Do I smell cake?

Two members in our Providence office, myself and Julie Sellew-Kruger, are turning 30 in the coming week.  But rather than commiserate the demise of my 20’s, I decided to celebrate the big three-oh by sharing with you what I consider to be the Top 30 Do’s and Don’ts of working in PR.  Thirty is such a nice, round number after all.

So without further ado, I present to you:

Top 30 PR Do’s and Don’ts:

1. Do read every day.  Know who is writing about your client’s industry and what they are writing about in your client’s industry.

2. Don’t leave home with an uncharged smartphone – ever.

3. Do pick up the phone.  Sending an email isn’t enough. Get on the phone and introduce yourself to the editors and reporters who are likely to cover your client.  They are more likely to respond to a friendly voice than to an impersonal email.

4. Don’t underestimate the little guys. Sure, your main objective is to get your clients in major media such as the New York Times or 60 Minutes, but don’t forget to pitch stories to the local news junkies.  Every town’s paper is eager to write good news about businesses and organizations succeeding within their own communities.

5. Do establish a taste palate for coffee.  You’ll thank me later.

6. Don’t pitch old news.  Stay current with what’s being talked about in your client’s industry and be timely in your pitching.

7. Do be social media savvy.  The PR industry is like a chameleon.  PR pro’s are able to adapt to the changing media landscape and utilize all available communication outlets to deliver their clients’ story to the masses.  You’re reading this blog on the internet, aren’t you?  More than likely you’ll be reading a news article on a newspaper’s corresponding website during your lunch break today as well.

8. Don’t forget to include the Who, What, Where, When and Why of your client’s story.  The more you’re able to think like a reporter, the more likely you’ll pique their interest in what you have to say.

9. Do have passion for the work that you do.

10. Don’t send out an email blast.  Rather, state the editor’s or reporter’s name when sending an email.  They are more likely to respond to you when you make it personal to them.

11. Do have a thirst for knowledge.  The more inquisitive you are about your client’s mission, the more information you’ll have to tell their story.

12. Don’t send a pitch to a publisher, ever.

13. Do subscribe to publications that cover your client’s industry, and read them.

14. Don’t take yourself too seriously.  A little humor goes a long way to brightening up your work day.

15. Do have your business card on you at all times.  You never know when you’ll meet your next connection.

16. Don’t forget to eat.  It’s easy to blast through lunchtime when you’re busy brainstorming pitches and meeting deadlines.  A productive PR pro is better able to service clients on a full tummy.

17. Do own a least one good suit. In PR, image is everything.

18. Don’t harass editors and reporters you’re pitching.  Follow up as appropriate if the story still has life, but know when to walk away or when to rework the pitch angle.

19. Do tailor your pitch to the specific needs of each editor and reporter you’re contacting.

20. Don’t call an editor or reporter without knowing your story.

21. Do keep a dictionary and thesaurus nearby at all times (or if you’re web savvy, bookmark www.dictionary.com).

22. Don’t skip out on sleep.  It may sound silly to mention, but the more alert you are during working hours, the more you’ll produce for your clients at the end of the day.

23. Do proofread, proofread, proofread! Nothing lessens your credibility more with the media than a typo in an email subject line.  Likewise, your clients will lose confidence in your ability to deliver their messages professionally.

24. Don’t warm up smelly food in the company microwave.  Your colleagues will thank me later.

25. Do establish good coworker relationships.  You spend a considerable amount of time with the people you work with every day.

26. Don’t call editors and reporters when you know they’re working on deadline.  They’ll just hang up on you (sadly, I learned this one from personal experience).

27. Do know when to tell your client “no.” You’re there to provide your clients with the professional advice they sought out in you.  Sometimes you’ll have to tell your client when their idea just might not make the best sense.  You know what the media wants, that is your job after all.

28. Don’t miss deadlines.

29. Do repost this blog on your Facebook and Twitter pages.  I’ll thank you later.

30. Don’t ignore your mistakes.  Learn from them and move on.

By now everyone has heard about the Costa Concordia shipwreck off the coast of an Italian island, and it has not been good news. After nearly two weeks, the cruise line is still making national headlines. While I have little experience in crisis communications, I know there are plenty of public relations lessons to be learned from this particular crisis.

Get everything out in the open, no big secrets.
Once your company is in the news for a major crisis, people are going to dig for follow up stories. If you hide information, people are going to find out and it will do even more damage to the company’s reputation than if you had just shared the information from the get go. Also, if your company shares the information first, you can explain the situation and shed the most positive light on the situation. When companies withhold the details, people are naturally inclined to assume the worst. Again, not good.

