Tag: entry-level PR position

My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Day 21

Margot HorganBlog, Entry-Level PR Job, Social Media + Influencer Engagement, , , , , , ,

It is as simple as this: “Storify helps its users tell stories by curating social media.” I just stumbled across the social media tool Storify, and at first, the concept didn’t seem too helpful. But, now the different possibilities for Storify seem pretty interesting. Here is an abridged version of how Storify explains its (free!) service:

Use Storify to introduce social stories.

  • Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative, creating a new media format that is interactive, dynamic and social.

Or, use Storify to create your own story.

  • Search for social media elements — In the Storify editor, you can search social media networks to find media elements about the topic you want to Storify. Look through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram and more to gather material for your stories.
  • Curate the elements — Drag and drop status updates, photos or videos to bring together the social media elements that will best illustrate your story. Your story is always editable, so you can pull in the latest from the social web.
  • Write your own narrative — A Storify story is more than just a collection of elements from social media. You can write a headline, introduction and insert text anywhere inside your story. You can add headers, hyperlinks and styled text. Build a narrative and give context to your readers.

One of the best opportunities for Storify is the ease for a story to go viral. More than just about pulling information from different social networks, Storify helps you create a story in one central place while including, quoting and linking all of the people involved, making each individual person part of something larger. Further more, these stories are easy to share and can be embedded anywhere on the web.

Check out this example of a Storify CBC News created about a Coca-Cola Hug Me vending machine. Getting a better feel for Storify now? Once you start to see the different ways to use Storify, it’s impossible to not start brainstorming different ways to use this tool for clients. CBC News did a great Storify on the Hug Me vending machine, but Storify can be just as useful for brands. Introducing a new product? Making a big announcement? Want to involve your fans and followers in a trending topic? This is the tool you need.

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My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Day 20

Margot HorganBlog, Entry-Level PR Job, Marketing, Social Media + Influencer Engagement, , , , , , 1 Comment on My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Day 20

I love Pinterest, and this infographic from a recent PR Daily article was too good not to share. Did you know that by the end of the year, Pinterest will contribute roughly 40 percent of all social media driven purchases (Facebook will control about 60 percent, and Twitter will become virtually insignificant.), or that buyers from Pinterest are 10 percent more likely to purchase and will spend, on average, 10 percent more than users from other social media sites?

With Pinterest’s popularity still on the rise, and its future still unknown (especially in regards to advertising), we are keeping a close eye on the pinning site here at Clairemont, because numbers like these are hard to ignore! This infographic from PR Daily gives a great breakdown of Pinterest’s current, and possibly future, clout, and reinforces that Pinterest really is a site to continue to watch.

 

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My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Day 19

Margot HorganBlog, Entry-Level PR Job, Public Relations, Raleigh PR Agency, , , , , , 1 Comment on My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Day 19

A lot of my work at Clairemont thus far has been centered around doing social media and blogging for clients, but every once in a while, I’m doing what we now consider “traditional PR,” as well. My most recent task has involved pitching the Charlotte and nearby Lancaster, S.C. media regarding our client Walnut Creek’sannouncement that three new builders are set to begin construction in the housing development.
Pitching media is still a new experience for me, and it is probably one of the most nerve-wracking assignments that I have worked on yet at a PR agency. Reporters are busy and can receive hundreds of pitches a day. Sometimes they are just not interested in hearing another pitch, and sometimes your story just really isn’t what that reporter needs.

My best advice? Don’t take the rejection personally. Pitching the media can be hard, but it gets much better with practice (so I’ve heard). Instead, make the pitch into a game. What can you do, what angle can you approach it from to make your story sound the most interesting to the reporter? What can you do to make the reporter’s job easy? If you can give the journalist as much information as they need as soon as they need it, you are making his or her job easier, which means you are in a much better position to get placement for your story.

This is just my initial reaction on how to make pitching the most interesting and effective, but for those of you who have had way more experience than me, do you have any tips and tricks to share?

