By Catherine & Andrew Goddard

Things have changed in the world of PR since my days as a worker bee in consumer agencies for eight years until 2005. In my early days, press releases were stuffed into envelopes and sent by post and photography was sent on ‘trannies’ rather than by email. Technology is keeping PRs on their toes – trannies are long gone and PR agencies have set their sights on video. My husband, an expert in video production, has collaborated with me to write a few pointers on how video is taking the PR world by storm…

10 ways to use video in PR:

1. Bolstering an online press release
Assuming a press release is genuinely newsworthy; adding video to the package increases its impact and widens opportunities for exposure. Here’s how:

• Video that’s clearly aligned to the story of the press release can reinforce core messages in an engaging way
• Video is easy to share – blogs, micro-blogs, forums and viral emails spread information and create a buzz about a story
• Video attracts attention from search engines, especially when supported by a keyword-rich title and a paragraph about its content

2. Creating a VNR — video news release

A Video News Release is a press release in video format. Usually running 90-seconds, it’s distributed to television stations for airing in news programs. Quality content, striking footage and strong interviews are a must. A VNR is worthwhile if you have a launch, event or new research findings to publicize. The key is that the story must be newsworthy – programme editors sniff out publicity stunts a mile off, so there must be a strong ‘hook’ that passes the “So What?” test.

3. A promotional tool on your website or blog
Alert clients & business prospects to new video content on your website or blog. There are myriad ways in which it can be used to showcase the credentials of an effective, creative PR business; or to create a likeable personality for the company:

• Upload a show reel of recent, impressive campaigns
• Conduct short interviews to introduce key personnel
• Create a video tour of your company office
• Post video testimonials from existing clients
• Create “how to…” videos that demonstrate your expertise

4. Creating jaw-dropping moments at events
Want a powerful opener to a conference? A dramatic montage for awards ceremonies? An eye-popping attraction at a road show or launch? Video brings an extra dimension to events; creating instant kudos for a brand, product or service, presenting information & emotion in a cinematic package. The video can be transformed into other life forms afterwards — such as a DVD show reel or webcast.

5. Go guerrilla with marketing video
YouTube is chock full of guerrilla marketing ads, the best of which attract attention from newspapers and TV news, as well as enhancing the page ranking of featured brands’ websites. Making a video and uploading it to YouTube is relatively cheap, but the exposure for a client’s product or message can be amazing.

6. A pitch tool to wow potential clients
With technology advancing every day, PowerPoint doesn’t look that ‘powerful’ anymore. Agencies that want to show a forward-thinking approach need to invest in smarter ways to present to clients. Video can create the necessary ‘wow factor’. A package might include Vox Pops, talking-head interviews, montages of news coverage, ‘mood reels’ and client testimonials. And, instead of tables to present data, motion graphics bring facts & figures to life.

7. Evaluating campaigns
A video presentation that demonstrates business benefits achieved by a campaign could be the key to building an ongoing relationship with a client. Presenting the brief given, strategy developed, tactics used and the results achieved, an exciting video presentation leaves clients wanting more. A journalist endorsement captured on film, or a street Vox Pop demonstrating a shift in public opinion, delivers rock solid proof that PR is working.

8. Show reels
The plasma screen in the office reception can be an advert for a PR agency. Instead of playing daytime TV, blast out a show reel highlighting the agency’s best work.

9. Team building & client bonding

Create a video of an office away day, or a hospitality event for clients. Play the film at the end of the day, or send it on a DVD after the event. The entertainment value will be a boost to the bonding experience between colleagues and/or clients.

10. A lasting record of a launch
Capture the vibe at a glamorous launch. Video offers a who’s who of attendees and conveys the atmosphere of the occasion. The PR team responsible can utilize the film as a promotional tool to secure similar projects, while clients can use it to big up their brand to retailers or attract sponsors for future events.

Catherine Goddard, a former PR, now works as a journalist and commercial writer. Find out more about her background and work at http://www.catherinegoddard.com. Andrew Goddard is a director of Cherry Corporate Video Production, a corporate video production company based in London. He has a decade of video editing experience having worked on scores of advertising campaigns, corporate presentations, DVD extras and movie commercials. Visit the Cherry Website for examples of their work including corporate video production, advertising, motion graphics and more.

Tip sheets are essentially lists of a half dozen or so ‘tips’ that tell people how to do something or how to solve a problem.  They are a great way to get free publicity.  Traditional editors and reporters love them – they’re a ready to go piece that requires little to no extra work, and they cross into different formats (print, TV, radio, etc.) well because they can be used as short lists complete with bullet points.

