact.
Nils Mork-Ulnes, vice president of Context Analytics, opines “Where there is more risk involved for the buyer is where the link between real brand value and media prominence is the strongest.” Although public relations efforts still benefit companies in industries such as personal care and apparel, I agree with Mork-Ulnes’ statement.
Text 100 and Context Analytics examined Interbrand’s annual rankings of the Top 100 Global Brands to find how the brand’s ranking related to media hits. The study found that 48 percent of the computing industry’s brand value was explained by media prominence, 16 times that of the personal care industry.
About a year ago, when I was shopping for a new laptop I researched the latest news from Apple, Dell and other leading computer makers. I poured over articles and reviews about each brand and model. Ultimately, I selected my notebook computer largely due to the positive reviews from other customers and technology experts.
I’ve also found social networking has a large impact on purchasing decisions. Just recently, I saw a poll on a friend’s Facebook page inquiring about the differences between an iPhone and Blackberry. The majority of people were in favor of the iPhone because of the “cool” applications. I’m not sure if he decided to go with the iPhone, but the comments clearly identified Apple’s brand value and illustrate how consumers are using social networking sites to gain information about products and services.
Have you based your latest tech gadget purchase on media hits and blog buzz? If so, we’d love to hear about it! Send an e-mail to [email protected] or leave a comment.
April is National Autism Awareness Month; and given the staggering numbers of children diagnosed with autism, it’s probably safe to assume you know someone impacted by this condition. Autism is a brain development disorder characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 150 children is affected by autism. It is the fastest-growing developmental disability with a new case of autism being diagnosed almost every 20 minutes.
Today doctors and parents are better equipped to help treat autism; however, there is still a lot of work to be done. To better explain what is known and unknown about autism, CNN published an article yesterday, April 2, examining the war against autism. The article focuses on vaccines and environmental factors, information about the growing rates of autism and how families can find solutions to pay for treatment and therapies.
We worked closely with CNN on behalf of Seattle Children’s Hospital to place this article. By building a solid relationship with Miriam Falco, health and medicine managing editor with CNN, we were able to present story ideas to her and provide her with resources the article. This meant not only offering Miriam the perspective of Dr. Bryan King, director of child psychiatry at Children’s and a recognized national autism expert, but also connecting her with a family touched by autism to share their perspective and bring the story to life.
As we have blogged about in the past, personal stories can bring powerful emotion to a story and highlight an experience that either directly or indirectly impacts many people. To read more about leveraging personal stories with media read our past blogs about the power of a personal story and the Obama Administration.
By incorporating a variety of expert sources and offering readers the family’s perspective, Miriam does an excellent job of showing readers what autism means to different people rather than telling. From a PR perspective, showing audiences the narrative story versus telling is an important rule to crafting a compelling story.
Click here to read Miriam’s article titled, “Progress is slow in the war against autism.”