PR - Marian Arnold, Account Manager for Whale Marketing, tells us her views on PR.
1) What does PR mean to you?
For me working in B2B, PR is all about raising a company’s profile and making sure the brand is promoted in a positive light. It is about projecting corporate image and ensuring you protect a company at the same time.
2) Is social media hindering or helping PR?
Personally I believe it is helping more than hindering. Nowadays news is out quicker, information and press releases are more than ever time sensitive and being able to react quickly is key.
As with everything, there is a downside, the problem is that as with good news, negative news spreads just as quickly.
PR is also about managing any crisis situations and being a step ahead. Having an open and honest policy showing transparency from the start is the best way to win over your audience as people are much wiser to spin than they used to be.
3) Can you create something news worthy out of nothing?
Good PR is about finding an angle. A good agency will be able to find interesting information and create news worthy content from limited material, even generating entire news campaigns from scratch.
4) What is your best tip?
Write something relevant to the audience and tailor your content not only to the audience but the publication itself. Ask editors what they need to fill their magazines, get forward features lists and plan meticulously. Building relationships with key media at the early stages will stand you in good stead.
5) How can businesses benefit from PR?
It is vital for any company to have a public presence and speak to their target audience through trade and local press. You have to be current and talk about issues relevant to your sector, ensuring you stay at the forefront of people’s minds because if you don’t, your competition will!
6) Good PR/ Bad PR
Everyone knows the bad example of BP. The way they handled the crisis was too little, too late. Twitter was used against the brand when fake accounts were created thus creating negative news for the brand. http://twitter.com/#!/bpglobalpr
A good example of PR was Radio 1’s Chris Moyles and Comedy Dave whose record attempt raised more than £2.4m for Comic Relief.
Taking part in an attempt to break the record for the ‘longest ever radio show’, Chris and Dave remained on the airwaves of Radio 1 for an impressive 50 hours- officially marking their broadcast as The Guinness World Record for longest ever radio show by a team.
PR comes in many guises but generally, you are trying to get people on your side, to know, like and trust you and more importantly, to buy into your product or service.
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