Plan ahead.
In college, we did a case study on BP’s oil spill and the basic principles apply here as well. From my point of view, it looks like the Costa Concordia crew and Carnival Cruise Lines did not have an effective crisis communications plan in place. The company has not made their statements readily available and easy to find. After a quick search, this was the only press release I could find, which was dated six days after the incident.

Be proactive.
If you know that there are issues or controversies within your organization that could lead to a crisis, have a well thought out plan (that is understood by your internal team) and perhaps even suggest that the organization make changes to avoid a crisis all together.

I am interested to see how the rest of this crisis plays out. What kind of crisis communications advice do you give to clients, either before or after disaster has struck?

I’m sure you’ve seen all the ballyhoo around McDonald’s #McDStories campaign that has backlashed in a big way.   Designed to get followers sharing their favorite stories about the brand, people took to Twitter to share instead their disgust and distaste for the Big Mac of fast food.  There’s a public relations lesson here, and not just for one of the world’s biggest consumer brands.

From a PR perspective, it’s hard to blame McDonald’s for going out and trying to engage consumers in a way that would stir up nostalgia or charming anecdotes.  However, for a brand that has struggled with its brand perception and with America’s obesity rate higher than ever, it becomes easier to blame them for not being more thoughtful about the channel.  I’m not saying things wouldn’t have run amok if this was only done on Facebook – but I do think they would have had more control on their own page.  I find it hard to believe that no one brought up the possibility of a Twitter campaign going negative, fast.  And, if that’s the case and they thought it was worth the risk – well, then, they are probably realizing now the risk was far greater than the reward.

McDonald’s has had a ton of people piling on them for this – but I do see a bigger lesson here for brands on social media and their strategy for each channel.

It’s easy to say that every consumer brand should be on the biggies: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+.  But it’s not the “where” in social media that is the most important, it’s the “what” and “how” they engage on each channel that is critical.  Brands need to realize that every channel comes with its own risk and it’s important to weigh the pros and cons before embarking on a campaign aimed at engaging a large number of consumers.

On Twitter, the negative campaigns and social media missteps “go viral” in the blink of an eye.  People want to be in on the joke – so they pile on – even if they don’t necessarily have a negative perception of the brand.    With hindsight being what it is, I can confidently say it would have been far better for McDonald’s brand not to be on Twitter at all than to have this campaign go the way it has.

So, what should brands do? Research and identify the channels that make the most sense for your brand. Weigh the risk vs. the reward of running a campaign on each channel.  And, listen to skeptics who bring up the “what if” scenarios.

Chances are, if you have one skeptic on your team, you’ll find a million of them on Twitter.

As PR professionals, the First Amendment is not only crucial to our business, but something we truly feel passionate about protecting. Today, we have all inevitably run into at least a handfull of blacked-out sites in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011(PIPA), two bills under consideration by  Congress. If this legislation is made law, it would expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.  Sounds like an easy thing to support, right?  Not so fast.

People for the bill (major motion picture companies and record labels among them) say it protects the intellectual property market and their industry, jobs and revenue, and is necessary to be able to enforce copyright laws, especially against foreign websites. One example is Google’s $500 million settlement with the Department of Justice for its role in a scheme to target U.S. consumers with ads to illegally import prescription drugs from Canadian pharmacies.

People against the bill say that it violates the First Amendment, is Internet censorship, and will threaten free speech. It will hinder the efforts of small businesses and independent artists who rely on the ease of communication the internet provides. Today you’ll find a great number of websites hosting their own virtual protest, such as Wired, Wikipedia, Social Media Today, The Oatmeal.com and Google. Mashable says this will take us back to 1994, before the World Wide Web launched:

“When you turn copyright infringement into a felony and say that anyone can accuse a website of providing ”infringing” tools (and apply severe penalties whether or not you do something about it), you are essentially making it impossible for anyone to do anything online without fear of retribution.”

There is definitely an incredible amount of information available and passionate advocates both for and against it. As PR professionals, we have to be aware of how this bill would affect our clients and the work we do. Take some time to get familiar and let me know what your thoughts are.

