Tag: BrightSky PR

The Covid-19 pandemic is unlike anything we have seen in our lifetimes. As it effectively grounded businesses and economic activities, those working in Lakeland public relations are forced to take stock of the methods they can use to continue building relationships with their clients, the media, and the public. 

Unlike marketing, public relations is earned and not paid. This means that it takes time for PRs to gain the trust of their clients and the media, both of which are critical components of the work they do. Traditionally, PRs attend networking events, industry events, and other such things to connect with the people they need to do their job efficiently. 

They also organize events as these are opportunities to invite industry leaders and members of the press. However, ever since the pandemic, how can this be possible? Since people were told to retreat to their homes if they can and not to attend public gatherings, how can PRs nurture their relationships with their clients and partners?

Virtual Events

PRs need to be creative in how they reach out to their partners. This means organizing webinars, virtual conferences and workshops, and even podcasts to connect with their viewers. Every opportunity is present on the internet. Technology made it possible for people to barely miss out on anything now that they have to avoid large gatherings of people. 

Use virtual events to your advantage. Traditionally, it wasn’t easy to organize these events and invite many people (even stakeholders from around the world). But when the pandemic happened, people searched for a silver lining.

And what we found out is that we can use the situation to our advantage. We can tap resource speakers from half across the world. They don’t have to fly over to talk to your audience. They just have to log in on the Zoom conference room to reach thousands of people tuned in. 

Connections Are Important

And don’t build connections through events broadcasted to thousands of viewers. Reach out to your partners for some face-to-face conversation. Building relationships in the business is a bit like maintaining friendships.

You have to invest time, effort, and even money in these relationships. So, don’t hesitate to reach out to your clients and media partners. Now more than ever, these connections are critical to your profession in Lakeland public relations. 

Make sure to never neglect your relationships in the industry. Because once all of this is over and the world is under a new normal, you will have to forge these connections again. 

What is social listening? It is the process of monitoring various social media platforms to know what your audience is saying about your brand, products, services, competitors, and industry. You want to know what your audience thinks about your company? Social media is the best tool for that. But what does this have to do with Lakeland public relations? Why does it matter? 

The audience’s perception of your business plays an important part as to why you will remain relevant in the industry. Forget about your audience, and you might as well forget about who your brand is. Public relations pertain to the reputation you built about yourself—who you are, what you do, what is important to you, and how people see you. Together with social media, this forms your brand name on the internet. 

It’s important to note, of course, that your reputation on and off the internet sometimes differs. You may be popular on the internet and yet, no one has heard about you off the web. Your brand may be well-known in the community, but online buyers may draw a blank when they hear your name. 

Social Listening Metrics

There are four important metrics to look at when you’re doing social listening. These are brand mentions (how many times your brand is mentioned on social media), relevant hashtags (did someone make a hashtag of your brand?), competitor mentions (if people are talking about your competitors), and industry trends (what people are saying about your industry). 

So, why are these things critical to your business? One, it allows you to engage with your customers directly. If someone praises your brand, you can reply a simple thank you. If someone criticizes it, you’ll want to address that complaint as early as possible.

Second, it opens up an opportunity for you to start a conversation with the rest of your audience. Whatever the complaint or praise was about, you can ask other internet users if they are having the same experience or issue with your products. 

Impact on Lakeland Public Relations

Of course, the way you engage with your customers on social media will have an impact on your reputation. And when it comes to reputation, the goal of Lakeland public relations is to make it infallible. PR campaigns want brands to be able to stand on their own reputation. This is what happens when your brand has built for itself a great reputation. People are going to rally behind it. 

To cancel someone on social media means to stop supporting that person. Celebrities, influencers, and other popular personalities usually get canceled because of something they said or did. Brands can get canceled, too, because of failing to stand up for what their audience perceives to be an important social issue. There have been many times in the past where a company suddenly has a Lakeland public relations nightmare on their hands because of a viral comment about them. 

So, what is the role of PR in the cancel culture that social media users seem intent on cultivating? Do brands even get canceled truly? Or do these “calls” stay on social media only?

Respond

The first thing that a brand should do when it gets canceled on social media is to respond. You need to cut this message from spreading to the rest of your target audience. The more you try to ignore the complaints, the more the people are going to get vicious on attacking your brand. So, respond with a nice message publicly and via DM, too. 

However, make sure that you word your response properly. Remember that people can screencap your messages and share them with their followers. The last thing you want to do is to fan the flames, so respond as calmly and respectfully as possible. 

Formulate a Plan

Once you mitigated the problem by offering to give the customer his money back or replace the product, meet with your Lakeland public relations team. By now, they should have a plan ready for how they are going to deal with the problem. They should build a plan on how they are going to stop one viral tweet from ruining the reputation of the company. That is the main goal of the plan. 