Best of all, tip sheets are easy to write and can be pulled together relatively quickly.  Everyone has seen a form of a Tip Sheet in traditional media: “8 Ways to Lose Weight Fast”, “Top 10 Biggest PR Blunders of All Time”, “6 Proven Tactics to Lower Your Energy Bills”, the list goes on.

For those of you who spend time on, or are at least familiar with, the various online social networks (as any modern PR person should be) those types of titles should look familiar.  Go to the first page of Digg.com and at least two or three of the top posts will have titles similarly structured.

The ‘tip sheet’ tactic has crossed from traditional PR to new online mediums, except the online marketers and SEO types coined a new term for it: Link Bait.

Hey, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”…

5 Great Tips for Putting Together a Great Tip Sheet/Link Bait Title Article

1. Use numbers in the title and try to work in words like ‘Best’ or ‘Top’ – the whole idea is to make it exciting and easy to digest.
2. Be Concise.  The first sentence should give the instructions, the second sentence should explain them – that’s it.
3. Avoid promoting yourself or your client too much.  The temptation is there, but people will not trust your advice if they feel they’ve been pitched to.
4. Use ‘action language’.  The tips should read like well-written instructions, start off with a verb whenever its possible.
5. Make it short and sweet.  Limit the whole thing to a page; you want there to be enough information to  actually be of use, but people will not read through a huge laundry list: 5 to 12 tips is a good guideline.

It seems like common sense, when times are rough people crave good news and take it when and where they can.

It’s an important fact for PR agencies. With the dismal economy dominating the news recently, media outlets are asking for pitches on feel-good stories/items.  Even opening it up to the public – like NBC Nightly News, whose anchor Brian Williams requested on the show’s blog that viewers “tell us your good news.”

There is a market for the upbeat, the positive.  Stories of everyday people enduring difficulties and succeeding are especially attractive.  If you can tie value and social responsibility to your clients’ brand you’ve got a golden opportunity.  It will be a natural fit at a time when people are turning to these types of values regardless.

Examples are all around: the media frenzy surrounding Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger after his safe emergency landing in the Hudson, Goldman Sachs un-traditional, philanthropic homepage, people are desperate for a bit of hope and stories with happy endings.

Public relations professionals also need to pay attention to outlets that offer people an ‘escape’.   Entertainment news is proving to be recession-proof industry, with the public still reading People and watching Oprah – so going for that soft news angle can pay off big time.

Banks and Financial Services companies obviously need a PR face-lift.  With public opinion and trust levels plummeting to new lows some are ready to try completely different approaches.  Such is the case with the current Goldman Sachs website.

The corporate feeling, powerful, almost graphic-free save for a logo imagery we are all used to seeing for Financial Services homepages is gone – replaced with a site that looks more like it belongs to a non-profit organization for empowering women.  At first glance I thought I had made a mistake in typing the domain name, then I saw the Goldman Sachs logo placed subtly in the upper corner.

The new design highlights the firm’s philanthropic efforts far more prominently than any of their asset management services.  It’s clear the firm and their PR team is trying to project a more friendly, approachable – or for lack of a better phrase “warm & fuzzy” – image.  An interesting change to say the least, but will it help with the current public relations crisis the industry is going through?

Note: Archive.org was, unfortunately, unable to give me a screenshot of how the site used to look.  However, for comparison purposes the previous homepage design was a cross between Fidelity’s and Merrill Lynch’s.

Knowing what people are saying about you is square one for a public relations campaign.  Instead of going insane trying to monitor every single source in-house many businesses and agencies use a media monitoring service.  There are hundreds to choose from; some free, some paid.  So before settling on a service, be sure to ask these questions.

1.  What exactly do we need monitored?
Magazines? News? Blogs? Social Media? There are more outlets than ever before to keep track of, so it’s important to know how your organization relates to each.  For most, news monitoring is the core coverage.  Today, most newspapers publish stories on their websites before the traditional print version can be distributed.  In addition, online monitoring will catch clips from tons of online news sources that don’t have traditional print versions.  Therefore, it’s most efficient to monitor news online.  Keep in mind live TV broadcasts are rarely broadcast online, so its good to set up monitoring through closed caption feeds as well.

