BEST PR PRACTICES

Public Relations: Overview & Best Practices
According to the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics. PR aims to gain an organization or individual credible third-party exposure to key stakeholders like customers, partners, or employees through blogs, the media, TV, radio, the internet, and other sources.
In 2006 Proctor & Gamble did a comprehensive study of their marketing mix including advertising, marketing, and public relations for six major brands over a three year period. The company used a statistical model called multivariate analysis that relates historical changes in which disciplines the company invested in to business results.

The study found that PR drove sales just as much as advertising, was cheaper, and improved the impact of marketing, direct sales, and advertising. The PR efforts were measured to have an ROI of 275%. Proctor & Gamble weighted their PR investments accordingly.

Spin
Since Ivy Lee is credited with founding PR by helping Standard Oil improve their public image and quell outcry, it's no wonder the public often perceives PR as dubious word-smiths that work for smoking, big oil, and politics to mislead the public. In reality, most companies of any significant size practice public relations.
Agency & Corporate
For PR practitioners and decision-markers, the difference between corporate and agency PR is a fundamental dividing line. Companies buy professional services from PR agencies who work for a variety of different clients, while corporate PR teams are practitioners hired directly by the company.

Small companies often can't support full-time PR staff, so they hire an agency, where they can get access to an entire team who works for them part-time. Larger companies have an internal PR staff, but often work in a hybrid model - working alongside an agency who provides access to experts on specific markets, media segments, or talents.

Smaller agencies often have a niche expertise and a small, efficient, team, while larger agencies have a greater diversity of resources and experts. Agencies tend to understand the media, while corporate PR people have a better understanding of their company's products and inner-workings.

PR vs Advertising and Marketing
Often the difference between PR, marketing, and advertising is a blur in the minds of the public. Generally advertising and marketing work on paid opportunities to expose audiences to controlled content like ads, webinars, advertorial, etc. PR efforts are geared towards promoting your company, products, and executives through news coverage of significant company events, awards, conferences and other *free* opportunities to provide content that is deemed of editorial value by reporters and event organizers.
Since PR opportunities are not paid for, we rely on influencers such as journalists, analysts and bloggers to tell a compelling story that is less controlled and less on-demand than a paid-for advertisement. Also, since these influencers are the gatekeepers to company exposure, relationships with the them are key to a successful PR program.
Trends
Public relations has been impacted substantially by the issues facing today's media.
Media umbrellas like News Corp, Dow Jones, and CMP are under fire to increase their profit margins, which are suffering due to a lack of advertising dollars being spent in publications. The results for the media are consolidation, lay-offs folding publications, and the increasing focus on tradeshows and 'new media' which is providing better returns for the stock-holders of media corporations.
The San Jose Mercury News and The San Francisco Chronicle laid off 17 and 25 percent of their staff respectively. As editorial ranks slim and publications fold, already busy journalists are becoming even more so. Beats are growing broader, freelancers more popular and expertise more limited. Editors are relying on PR more than ever before for contributed content, press releases that read like articles, and digital materials like podcasts, video, and more. With fewer reporters covering more companies, the competition for their attention has become even steeper.
With a growing number of publications soliciting for content from readers and fellow bloggers, these mechanisms can prove more valuable tools for PR people to contact the media than email.
Publications like BusinessWeek among others have begun initiatives to engage their readers in an interactive process and even get story ideas directly from their readership. While traditional publications are folding, blogs like tech blog Giga Om and Valleywag are quickly gathering a significant following.
Best Practices
It goes without saying that best practices and PR strategy vary by industry, company, and depending on the company's goals, but here's a few generic one's that are most important:
• Make the journalists life easy: This simple rule can be broken more often than you'd think. Journalists today are overwhelmed. If company A reschedules their interview three times, asks lots of questions before jumping on the phone, and provides 5-step instructions for dialing into the conference bridge, and company B calls the journalist directly the very next day, who do you think the reporter will go to next time they're writing a story? The one who gives them quick, seamless, access to high-level spokespeople who offer quotable conversations.
• Tell a compelling story: It's often a struggle for smaller companies to make big news, but the criteria for achieving media coverage is the same for anyone - tell a story worth reading. Readers are naturally inclined to read articles about their favorites (Apple, Google, Facebook); they have an advantage. Make sure the story you're telling is interesting to the audience - not just a product catalog - and that you latch on to bigger issues or competitors that helps the reporter/producer make an article with a compelling headline.
• Align PR with your Goals: The reasons for doing PR can vary from creating brand awareness, exposing the company culture, promoting executives as thought leaders, or just getting potential customers aware of the new product you're selling. The strategy for achieving those goals will vary, but be sure to keep your goals in mind every step of the way

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