Strategic Internet Public Relations

Strategic Internet Public Relations was an excellent course at Full Sail University that revealed now imperative it is for a company to invest in an internal and external PR strategy. My objective was to learn how to correct bad PR and initiate positive PR strategies. However, I learned that it is not just about correcting bad PR, but being proactive to help prevent it.

 First, by creating an internal PR strategy that tells everyone in the company who is responsible for what during a crisis helps the company look more professional to the media while increasing response time. Most importantly, it can save a company a lot of money from repairing a damaged reputation. The internal strategy is also important for a consistent brand voice so when employees do respond to customers, they all sound like they are coming from the same company and not a shattered personality.

 After the internal strategy is in place, an external PR strategy can be implemented. Because of the internal foundation that was created, all external strategies will move more smoothly as a result of employees knowing the brand voice and their responsibilities. The best way to start an external strategy is by setting up a place that people looking for information can come and share what they find. This would be like a socialized online press room on either your current website or a new website. It should be an aggregated page of the company’s press releases, blog posts, mentions of the company in the news, social media sites, and company produced multi-media. It would also be good to have a contact person for the media to get in touch with for questions or comments. Apple has an excellent example of this.

These internal and external PR strategies are just examples of the base of what you can build on for a strategic Internet PR strategy. I am surprised at everything I was able to learn from this course in such a short period of time and I have no doubt that what I mentioned earlier will be used in my next professional endeavor. 

Fictional TV Show Apps You Can Actually Download In Real Life

Here are four dedicated TV shows (and fans) who went the extra mile to bring their fictional apps to life.

1. Community's MeowMeowBeenz

2. Brooklyn Nine Nine's Kwazy Cupcakes

3. NTSF: SD: SUV's Scanner

4. Arrested Development's Fakeblock

For more information read the full story about each one.

Facebook Expands Business Manager Tool

Business Manager is available to a limited number of U.S. advertisers and will expand internationally soon, Facebook says.

The tool is designed to simplify marketing efforts and shows each advertiser the Pages, ad accounts, and apps linked to a brand, as well as the people on a given team and the external partners who can access those assets.

This will make it even easier for small business owners to create ads for Facebook.

5 Times You Should Ditch Pay-Per-Click Search

1. Too many competitors: Pizza in New York City, lawyers in San Francisco, accountants in Chicago, stores selling cameras — these are all situations where there are far more competitors than there are available ad slots. Plus, the top positions get such an overwhelming percentage of the clicks that the rest of the advertisers must live on the crumbs.

2. Irrational competitors or ones with metrics you are unwilling to use:When a competitor consistently out-ranks you for position, they likely have a great Quality Score and therefore are bidding less than you, particularly if they are a well-known brand and you aren’t. They get a natural “brand discount” on PPC because their click-through rate (CTR) is higher, all other things being equal. Often it’s a matter of making a higher bid due to a different way of measuring profitability or return on investment (ROI). It may also be an irrational bidder.

3. Inability to match Quality Score: If you can’t match the competition’s Quality Score due to their brand recognition, or the simple fact that consumers perceive their ads and/or domain names to be more relevant, then you’ll be paying a surcharge on clicks.

4. Cherry-picking high-value clicks doesn’t deliver scale: Using day-parting and geo-targeting to cherry-pick the very highest value clicks out of the clickstream is a great strategy to increase volume on important keywords when the competition is bidding aggressively. However, in some cases there simply aren’t enough super-profitable clicks to cherry-pick, and so you may find yourself stuck with a high-profit, low-scale campaign.

5. Lopsided keyword distribution: After 15 years of PPC, most keyword lists range quite far into the tail. When the keyword tail is short, and consumers disproportionately tend to favor a small number of keywords, you may end up fighting the same exact competition for nearly every one of your keywords. There may be room for keyword creativity in a few cases, but often you will be out of luck.

written by KEVIN LEE for ClickZ

Organic Search or Social Media Referrals?

According to Shareaholic, organic search traffic has dropped a total of 6 percentage points from November 2013 to November 2013. Now, 6 percentage points in search is nothing to worry about, and has probably already been regained here in April. The point to recognize is the stagnation of organic search numbers over the past year.