We're very excited to announce that Remedy Public Relations' managing director, Bill Byrne, has been asked to speak on a panel about best practices for brands and PR people to engage with emerging media as part of a live group panel discussion through the NYC Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.
The Pod Bless America event will be co-produced by the media heavyweights at Muck Rack, along with the NY PRSA, and focus on the best way to engage with podcast outlets and other emerging media. You can register for the event here , and more information can be found here.
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PR (actually all marketing) takes time. Even in today's ultra-quick Instagram world, it usually takes time to see traction from your public relations campaign.
One of the biggest issues we’re seeing with brands that need marketing help, outside of properly budgeting for outside PR and marketing support, is poor budgeting when it comes to time.
Many times, the Remedy team has turned down potential work because the client came to us at the last minute with a project we feel they didn’t allow enough time to be successful.
We’re not the only ones who feel this way.
Take Axia PR in Jacksonville, who has worked with some very impressive brands, or Michael Shane, of www.freide.co, a "hybrid creative agency fusing media consulting and creative strategy," based in Bill's old stomping grounds of NYC. Now we don’t know Michael at all, but we’re a member of the same networking group on Facebook and he recently made this post lamenting a recent client that is just now seeing momentum right away.
This is only a small part of the discussion that occurred on Michael's post. And this happens all the time.
We’ve worked with brands under tight time constraints and had them on national media programs and major market daily newspapers overnight… but many times, it can take weeks, often months, to start seeing momentum, let alone an impact on measurable awareness or sales (assuming you're able to track this, to begin with).
So what’s the magic number for how long you should experiment with a good PR firm?
Tough to say, especially since the first month of the program should be spent outlining the full plan and you won’t be seeing media results during that period of time. Many will tell you six months is a good timeframe to consider, but that could scale up or down depending on if you’re working on a very timely event or working with a brand that has news coming out a few seasons after this one.
Please keep in mind that we're not saying that PR firms (consultants, marketing firms, ad agencies, etc.) don't fail to deliver. They do. It could be because they weren't clear about potential results, promised too much and in some cases, failed to manage expectations.
However, many times when a PR program fails, it's because there wasn't enough time allotted to see results or it's being compared to the 'guaranteed impressions' that come with buying an ad (which still don't guarantee sales though).
Enjoy this piece? Please consider sharing it on LinkedIn!
Again, special thanks to Michael Shane of http://www.freide.co/ for giving us permission to share his Facebook post.
The Five Easy Steps Our Clients Took To Win 10 Major Trade Show Awards
The next Outdoor Retailer trade show(OR Show for short) is right around the corner. If you’ve never been, the OR Show is it’s the near trillion dollar outdoor industry’s version of CES or the New York Auto Show. It’s a business-to-business show where retailers preview potential products to carry in the future and features the biggest names in industries surrounding backpacking, adventure travel, trail running, climbing, mountain biking, outdoor wellness and more. The OR Show is typically a who’s who for the industry. Brands such as Yeti coolers, K2, The North Face, Oakley, GoPro, Sorel, Patagonia are usually there.
In January, for the first time ever, the OR show combined with the snowboard and ski-focused Snow Sports Industry’s Snow Show. It was the equivalent of CES combining with Apples WWDC, or MacWorld if that was still in existence.
It was a crowded event for sure and competition for media was high.
The steps we took to win these awards on behalf of our clients will work for any brand looking for PR exposure, at the OR Show, CES, or throughout the year. You just need to follow them.
Those that know what our clients were offering may think it was fairly easy. Some of the products being highlighted were definitely innovative, but perspective here is important.
The playing field isn’t level in the PR world, especially when it comes to outdoor product launches. At this show we were competing against brands that fly journalists to overseas to go skiing and check out a new fabric. Or to Panama to experience the fit of a new sandal. That doesn’t necessarily guarantee media coverage, but it can definitely help give journalists a useful, in-depth understanding of what a brand has to offer.
While we’d have loved to fly some of our journalist friends to meet us to go snowboarding, a large-scale trip like that was not in the budget. In addition, while our clients did have truly-media worthy innovations to showcase, we were dealing with other issues and legacy baggage to overcome.