Check With Stakeholders

Who was most affected by the complaints? The customers, of course. But first, reach out to your investors and explain the situation. You may also want to send an email to your loyal customers to assure them that your business remains to be in control.

The last thing you want to happen is to lose current customers because of complaints from previous ones. Listen to your stakeholders because they have as much interest in your company as you. 

Getting canceled on social media is not the end of the world. Certainly, it’s a lot harder for your Lakeland public relations team to save your reputation. But as is with many things in business, this is part of what makes it challenging. So, take this as a challenge and attack it with the single-mindedness great entrepreneurs are known for. 

The work of Lakeland public relations is hard enough without misconceptions making it more difficult to attract clients. Many of these misconceptions are stopping executives from hiring PR agencies.

For them, it’s a waste of time considering they are already paying for advertising agencies. But these are two very different things because, for one, public relations is all about earning the reputation you want your company to be known for. 

A solid PR campaign has the power to bring your company to success. It is as far as possible to marketing and advertising wherein a campaign is specifically made only for one product or service. With PR, the outcome can last your business for years. It will be the foundation of how your customers see your brand. 

Too Expensive

Don’t assume immediately that public relations is expensive. There are various options available to you. Many agencies offer basic packages wherein you can still get the benefits of the full PR service. You should also consider the scope of what the agency can do for your brand. Is it too much to pay for a PR agency that can bring your business to new heights?

DIY PR

There are many things in a business that you can do yourself, but public relations is not one of them. The relationship of a PR expert with journalists and others in the media industry is born from years of experience and camaraderie. You cannot buy that.

You cannot have the same resources as other PR agencies do. And besides, many of these PR experts have been part of the industry for so long. How can you convince editors and journalists to take you seriously if you’re not going through the people they trust?

Media Relations and Advertising

Media relations is part of public relations. But PR isn’t just about the media. It is based on a variety of things that only include your company’s relationship with the media. It depends on your goals and objectives.

If you need to generate traffic to your website, PR isn’t for you. It’s better if you build a website and use the content. If you need to establish yourself as an expert in the industry, you need to organize webinars and conferences. 

And again, Lakeland public relations is not the same as advertising. You need to pay for advertising. You don’t pay for PR. You earn the credits of getting written about by the media because of the strategies you used to get noticed. It’s not about paying for a space in the newspaper or a mention in a radio program. 

Something that surprises a lot of people is when they find out how much writing is actually involved in a Lakeland public relations strategy. Believe it or not, you aren’t’ going to be spending all of your time on a podium, talking to the public about certain events that are going on in your company at the moment. 

In reality, you’re going to be spending a lot of time writing up content for your company’s public relations stratgey, which usually takes the form of blogs, press releases, media pitches, etc., which means that you have to learn how to refine your writing. 

It can be very easy to mess up the writing for your Lakeland public relations strategy, so you have to make sure that you avoid any mistakes that can end up costing your public relations strategy. Learn about four writing sins that you should definitely avoid for your PR strategy.

Not understanding your audience

One of the biggest mistakes that some people make when they are writing content for audiences is, ironically enough, failing to take their audience into consideration in their writing. Plenty of professionals simply jump into the writing of the content without thinking about how their audience is going to receive the content that they’re writing, which can end up sending the wrong tone and message. 

It’s important that you always think about your target audience and their expectations when it comes to creating content for them. Develop your tone to fit with their expectations of you and the company you represent. 

Being inconsistent with your style

Even if you’re writing for blog content or social media, you have to always stick to a single kind of style in your writing. Whether you’re going with the Chicago Manual of Style, APA, or an in-house style, you have to make sure to maintain the style consistent throughout the entirety of your content. Otherwise, you risk confusing your readers, which gives off a bad impression of your company. 

Failing to proof your content

No matter how good you are at writing, you have to make sure that you take the time to proof your content before you submit it for publishing. The last thing that you want is for your content to be published to the public with simple typos. It does not leave a good impression on your audience. 

Lack of authenticity in your content

It can be very easy for companies to simply adopt a professional tone and use that in all of their content. However, this lack of authenticity can be bad for your company’s image, as this will fail to reach your target audience. 

Like it or not, one of the most important parts of any successful Lakeland public relations strategy is knowing how to pitch the right story. The media outlets that run PR stories rely on story pitches to determine if the story that you are pitching is the right fit for the media outlet. 

Because of this, there is a lot of thought and work that goes into a PR pitch, and you have to make sure to get this done properly. But how are you supposed to pitch your stories properly? Read on to learn more about how to pitch a story properly for the benefit of your Lakeland public relations strategy.

