Direct mail in the PR world is really known as “junk mail.” Sometimes the information can be helpful and useful, though. PR pros can jazz up direct mail by having bright colors on the envelope to make people want to open it. Creating big fonts that advertise FREE STUFF is also appealing. Using direct mail can broaden the audience the PR pro is trying to reach. A lot of the time though the mail goes unused and wasted. It has kind of gotten outdated, more people tend to communicate electronically now. Maybe sending Direct Mail via email will be the new norm?
Category Archives: PR Writing
Modern Communication vs. Traditional Communication
In today’s world, a PR practitioner has many available sources of communication tools. For my generation we tend to use more modern approaches to communication such as social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. The traditional communication though will not be 100% replaced so we need to know how to use tools like News Releases, Fact Sheets, Bio Sketches. These components are vital to PR practitioners and we as professionals have to learn to use all of the effectively and efficiently and in the right way. We need to be educated on when to write a press release and when to post a Facebook status for our client. The different tools we use also reach different audiences and they change over time.
Most Exciting Part of Public Relations
I would love to be a specialist in Crisis Communication. Whenever there is something wrong I like to fix it, and I work well under pressure. Being a spokesperson for a firm or company and handling their “issues” whatever they may be is what I would like to do. Working in DC, where it seems like all the scandals are, would be my ultimate dream. Keeping my client(s) in the media and out of it is one the hardest parts of being a PR specialist. Learning to say the right thing, when to say it, and who to say it to is also hard and will not be easy at first. You learn from the issues that take place to make them better and so they don’t happen again, which makes you very good at your job.
The relationship between the media and PR professionals
The media, in a very broad sense of the term, is the medium in which a PR professionals message is relayed. If a PR professional does not have a good, working relationship with the media then their message can be compromised. It is important for the PR professionals to have an up-to-date version of a media contact list to reach the appropriate media executives as well. Reaching the right audience in that type of media platform is important too. The media makes a PR professional’s job a lot easier. They can distribute your information to the audience in a quick and effective manner. It is the PR professional’s job to make sure the information is accurate and on time to distribute. Without the media as a means to communicate with an audience, a PR professional’s job just got a lot harder.
Rapidly Growing PR Field
I think the reason why it is so popular is because it is so broad and covers many different areas. You study many different topics to earn a degree in Public Relations from Journalism, to Communication, to Marketing. It spans over many areas so if you do not know what you want to do as a career you have options to choose from. Because PR involves many topics of study you are well prepared for anything that your employer asks you to do. If you find out there is a spectrum of PR that you don’t really like or not very good at you have other options to still explore. Most every company now has some sort of PR job. The title may be different but it involves the same skills.
Communication is Power
We live in a day in age where our communication is done electronically. It is the society we live in now where it is more common to get to know someone through a text message not by a face-to-face conversation. Therefore, the physical interaction of conversations is a “lost art” almost. Rarely do we have a face-to-face conversation with anyone anymore. That physical interaction, the face-to-face communication is the most powerful of all. Both parties can hear the tone and inflection in your voice. They are also aware of the body language being communicated as well. There is more communication going on if it is face-to-face. In a way, it is also a sign of respect to meet someone face-to-face and talk with them. It means they have time for you to sit down and have a conversation. They can get their message across in the most effective way. A lot of times, communication gets lost in the medium. A text message gets read the wrong way than intended, for example. What we say has meaning and the way that we say our words is powerful even in the most simple sense.
PR Practitioners & the Media
PR Practitioners use the media to communicate to their external audience for their client(s). If all goes well, the media relays the message you want. PR Practitioners use many means of communication to get the information across. From news releases, the most common of communicating, fact sheets, brochures, each way of communicating is used at different times and to different forms of media. You would obviously send the news release to the newspaper to be published, while you might use a brochure as a guide to communicate.
At times, the media can seem constructed to only report, or frame, their information the way they want to. I think it is up to us as PR Practitioners to help dissolve the issue. If we are honest and trustworthy for the media then they have means to trust us and relay our message the way it is intended. A lot of things can get lost in translation and it is our responsibility to communicate effectively with our media source. There are so many forms of media that we now have more means of communication, which can be good and bad. We have more ways of getting our message out to the audience, but there is also more room for error and things that can go wrong. It is important that we don’t lose sight that the media is influential and vital in our line of work, and we have to work with them everyday.
What makes it Newsworthy?
We live in a day in age where what you had for lunch is newsworthy. You take a picture of it and suddenly you have 15 likes on Instagram. Our means of communication have changed therefore making our news and what we think is “newsworthy” changing constanly. My generation goes to Facebook and Twitter for the latest updates on news, while my parents still watch Fox and ABC. The content of each is different, but it doesn’t mean that neither are newsworthy, or when is more worthy than the other. Its all about the perspective. As I get older I am finding myself less on facebook for my news stories and more inclined to watch HLN before I go to class in the morning. I know that the Pope plans to resign at the end of this month, as well as what my bff had for lunch yesterday.
Why AP Style?
The believe we should all be on the same page about formatting when writing and publishing our works. It looks uniform and more together that way. Also and probably the biggest upside is it makes us as PR professionals or journalists look more credible. We don’t want to be writing all this for the public not to believe it or for it to look sloppy! We as professionals, want our audience to be happy and our clients. Using AP style helps us all stay together and uniform and look professional, because we are!
AP style is updated every year, the world in which we work is constantly changing. There are new audiences, new social media, new ways to communicate that pop up all the time, and it is our responsibility to stay current and accurate using AP style.
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