Our team has a pretty deep history in handling PR for outdoor brands, going back to one of us working with Burton Snowboards back in the late 90’s. And most of us are avid skiers and snowboarders. Because of this, for one client, our professional and personal authenticity in the industry had us wondering out loud if their product would actually work as promised. For another client, we knew that a rival of theirs had introduced a similar technology, which also won awards. And in that instance, we had heard rumors of another brand trying to do the same.
But collectively, we still crushed it. How? Here are five easy steps.
1. We planned ahead.
Sounds simple, but unfortunately, we’re often called to help promote something under such a tight deadline that we don’t think it will be of interest to the media. Of course, we can meet the client’s deadline in terms of materials creation and outreach, but PR this isn’t advertising and journalists need time (sometimes days, sometimes weeks) to consider story ideas.
The ability to plan ahead do this is a huge factor in helping your PR program achieve success and something we constantly remind our clients about. And thankfully, both of our brands at the show gave us plenty of time to get the wheels moving… one did so two years out. The ability to plan well in advance gives your PR team the chance to anticipate issues and roadblocks that could arise, and map out course corrections to help when they do occur.
2. Relationships matter in public relations, but not always how you think.
How often a PR person doesn’t call a reporter can matter just as much as how often they do.
We try to impress upon all our clients that journalists smothered by bad PR pitches every day. Hundreds of them, and there are websites, blogs, and social media accounts dedicated to them. Just ask a journalist if you want to see some. With that in mind, we never pitch what isn’t appropriate and are realistic in how we position something to the media.
We’ll never say saying something really is groundbreaking when it’s not. That way our journalist friends know that when we do make major media-worthy claims they know we’re not coming to them with a new shade of grey.
3. Timing is everything (point #1 above).
Because our clients gave us time to plan, we were able to give journalists the time they needed as well. Despite a popular belief some brand managers have, journalists aren’t sitting around waiting for PR people to contact them with story ideas.
Through creative mailings and other tactics, we gave journalists an early, albeit veiled, heads-up on what we’d be showing at the Outdoor Retailer + Snow Show. When they received all the details, this allowed them to ask questions, and later, follow-up questions, with plenty of time to meet their deadlines before the big event.
4. We made it easy for the journalists to experience the product.
While flashy events and trips can really give a journalist a feel for the product being launched, those typically take a massive amount of time and budget to execute. Also, we needed to show the products in a tight window before the show, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. Journalists are just like the rest of us, with vacations booked, families, and personal obligations to attend to. Even if we had the budget to produce an event that’d result in an award-winning case study, there were slim chances they’d even have the time to attend.
To make it easy for journalists to experience the products being launched, we went to them. For both clients, we executed separate three-city media tours, each taking less than 48 hours total, where we met at their offices, coffee shops, restaurants, and breweries, based on the preference of each media contact. Wherever they wanted to meet, we went to. The meetings were fairly quick, about an hour each, and our days typically ran from 7 am until two hours before evening flights out of town.
We followed up the meetings with product for the reporters to review on their own, along with technical details, answers to hard questions, images and more. We were able to plan for almost every question, which takes us to our final step.
5. We anticipated the hard questions and answered them in advance. This one was crucial.
Remember, media relations (aka PR) is not advertising. You can’t just put out your message and hope a reporter will take your word for granted.
PR doesn’t happen in a bubble. We knew what similar technologies had been announced in year’s past for our clients’ categories and we were candid in mentioning that during our meetings.
But we followed up with examples of why what we had to share was not just different, but better. And we were honest in terms of when these products weren’t appropriate, spelling out why you wouldn’t want to use them in certain situations. Journalists appreciated that. Sometimes you need a Jeep, sometimes you need a helicopter. Both can get you places, but neither is appropriate for all situations.
At the end, even with all this advanced work, there was no guarantee we’d be successful.
Media interest in what was being shown was very high. We had an uncomfortable amount of meetings booked during the show to ensure that journalists we couldn’t meet with during our three-city tours would get intimate previews and the attention they deserved.
And almost as soon as they show started, we knew that our hard work did pay off.
Journalists started coming by our clients’ booths early in the morning to drop off award after award. It was almost comical. We had multiple team members on site for the show, but it almost seemed that the journalists were waiting for someone’s back being turned so they could discretely drop off another award.
Collectively, this was a career high for many of us and an agency, a major coup. We exceeded client expectations, as well as those of the internal team here. Will we win 10+ awards at the next Outdoor Retailer trade show for these two clients? Probably not.