Most organizations today will also want to monitor social media.  No matter what your business, chances are someone is talking about it online.  It’s good to monitor as many forms of this type of word-of-mouth media as possible – including forums, groups, message boards, blogs, consumer-reporting type sites, and as many social bookmarking/sharing sites as possible.

2.  What is covered in the ’subscription’?
This is an obvious one, but it’s important to ask exactly which sources or websites the service covers.  Many services have a pre-built list of sources, but will add any specialty sources upon request.  Pay attention to geography as well – if you are a smaller local company you could end up paying for overseas monitoring you don’t need.  Conversely, if you do business world-wide make sure to get the details on which foreign sources are monitored and whether the service has multi-language capabilities.

3.  Can we customize the service features to fit our specific needs?
Do you want clips from all news sources or only from a list you’ve already decided is most worthwhile?  Do you want to know about every single mention of your search terms, or just the ‘important’ stories?  Should the clips be delivered to several people?  How many copies?  How should they be delivered-once a day or as they come up throughout the day? Do you want to see everything or would you rather they be packaged into an edited brief/report?

You get the picture.  The better services will take into account your specific wants, needs and budget and customize your account.

4.  What is the average ‘turn around time’?
If a story is published in a small neighboring town’s paper today when will we get the clip?  Traditionally formatted clips can take up to 3 weeks to deliver from the time of publication.  Online clips can be delivered in almost real-time.  Depending on the story and source an immediate response might be required.

5.  What is the service’s missed clips rate and ‘clip accuracy’?
Screw-ups happen, and no matter which service you use it won’t catch 100% of what is published all the time.  Traditional services with human readers will deliver more relevant clippings, but are more likely to miss a story here and there.  Automated online monitoring will catch much more, but will be less effective in determining between valid and irrelevant stories.  The key is to strike a balance.  The good services will have an element of both-perhaps using an automated service to pull stories first and then having human editors quickly sort out the erroneous stories before delivery.

This morning anyone who visited the Skittles Brand homepage (www.skittles.com) was probably a bit surprised to find themselves suddenly on Twitter.  With a new slogan “Chat the Rainbow” Skittles linked their homepage to the Twitter search results for Skittles

Its generating a lot of buzz – and prompted everyone on twitter to try to get onto the skittles homepage by tweeting something about skittles.  Pretty brave when you think about it, with apparently no means of moderating the tweets Skittles has opened the door for open communication on their company homepage.

We like the idea…its a great PR stunt – get people talking about your brand in a completely new, trendy and different way.  However there is real potential for this plan to backfire.  First of all, Skittles isn’t active on Twitter, neither is its parent company Mars.  For a social media strategy to work long-term it’s got to be a 2-way conversation, which isn’t happening at all here.  What they’ve done is pull up a stream of anyone using the word ‘Skittles’ in their tweet.  Because of this there have been a few incredibly inappropriate tweets showing up – including offensive language and links to ‘adult’ sites.  Furthermore, what happens when the initial “wow” factor wears off and people aren’t tweeting about skittles every second?

Skittles also should have thought about the Fail Whale a bit before launching this.  Twitter, although getting better on this front, is notorious for not being able to support the amount of traffic it draws on a regular basis.  Especially with all the buzz surrounding this…is it worth relying on Twitter to keep your homepage up and running?

It’s a great PR stunt, but is it a good social marketing strategy?  We’re not sure…

Social Media is like a shiny new toy for PR people.  It’s all the rage and everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon.  If you’ve read other posts on this blog then you’ll know that we are big fans of utilizing the web and various social media platforms for public relations purposes.  We’re excited these strategies are getting the attention they deserve, and to see where they take the industry.  That being said, PR Channel isn’t quite ready to jump ship on the classic PR strategies.

The gold standard for a PR person is landing your client an on-air TV appearance or interview.

When trying to land a TV interview it’s important to remember the visuals – they need to grab the viewer’s attention.  A lot of PR firms seem to forget to plan for visual content before they approach the producers/execs.  In a multi-media world PR people can’t expect to be able to rely on a well-written press release – audio and visual elements have become standard tools of the trade.

Producers across the board say that when deciding whether to give an on-air interview its a bonus when a firm includes a list of available audio or visual elements in their press kit and mention the visual strengths of each.

Think of it as a grown-up version of show and tell.  As a kid, you were way more likely to pay attention if a classmate brought in something really cool for you to look at while he talked.  PR firms would do well to remember this, because not much has changed – people still like to be presented with something visual.  Watching two talking heads is incredibly boring, and you should coach your clients on how to ’show’ while they spread their message.  Here are a few tips we’ve come across for making sure the interview is a success.

