Public Relations Tips

7 Best Pubic Relations Companies to Work For

Let’s face it, the public relations industry is as about as competitive as it comes isn’t it? And what is the one asset that a PR firm has to have in order to get its fair share of the market? Talent, human talent. You can have the slickest technology in town but with out the slickest people you’re doomed to mediocrity. So it’s not surprising that PR firms focus on finding, and keeping, the best talent in town. From an employee perspective, here’s a list of the best public relations companies to work for according to the PR industry publication The Holmes Report.

Best of the Best Carter Ryley Thomas

For starters, this agency has a corporate culture that focuses on respect for the individual, a balanced life between work and home, shared responsibility and a “We work” mentality making workplace relationships that are the envy of the industry. And then there’s the fact that this company is one of the very few that is entirely employee owned. That’s right, everyone from the founder to the clerks are owners and no one owner can have more than a 17% share of the stock. When you’re working for your own business you can do remarkable things.

Number 2 The Horn Group

This agency takes a more traditional approach to keeping employees with what Working Woman cited as “eye-bulging benefits” including paid health, dental, life and long term disability insurance. They also culture an environment of respect, innovation and professional development.

Number 3 Citigate Cunningham

Like vacations? This PR firm offers 3 weeks paid vacation in the first year and a six week paid sabbatical after four. Schedules are designed around the employee and include telecommuting. They can also offer a four day 10 hour work week. The facility has a gym, emergency child care space and a kitchen full of free snacks and sodas.

Number 4 Fitzgerald Communications

Training and professional development are what distinguish this PR firm from the rest. Entry level employees are put through a “boot camp” where they are introduced to every facet of the company and have a chance to mingle with C-Level personnel. For their seasoned employees they have a mentoring program that won accolades from Inc Magazine

Number 5 Cone

Cone, noted as one of the big-ideas PR firms places heavy emphasis on training as well investing 120 hours of training per employee per year. Tuition reimbursement programs are available as well. Couple that solid foundation in industry knowledge with liberal benefits, bonuses and 3 ½ weeks of vacation in the first year and you can see why their retention rate is so high.

Number 6 Fleishman-Hillard

One of the biggies in the industry with sales over $100 million, Fleishman-Hillard is rated highly by employees for its professional development, adherence to ethics and its 360 degree feedback program. Being as large as it is makes it more difficult to be as flexible as the smaller niche agencies but F-H tries.

Number 7 PepperCom

Pretty straight forward here with big money and big benefits. Employees do rank the company highly for professional development particularly their unique PepperCom State University. An unusual perk is the weekly visits by a nurse to take blood pressure readings and administer flu shots.

So if you are considering a move into this field, or you are ready to abandon ship at a different agency you might want to consider investigating these best public relations companies.

Business management expert Mark Polman understands the value that these best public relations companies can add to their clients and he also knows it’s all about people. If you’re interested in learning more about these agencies and others Mark encourages you to visit Relationships At Work right now.

No Comments »

Music Promotion Tips How To Promote Your Music

If you are still starting out as a musician, a singer or an artist in general, and you want to find ways to enter into the music industry but you don’t have much resources to hire a PR firm to do all the music promotion for you, you can actually learn a few music promotion tips to help you introduce your music and reach out to your fans. With the wide reach of the internet today, music promotion has become a little easier than before.

Yes, the shortest way to promote your music is to hire a music promotion agency or company but if you are just starting up, here are a few things that you can do to market your own music at the least cost.

- Invest time and effort. Accept the reality that promoting your music especially if you are a new face and a new sound, is not just simply putting up a website and expecting fans to flock in. If you are not yet in the stage where fans can find you wherever you hide, then you have to spend time and effort to find your fans. Promote on site that you think your fans frequent. Find websites that are relevant to your kind of music. For sure, people who love your music are there in websites that talk about music similar to yours.

- Develop your marketing plan. Whether you are promoting online or offline, it is important for you to have a written marketing plan to help guide you on how you can attain your goals and what you need to do next. Without a plan, you can easily get distracted with your focus and you may not even have a good direction when it comes to promoting your music.

- Take advantage of social networking sites. Yes, you can use social networking sites to find and grow your fan base. You can start with friends and family and aim to make the numbers grow. One good thing about social networking sites is the fact that you can provide them updates every now and then and you can inform your fans as well on the new song that you are writing or the new album that you are making, which can also pique their interest and eventually patronize it if they love your music. You can also get comments that you can make use in improving your music as well.

- Consider off line promotions as well. Create links to local radio stations or the print media, or even ask for sponsorships. It does not matter how small the sponsorship may be, it can be a good start in learning how to get bigger ones next time as well. If you can get a break in the local TV network, then that would also one of the great music promotion tips that you can maintain.

There are of course, many other creative ways and music promotion tips that you ca use to help you promote your music. The thing is, you have to make sure also that you have the music that your target audience will love so that they will also learn to like you as well, thus make sure to hone your skills and talent to perfection as well.

For a detailed guide on how to promote music events and concerts, check out this concert promotion guide. Also check out So Clean Kit, where you can find The Neptunes-inspired hiphop kit that will allow you to listen and play a variety of sounds.

No Comments »

Online Public Relations Skills

The online arena is a battleground for four groups to compete for clients’ business: PR, advertising, search marketing and design. Companies in each of these areas claim to be perfectly placed to carry out online work.

Online PR can be split into four categories:

· Listening: using buzz monitoring tools to get a perspective on how a brand is perceived across blogs, forums, news media, social networks and video

· Engaging: having two-way conversations with people on the web to influence their perception of the brand.

· Enhancing: boosting a company’s position on search engines and keeping adverse comments, news and so on out of sight.

· Creating: developing new content - video, viral games, blogs, Twitter feeds - to develop the personality of the brand and encourage further engagement.

Listening and engaging are areas where, in ‘traditional’ communications terms, PR agencies have proven skills. When it comes to enhancing, search marketing agencies should be able to offer more advanced search engine optimisation (SEO) services. However, PR specialists ought to be able to write better copy than SEO professionals.

Content creation is the traditional preserve of advertising and design agencies. However, while these agencies tend to want to work with large budgets, PR agencies tend to be able to create lower cost content that directly relates to the news agenda, which dominates the web.

All of this means that traditional PR skills - writing a press release or case study, briefing photographers and analysing press clippings - are being matched by such new skills as producing a social media release, or a video case study; briefing a game developer, and monitoring online buzz.

Blogger relations, social bookmarking, web analytics and moderating blog comments are now key PR skills to rank alongside writing and distributing press releases, dealing with media enquiries and analysing coverage. Moreover, today’s trend is for the PR agency to create a blog or a microsite rather than produce a customer newsletter - and there’s already more to online PR than YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Bob Little is Senior Partner at Bob Little Press & PR (http://www.boblittlepr.com, a UK-based business-to-business public relations consultancy which tells the truth as you want it told. He specialises in helping organisations - principally from the private, public and charity sectors - to tell their story to the people who need to hear it.

Currently, Bob writes for a number of publications and websites - including CheckPoint eLearning in Germany and eLearning magazine in the USA - and has chaired international conferences (on the subject of learning technologies) in the UK as well as in Sydney, Australia.

No Comments »