What do I love most about public relations? People work hard to play hard. PR people are a special breed – including us “agency-folk” working with several clients at once. As Sam Fletcher recently pointed out, PR execs are listed as having the seventh most stressful job out there according to this year’s CareerCast survey. That said, we here at Matter have endeavored to find the balance between work and play, with a special emphasis on social good.

Take, for example, our holiday party this year. Before we departed for a long break, we gathered for a celebration of the great year we had. Because we were fortunate enough to have family and friends join us for a night of food, drink and dance, we wanted to make sure we were still productive with our time – as PR professionals often do. In the fast-changing world of PR, we don’t have a minute to spare so we have to make them all count. With that in mind, we collected Toys for Tots donations at the door and delivered all leftovers from our meal to the Salvation Army for lunch the next day.

I feel grateful to work at a company that has such a strong belief in giving back. Too often do we get sucked into the craziness of work, and forget to come up for air. I hope that 2012 will bring even more charitable activities here at Matter, but in the meantime, these were my favorite highlights of 2011:

Care Packages for Marines: My amazing coworkers put together 11 boxes of goodies for my brother and his platoon who were deployed in Afghanistan.

Jeanne Geiger Walk Against Violence: Matter made a financial donation for this cause and participated in a 5k walk around Newburyport to raise awareness of domestic violence.

What do you do to balance out work? Any cool social-good opportunities you think we should look in to?

 At the turn of every year, many industries take a step back and lament on the year just passed. The PR industry is no different and Business Insider recently took a look at the 11 biggest PR disasters of 2011. The list is pretty comprehensive, and it outlines all the biggest PR goofs and gaffes I’d compile for the year, but I’m left wondering: where the heck are these people’s PR representation??

Let’s face it, a PR person throwing up her hand in protest when a CEO comes up with a crazy idea to split up the company and raise prices without adding value (*cough cough, I have a Netflix stuck in my throat) might not keep the CEO from pulling the trigger, but a good PR person would have to have a response in mind, right? Unfortunately, no matter how much a PR person prepares, something unexpected could happen, and like the article says, how you react is more important than how to avoid bad things happening.

The article rightly discusses an example of an insider trading scandal that could have been much, much worse than it ended up, simply because the firm reacted the right way. While it was traditionally a secretive and close-to-the-vest organization, it adapted to the problem at hand, demonstrated some transparency and avoided a very bad PR backlash.

It will be interesting to see what horrific PR goofs 2012 will bring. Hopefully CEO’s and celebs have taken note of the fumbles of others and will consult their PR reps before making any big moves.

Like most people, I entered this New Year with hopes to improve upon last year. As I was strategizing these goals, most of which included my career, I stumbled across an article on PR Daily, “New Year’s Resolutions for PR and Marketing Professionals.” Most of the resolutions in the article include things I was already taught during my first year at Matter, but all are important to remember as we go about the daily grind. The article had 11 resolutions, but I went through and picked the five that were most important to me for 2012.

1. Resolve to know your audience.

This has been ingrained in my head from all of my mentors here at Matter. Pitching a massive list of contacts with the same pitch is ineffective, and quite frankly, rarely garners results. Taking that extra step to get to know exactly who you’re pitching and why they would be interested is important, and something we all need to make priority in the New Year.

2. Resolve to stay ahead of the game.

In an agency, there are so many things going on at once that if you don’t stay organized and on top of things, you’re bound to forget something important. Although it may not seem possible some days, taking that extra minute to make sure you write something on your to-do list or finish up a task that has been on your to-do list forever can make all the difference.

3. Resolve to slow it down and clean up your act.

At Matter, we have professional development meetings that are meant to help the junior members of the team improve our skills and learn best practices. I chose to include this resolution because it is one that Matter takes pride in, and even had an entire development meeting dedicated to just this. Attention to detail is effective, saves time AND people (especially clients) notice!

4. Resolve to clear your head.

Even though, according to PR Daily, PR moved down on the list of most stressful careers from number two to number seven…it’s still number seven. Taking a moment to go for a walk with a colleague or grab a coffee can help you clear your head and make that to-do list look a lot more manageable. Matter’s employees are extremely hard workers, so we all know (or need to realize!) the importance of a quick breather to re-focus.

5. Resolve to be a storyteller.

This one was great to see on the list because inevitably, it’s our creative minds that help us drive great client results and think outside of the box. Using our brains to make facts and figures relevant to each publication we are pitching is an important skill for all PR professionals. Taking the shortcut and just relaying the facts may sometimes seem easier but really hinders your ability to create an idea for a good story – and hey, that’s one of the fun parts of our job!