And we probably won’t try either.
But that’s the secret to great PR. While we won’t always have something groundbreaking to show, we’re actively planning ways to continue the post-launch momentum, keeping the awareness of our clients high with both the media and the end consumer.
When you have limited budget, or a pitch that isn’t on the same level as the next iPhone, that’s when a PR team’s skill can really shine through.
Remedy Public Relations is the leading lifestyle firm in San Diego for companies in the surf, snowboard, ski, motocross, finance, and consumer electronics industry. We know PR. We know social media. If your PR team is falling short, you may need a remedy!
We're regular contributors to The Craft Beer Attorney's B5 Newsletter and our most recent column is probably our best yet.
The article centers around the planning required when it comes to PR and media relations campaigns.
Can we see success with minimal planning? Definitely.
But honestly, you'll probably get the best bang from your buck, from us or any other sort of marketing agency, by planning well in advance.
If you don't subscribe already, we've pasted it below for you to check out!
Like what you've read? Please click the LinkedIn share button below!
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Numbers don’t lie, but they often don’t tell the whole story.
We live in (and have been for a while) a metric driven world when it comes to marketing. Often the metric involves measuring quantity over quality (yes, you can measure quality). We've seen more tangible results from PR placements in regional newspapers than we have in national ones, but that’s a topic for another time.
Yahoo! once claimed that a streamed Bills versus Jaguars game resulted in more than 33 million streams.
Impressive!!! Right? Maybe?!?
In reality, those 33 million streams were 15.2 million unique viewers and 460 million minutes of football. The live stream actually averaged less than 2.4 million viewers per minute, compared to an average of 10 to 20 million viewers through traditional broadcast and cable for most NFL games.
Should we mention that the stream was set on auto-play for Yahoo!, Tumblr and their other properties… and that views were counted as long as the window was open for three seconds.
That means that if you went to Yahoo! to look up the number for your local dog groomer or search news on mortgage rates, you may have been counted as ‘watching’ the game.
Who cares about why they watched it, as long as we have the impression numbers to show for it 😉
This is one of the chief reasons we don’t compare PR/editorial value to ad value and I’d be hard pressed to tell you at home broadcast/cable views are the same as streaming views on a phone, tablet, etc., whether in the home or not. They're all different. They all have value, but those values are different as well.
Yes, impression numbers are incredibly important in our world, but impression numbers alone shouldn’t be how you measure the success of your campaign.
For those that feel we're calling out digital ad agencies unfairly here, I’ll put the focus on the PR/media relations industry. A tried and true (and lazy) method of measuring a PR program’s success is impression numbers. How many people saw X on TV last night, or subscribe to that magazine, etc. If a client asks, for impression numbers, we happily pass them over, but with the caveat that we don’t believe for one second that X number of people actually saw the article with the client in it.
While we won’t be so bold as to call this a fact, it’s the truth. Impression numbers don’t equate to recognition, brand message retention or in the case of Yahoo!’s auto-play of the football game, intention.
In reality, impression numbers are estimates of how many may have been in the vicinity of your message. And nothing more.
Numbers alone don’t tell the story of a campaign’s success and unfortunately, as the media landscape continues to fragment and more brands leverage the tools at their disposal, almost all marketers are having to do more to achieve the same or even less results as they saw the year before.
Any marketing / PR / advertising person that doesn’t tell you this upfront isn’t necessarily lying, but they’re not telling you everything they know either.
