Measurement & ROI online and on-demand training courses are included in PRSA membership.

I left Jessica, our account executive, at the office and boarded a plane for Hong Kong to attend the first ever Asia-Pacific Summit on PR Measurement. Delegates from Singapore, Greater China, India, Australia and other countries gathered on Feb. 29-March 1 to expound on the outcomes of previous measurements summits in Lisbon and Barcelona and, ultimately, advance the Business Case for Public Relations.

When I returned, Jessica was curious about what I learned. “I know that the Barcelona Principles set basic standards for PR measurement, and the Lisbon Summit produced a road map for measurement going forward,” she said. “But what happened in Hong Kong?”

Continue reading " Moving Toward Social Media Measurement Standards: Key Metrics to Determine Whether Social Media Initiatives Are Working "

Join Tyrha M. Lindsey and Bruce Kirton for their Digital Impact Conference session, The Digerati: Social Media Habits of Multicultural Consumers.” The PRSA 2012 Digital Impact Conference, to be held April 2–3 at the Sentry Center in New York City, offers workshops where public relations professionals will hear from entrepreneurs and others who specialize in technology communications or social and digital media.

Multicultural consumers wield a significant amount of influence on popular trends in the general market, and consequently, smart marketers understand the importance of engaging this segment. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on the African-American segment in this article, but each ethnic segment has particular online behaviors and habits that can be leveraged to build a relationship with those consumers.

Continue reading " Leverage Online Dialogue and Conversations to Create Multicultural Brand Ambassadors! "

Join Kathleen Dunleavy for her Digital Impact Conference session, 3D Bubble Mania: Combine Traditional, Social and Mobile PR Outreach. The PRSA 2012 Digital Impact Conference, to be held April 2–3 at the Sentry Center in New York City, offers workshops where public relations professionals will hear from entrepreneurs and others who specialize in technology communications or social and digital media. 

How do you make a video go viral? I am not convinced there is a prescription to follow for making a video go truly viral. However, in my workshop, “3D Bubble Mania: Combine Traditional, Social and Mobile PR Outreach,” we will look at the importance of video in corporate communications by looking in-depth at “3D Bubble Mania” – and find out what worked and what didn’t.

Instead of speaking of viral videos, I recommend that we talk about Internet videos. Multimedia content that both engages the viewer and provides shareable content is a vital component of any comprehensive public relations campaign. And the challenge, as with all PR work, is to get noticed. It’s estimated that 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube. That’s a lot of video. So, how do you make your video stand out?

Continue reading " Don’t Pop this Bubble! Find Out How to Use Internet Videos in Successful PR Campaigns "

The PRSA 2012 Digital Impact Conference, to be held April 2–3  in New York City, offers workshops where public relations professionals will hear from entrepreneurs and others who specialize in technology communications or social and digital media.

Pinterest is the latest hot social media platform. The public loves it but what exactly is its best use for businesses? Is it a relevant marketing platform or is it more of a sharing network where marketing messaging isn’t welcomed?

Like many professionals, public relations practitioners (PRSA staff included) struggle with implementing new technology to make the user experience of for their customers more worthwhile. It’s a problem that seemingly never goes away yet gnaws at any professional who wishes to stay abreast of trends in an ever-changing marketplace.

There are hot technologies that never quite become as ubiquitous as people predict. It seems like just yesterday that Second Life was being featured on the cover of magazines, bringing in an era of changed platforms and virtual reality. In truth, it was eons ago (OK, 2006) and we are no nearer to conducting all of our earthly transactions in a virtual world then we were then.

I bring this up because some institutions, at the behest of their PR and communications departments, pursued aggressive engagement strategies on the platform, often to the detriment of other mediums like Facebook or the blogosphere, whose proliferation continues relatively unabated.

This isn’t to excoriate those institutions or campaigns. Maybe for their audiences, utilizing those platforms made sense. Maybe they were bowing to the pressures of a CEO whose entire knowledge of the digital world was based on a magazine cover they saw in an airport (it’s happened to all of us.)

The point is, most PR and corporate comms departments are small and resources are limited. A prudent institution with limited means should be thinking very carefully before dipping its toes into a new platform or technology.

Which brings me back to my original point: when a shiny new technology comes out, we here at PRSA give serious consideration to its application and utility to our members. As I’m sure you guessed Pinterest is the buzz around here at present, as it is throughout much of the PR industry.

Continue reading " How Should You Be Using Pinterest for Business? "

Join Tyrha M. Lindsey and Bruce Kirton for their Digital Impact Conference session, The Digerati: Social Media Habits of Multicultural Consumers.” The PRSA 2012 Digital Impact Conference, to be held April 2–3 at the Sentry Center in New York City, offers workshops where public relations professionals will hear from entrepreneurs and others who specialize in technology communications or social and digital media. 

When Mr. Lewis founded UniWorld Group in 1969, the only media outlet was EBONY magazine. The only other way that African-Americans found out about the news in their community was through “word of mouth.”

Fast forward to 2012. There are many media outlets of color — African-American, Asian, Hispanic, Haitian, Chinese, etc. Nevertheless, as a public relations professional, how do you REALLY tell a positive multicultural news story that is not related to celebrities, sports or crime? Since current studies say that multicultural consumers’ rate of Internet usage is now nearly indistinguishable from that of the general population, at 80 percent (versus 88 percent in the general market), African-Americans and Hispanics are now online more than ever before.

Moreover, according to “Brand Information Sources Among African-Americans,” the new study by One Solution and UniWorld Group, “ ‘Advisers’ in the African-American community are “advice exchangers” — they both ask and are asked for opinions of products or services.”

Continue reading " How Do You Tell a Multicultural News Story In 2012? "