Pitching a story is not advertising

One of the most important things that you should always remember when pitching a story for public relations is that pitching a story is not like putting out an ad. 

In a world where ads seem to be everywhere you look, even in your appliances, you have to be very mindful about the context of where you’re going to be pitching your story. It can be very easy to send out as many story pitches as possible, but you have to make sure that your story is aligned with whatever context it needs. 

Be mindful of the media outlet and the location you’re pitching

Speaking of context, you have to make sure that you carefully consider both the media outlet that you’re pitching to and the location of the outlet. Different locations require different contexts, so you need to make sure that your pitch is tailored to the area and the media outlet that you are pitching to. 

It can be very tempting to click “send to all” and wait for someone to decide to use your story, but always be mindful of the media outlet and location of your pitch. If you don’t even take the time to think about the outlet that you’re pitching to, then it is a surefire sign that your pitch will very likely get thrown out. 

Again, your Lakeland public relations story pitch isn’t something that you are supposed to send in like an ad, this is supposed to be a story that media outlets might be interested in running in their channels, which is why you need to take the time to learn about the kind of stories they usually run to determine if yours would be a right fit for their audience. 

There are a lot of misconceptions about the world of Lakeland public relations. One of the biggest misconceptions that you may run into is how little work the industry calls for when you see it on the media. 

Popular TV shows and movies easily portray a well-dressed man or woman standing in front of a podium, fielding questions from reporters while a company crisis hangs in the background. However, there is a lot of work involved in the world of public relations. 

In fact, one of the most important foundations of a good Lakeland public relations is a good content strategy. After all, your content is what builds up the core of your public relations stratgey. To help you out with this, here is a guide to content creation for an effective PR strategy. 

Plan out your content

One of the very first things that you should do to make sure that you have a good content strategy is to always plan out your content. This is important because this will help you determine what topics you’re supposed to be writing about for the benefit of your public relations strategy. 

Planning it out is important because this gives you enough time to assess the kind of content that you should be making for your PR needs. Make sure that you take the time to fully evaluate the state of the industry to determine what kind of content you should be making. 

Do your research

Of course, you should never be forgetting to do your research into the content topics that you’ve chosen. This will help make sure that the content that you do end up putting out is well-researched and factual as well as valuable enough to resonate with your target audiences. 

Write your content

Now that you have properly planned out your content, you have to make sure that you put enough care and effort into the actual writing process. This means that you have to take the time to thoroughly write the content well as well as take the time to proofread it to make sure that it is grammatically and factually sound. 

Maximize your published content

Now that you have completed your content for your Lakeland public relations stratgey, you might assume that the next stage is to simply publish it and forget about it. However, you should be making the most out of any kind of content that you come up with for your public relations stratgey. Don’t be afraid to reuse your content for other parts of your marketing, like your social media and website. 

The internet and the rise of online technology have afforded many industries, including the Lakeland public relations industry with plenty of benefits. However, it is not without its own share of downfalls. Along with its amazing ability to communicate with anyone online is the ability to abuse it as well, which is something that many people are starting to do. 

Because of how quickly negative news can spread, the occurrence of public relations crises has risen as well. As a Lakeland public relations professional, it’s very important that you learn how to properly address these crises with a crisis management plan. 

If you’ve never had any experience dealing with this, here is a basic crisis management plan that you can adapt for your own public relations strategy. 

Why do you need a crisis management plan?

You may be questioning the need for a crisis management plan on top of all of the other PR related things that you have to handle. Keep in mind that in a world where the internet is the primary source of information for a lot of people, and any kind of viral event will reach a lot of people in a very short span of time. 

This means that if you’re going to be facing a PR crisis without a crisis plan, then this has the potential to reach a lot of people and the situation can get out of hand very quickly. A well-thought-out crisis management plan helps make sure that you can address any PR crises as soon as they happen, which can alleviate the damage of the crisis. 

Always plan out everything and practice

Like any other business strategy, the key to an effective crisis management plan is to create a plan and practice out when possible. Different types of PR crises warrant different responses, which means you have to make sure that the plan you end up going with will work for the situation. Plan out everything thoroughly and practice to see how effective it is in the event of a crisis. 

Identify the different crisis levels

In the world of Lakeland public relations, you will have plenty of opportunities to see and experience different types of crises. However, if you give the same kind of effort to each type of PR crisis, you will find yourself very much burned out. 

To prevent this, identify the different types of crises and assign them to different levels. This will allow you to determine the severity of the situation, which allows you to respond accordingly and help minimize the amount of potential damage.