• Have something the interviewer can actually see and touch. This is a big plus, as it ads a realistic element that audiences will appreciate.  If you aren’t sure what to bring, bring everything you’ve got and ask the producers what you should include-they’ll have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t.  Just stay away from signs or brochures, its a little cliche and the audience won’t be able to read them anyway.

• Don’t get too promotional – its fair game to bring your products, but don’t wear a company shirt and constantly mention your web address etc.  If you want current promotions/issues mentioned make sure the host or interviewer brings them up, same goes with your contact information.  Audiences don’t respond well to sales pitches.

• Keep moving.  If appropriate do a demonstration,  have ’stations’ set up, have your visual elements nearby and ready etc.  Try to avoid just sitting there with nothing to do but talk.

• Know your facts.  Its part your job as a PR person to make sure your client knows the correct stats and sources to back up their statements.  The last thing you want is your client to get stumped on a question about one of their visual elements.

Press Release are a tried and true component of any PR campaign, but many PR people are continuing to write (and publish) press releases the “old” way.  The advent of social media, online newspapers and ‘google’ as a verb means that optimizing your presence online is more important than ever.  By writing and publishing press releases the same way as before, more traditional agencies are not taking advantage of the search engine optimization (SEO) potential that could greatly improve the position of their websites and releases in the search engines’ results.

Another advantage of an SEO Press Release is that even small businesses or Do-It-Yourself types can afford to write and submit these.  In fact, if you write the release yourself there are several places to submit it that are 100% free.

The main idea is to write your press release so that it will rank well in the search engines for certain keywords.  By ranking well you’ll get backlinks from other sites and higher rankings for both your press releases and actual website, resulting in more traffic.  Check out this hub from Christine OKelly for detailed info on How to Write an SEO Press Release.

Once you’ve got your press release written it’s time to publish it.  Instead of pitching it directly to reporters or editors, submit it to a few of the many online distribution services available.  These services will automatically distribute your release to thousands of outlets and put it up on their website.  The cost associated with the service varies based on levels of exposure, but there are several options that allow you to publish for free.  Check out our list of distribution services on the PR Dashboard for ideas on where to start.

A new survey, Online-Reputation Management, from Weber Shandwick reports that 67% of top execs feel that their company’s reputation is vulnerable online.

This isn’t news to many PR/Online-Marketing people that work ‘in the trenches’.  The social nature of today’s internet allows for many more potential reputation damaging situations, and the fact that execs seem to be sitting up and taking notice is great.  The report shows that a majority of execs are worried about e-mails that can end up in the wrong hands, in fact 87% of execs admit to having accidentally sent or received some type of electronic message – and about 27% admitted to doing it intentionally.

Aside from rogue emails and traditional media outlets, companies (and their PR people) should be paying attention to their reputation in social media circles.  Especially in rough economic times, when layoffs are at high levels and pensions/compensation often suffer, employees are more likely to be dissatisfied and perhaps be tempted to bad mouth their employers online.  Only about a third of execs admitted to knowing about an employee engaging in this type of activity and their response to the problem is to pay attention to employee satisfaction surveys, attempting to resolve the issue before the employee takes action.

Perhaps the most alarming section of the report was that only 10% of execs consider building relationships with prominent bloggers is an effective strategy for online reputation management.  Depending on the industry this could be a mistake, bloggers and online personalities can wield a great deal of influence over their readers and having a good relationship with them could lead to great PR opportunities – or at least help to avoid potential online reputation crises.

Online reputation management is an increasingly important component of any company’s PR efforts.  While execs obviously realize this, they need to include newer social media strategies, as well as their more traditional strategies, in their efforts to manage the brand’s reputation online.

Because what kind of jerk would want to kill a kitten?

We didn’t make this up, check out Save the Sea Kittens, the online home of PETA’s latest campaign.  The campaign centers around asking the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to stop promoting fishing.  Saying “it’s high time that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) stop allowing our little sea kitten friends to be tortured and killed.”

It’s generated quite a bit of buzz…and isn’t that the goal of any PR campaign?  The jury is still out if this will have any success- mainly due to the slightly ridiculous and ‘make-fun-of”ability factor that has been a feature of more than a few past PETA campaigns.  However it is drawing attention to their cause, does that make it a winner?  What do you think?