What are some of your PR resolutions for 2012?

Happy New Year! During 2011 we had the opportunity to work on many exciting, creative video projects with clients in a wide array of industries, from high tech to consumer products. Each project had unique technical and creative challenges, and this video gives just a taste of that work. Matter is a results-focused agency and our video production services help our clients reach their goals – and that makes us pretty proud. Please enjoy this short highlight video:

These comparative posts are often presented as PR vs. advertising as if the two were in a Thunderdome of marketing budgets. At their best, both disciplines are very powerful, and neither does the other’s job particularly well. The time to consider which practice to use is well before you hit budgeting — it’s when you identify the need. While both are effective means to influence public perception, the effects are not similar. You can see it pretty clearly for yourself in the story of how Santa Claus took his modern form.

Santa Claus — the large man with the snowy-white beard in a red suit that lives at the North Pole — is the result of two efforts to meet two distinct needs. The success in each resulted in a character with near global recognition and centuries of staying power.

The archetype of a solstice visitor bringing good cheer (in various forms and with various names) sprouted to help dispel the gloom of winter in the near arctic regions of western Europe. Some versions were children, some were religious, some were gift-givers. The need was not global agreement, but making the bleakest part of the year a bit more hopeful. You might call it a stretch to say Santa was a PR stunt, but none other than Martin Luther (who knew how to create a stir with the written word) co-opted the local and increasingly secular St. Nicholas traditions, celebrated earlier in December, to draw more attention to the feast that marked Jesus’ birth.

The beginnings of Santa Claus were grass roots, word of mouth, owned by the community and earned propagation by sharing value with the audience. It was passing ownership of ideas that enriched everyone. That sounds a lot like PR. As the stories ran into each other — particularly in America, where many traditions from around the world met and mingled — the stories adapted and the versions that best met the goal of keeping up holiday cheer continued.

Coca Cola had a different goal. The drink sold well in the summer when people were looking for refreshment, but in the colder weather, a hot cocoa sounded a whole lot more inviting. The company found its perfect seasonal counterpart in another white and red icon of good cheer. By investing heavily in tying its brand to a similarly bright and rosy Santa, the brand created a globally recognized version of the jolly old elf.

The advertising goal, connecting a product to the holiday season, required everyone to have the same associations with the season — a brute force tactic for a brute force need. A “Father Christmas” in his green robe (as was tradition in the British Isles) wouldn’t do because it was off-brand. Imagine Santa in an all-white robe. I can’t do it, but it’s certainly not less appropriate for a seasonal character that arrives with the snow. That’s how effective advertising can be in forcing an image into our collective heads.

So, as you consider your goals for 2012, consider Santa Claus regardless of the holidays you celebrate, and how you can best get your ideas spread around the world.

Before I started working at Matter Communications, social media was an up-and-coming medium. Facebook was still exclusive to college students and everyone was basing their friendships off MySpace’s top eight. Fast forward to 2011, and social media is a whole new ball game. For example,  I was scanning my Twitter feed today when I noticed that my colleague, Andrew Rodger, had posted an article from Forbes magazine regarding social media power influencers.

I instantly clicked and began reading all about these professionals who are using platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs and Google + to connect with the online world. The part that I found most interesting was that when the influencers were asked which platform they are most focused on, the answer was none. Instead they choose to focus on an integrated strategy that leverages content to connect with a variety of audiences.

The more I read through the article, the more I realized how social media has shaped my PR career over the past few years. When I first started at Matter, Facebook was the only program I was signed up for. I did not have a Twitter account and was also not interested in signing up for one. Today, I can’t imagine my life without it. I use Twitter to scan for breaking news stories and follow reporters. There have been many cases where reporters have tweeted about an article they are writing, and I’ve had an opportunity to pitch a client. Twitter is also a way for my clients to send their own news out. Whenever there is a big announcement, product launch or great article they appeared in, we tweet about it.

LinkedIn has also helped spread news for certain clients, while being a resource for others. Whenever I am assisting with award submissions or in need of a biography, I can look up my client’s LinkedIn page for their full background and develop a bio. Clients can then make a few quick edits or send their approval rather than starting from scratch.

It’s very interesting to see how much social media has grown and changed over the years. Do you find social media as useful as I do?  I know I love being able to log into the different accounts and have an infinite amount of information at my fingertips. Can’t wait to see what they come up with next! Tell me what you think.