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My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Day 18

Margot HorganBlog, Entry-Level PR Job, Raleigh PR Agency, , , , , ,

If you’re working on a team, it can be difficult staying up-to-date on what everyone is doing, what you need to be doing, when something is due, when something is completed, etc. Clairemont’s solution to this problem? A free online task manager program called Asana.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiLCmstyDdM&feature=player_embedded

Asana is a digital workspace where you and your team can share task lists, plan, organize, prioritize and stay in sync with all of your different projects. On Asana, you can create new workspaces for each client or project, create different tasks and to-dos for each workplace, assign tasks to different team members, set due dates and check items off the list upon their completion. Each team member can see exactly what she and other team members need to do. Projects can be prioritized so you always know which is the most pressing and important at that time.

With people in and out of the Clairemont office and often on different schedules, Asana has helped us communicate what needs to be done and when. Instead of clogging up email inboxes with messages reminding someone to edit a blog or send a document, the task can be added to Asana, assigned to a specific team member and flagged with a due date. This may sound like an elementary idea, but in a public relations office where you are working on a number of different assignments and clients at any given time, the ability to streamline everyone’s schedules is necessary for productivity and efficiency

Intrigued? You should be! Asana is easy, effective and, most importantly, free! It’s a great tool for a public relations agency to use, and we highly suggest it. Take a look at this “Intro to Asana” video to learn more!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liO5VbbIqIs&list=UU2BoogM0AqwOJyoSp1S4ClQ&index=7&feature=plcp

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My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Day 17

Margot HorganBlog, Entry-Level PR Job, Social Media + Influencer Engagement, , , , , ,

This month, the North Carolina Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America (NCPRSA) hosted a monthly professional development luncheon featuring a presentation by guest speaker Natalia Flores on the topic, Social Media Engagement Begins Offline: A Corporate Case Study in Building Successful Relationships in Latin America.

Flores, who has spent nearly a decade as a public relations marketing professional developing communications strategies for the U.S., U.S. Hispanic and Latin American markets, currently serves as a director at a public relations agency in Charlotte. Throughout her career, her clients have included VMware, Samsung, MasterCard Worldwide, SAP, Office Depot, Latin GRAMMYs and Batanga.

For the luncheon, Flores presented a case study about her client, Samsung, and the launch of its new product, the Samsung Galaxy Note, last year in Peru. Focusing on the fact that many businesses forget about offline interaction when using social media, Flores shared this video of the product launch and how her client used both offline and online interaction to promote the product:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOuVJhJO6Q0

Promoted online but acted out offline, the Samsung launch proved that the offline and online engagement are very much interrelated and should be used together. Instead of writing on the Samsung Facebook Page, “Buy the new Samsung Galaxy Note,” “Click here to see a video of the Samsung Galaxy Note,” or “Have you seen our new product the Samsung Galaxy Note?” Samsung promoted its product by encouraging fans to attend an offline event at a popular mall, where fans could use, interact and play with the new product.

Wanting to highlight the product’s easy-to-use stylist, Samsung hired local artists to create caricature drawings of participating fans and mall-goers. Fans could turn these pictures into buttons, t-shirts, etc., and in addition, photos were uploaded to the Facebook page, where fans could then tag, share and like their pictures.

In conjunction with this event, product sales increased, the fan base on Facebook grew and across social media platforms, fans tweeted, shared, posted and liked their drawings. Media coverage was high, and similar campaigns took place across Latin America and the Caribbean. Overall, it was a success!

So, what message did Flores want us to get out of this case study? Building relationships online starts offline. Just because you are on Facebook or Twitter doesn’t mean that you cannot engage with fans and followers offline. Use social media to become a resource for your fans, reward them for their loyalty and be more than just a computer or machine constantly pushing sales and promotions. Add human appeal to your postings and don’t be afraid to engage with fans offline. Having that face-to-face interaction offline is just as valuable to your social media strategy as writing Facebook posts or tweets.

Interested in learning more about this case study? Contact Natalia Flores at natalia@fusioncomminc.com or @curlygnat for a copy of her presentation, or come to the 2012 NCPRSA PR & Marketing Seminar November 15, where Flores will be guest-speaking.

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