San Diego’s Top PR firm for national results, http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/12/prweb13112332.htm, San Diego Public Relations, San Diego Social Media, 4629 Cass St, Suite 120, San Diego, CA 92109 “San Diego PR” “San Diego Public Relations” https://plus.google.com/+RemedyprSandiego A leading public relations (PR) agency in San Diego,, event marketing, action sports and finance, San Diego Public Relations Agency, Action Sports PR, San Diego Social Media Agency, San Diego Event Marketing Agency, Social Media Marketing Agency, Craft Beer PR, PR, Public Relations, Social Media San Diego, Social Media Marketing Agency San Diego, Public Relations San Diego, PR Firm San Diego, a leading public relations agency in San Diego, specializing in social media marketing, event marketing, and digital publicity. PR for Tech, experts, craft beer, action sports, finance, consumer tech, bluetooth, beer, consumer goods, b2b, green, eco-friendly, craft beer PR, action sports PR, finance PR, consumer tech PR, bluetooth PR, beer PR , consumer PR, b2b PR, green PR, eco-friendly PR, real estate PR, Experts, craft beer marketing, action sports marketing, finance marketing, consumer tech marketing, bluetooth marketing, beer marketing , consumer marketing, b2b marketing, green marketing, eco-friendly marketing, real estate marketing, action sports PR, action sports marketing, best PR san diego, https://www.malakye.com/Features/IndustryNews/8919/BZ-Remedy-Communications-Offers-Free-PR-Checkup-For-Acti.aspx, san diego best PR, san diego social media, san diego lifestyle PR, san diego bar PR, san diego restaurant PR, san diego restaurant social media, restaurant social media. https://instagram.com/remedy_pr/ San Diego Public Relations. San Diego’s Best Public Relations Consultants – Honesty results in public relations. bestprsandiego.com jpublicrelations, besocialpr, leaders in PR for action sports beer social media san diego, healthcare marketing, crossfit marketing, sports marketing, crossfit PR, crossfit social media, PR experts, social media experts san diego, san diego PR experts. San Diego Public relations and social media. Experts in public relations based in San Diego. Bar public relations. Beer public relations.
We contribute a public relations and social media column fairly regularly to the Craft Beer Attorney's Beyond Brewing - Business Basics Bulletin (aka B5) newsletter. The San Diego IABC is hosting a social media event at a local brewery, which reminded us we haven't shared this column with our blog readers before.
While the craft beer industry is thriving right now, many experts are saying it will soon become fairly saturated in a way similar to the dot-com/bubble burst we've seen in the technology industry. Regardless of if this is true or not, as more breweries open up in crowded craft beer markets (such as our home base of San Diego), marketing these beers is going to be a major key to their success. However, unlike the heavy lifters and heavy marketers at CrossFit, a lot of small to mid-sized breweries just don't seem to get it.
That said, we wanted to share our social media section from the B5 newsletter that includes some easy to follow tips to consider (and if you don't want our commentary, you can download it here).
Don't worry about Jimmy Fallon making fun of your brand. Appropriate hashtags are... well, appropriate! Feel free to throw a fun one in or one that yo want others to pass around, but for the most part, you should hashtag with words and phrases your potential consumers or current consumers are searching for.
This isn't a plug for Shirts On Tap, but it's incredibly important. However, rumor has it Saint Archer is killing it in apparel sales. Why aren't you?
See point 1 above.
You don't need to think that hard about this one. Would you click on a Twitter link that said "I just uploaded 34 photos to Facebook?"
We love to say "take the 'me' out of social media" because it's how all brands should operate online. A friendly bartender is engaging. They don't simply stare at you and wait for you to make the first move.
Again, you can download the full list here. We have a pretty extensive background working with brands that target particular lifestyles (including beer brands). Want to chat? Drop us a line!
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For potential clients, we’re always asked about our ‘lists’ and who is on these ‘lists’. While it’s great to have relationships with journalists in a key segment, no one has them with everyone. It’s probably impossible. Similarly, editors and reporters change beats and employment regularly. You simply can’t rely on these lists or the ones you purchase through a third party (which can be helpful though).
What you can rely upon in the PR world is creative and targeted outreach. In the past we’ve scored coverage of robotic innovations on CNN and a professional skateboarder in Field & Stream.
Both times, the contacts we approached were new to us. But that didn’t stop us from approaching them with story ideas that were appropriate for their audiences.
We’re not saying that we don’t have great lists of contacts, because we do. But just because CNN, Field & Stream, Maxim, Women’s Health, CoolHunting or HypeBeast featured one client, that does not guarantee they’ll feature another. Don’t be misguided. A better way to judge a firm’s media-savvy would be to ask about creative pitches or projects they worked on that had less than tier-A media appeal.
For more of our thoughts on the infamous PR ‘lists’ and ways to conduct media outreach, check out these other blog posts (blatant plug) that we have on the Remedy site: http://remedycomm.com/2012/04/why-your-press-releases-dont-get-you-coverage/ http://remedycomm.com/2011/04/pr-lessons-from-a-journalist/
Media Bistro's PR Newser has an article on Coke's announcement that social (more…)
