Thou Shalt Follow These 10 PR Commandments

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A commandment is defined as a divine rule. If you want to be a devout public relations professional, follow these 10 PR commandments in 2020.

Thou shalt spell check PR materials. Let pitch notes, press releases, client reports, blog stories, speeches, video scripts and so on sit overnight. Proofread it again in the morning or have someone else look at it. Sometimes editors will share an error-filled pitch or press release over social media to showcase poor communication that they have received.

Thou shalt keep thy PR message brief. Pitches more than 250 words might be hard for a top tier writer to comprehend. Some writers receive 400+ email pitches a day. Get to your point concisely.

Thou shalt surprise thy journalist. When you write a press release, ask yourself, did you include something new, interesting or surprising? Did you explain how it would improve someone’s life or improve a business process?

Thou shalt have a PR coverage goal. When you set out to garner attention for a company, concept or product, set a success bar. How much attention is considered successful? For example, your goal could be one feature print story, two TV news spots and five million impressions.  A tool like Meltwater could help.

Thou shalt not annoy an editor with too much follow up. Too many follow up messages might get you blacklisted by a writer. Use logic when following up. Instead of asking, did you receive the pitch note, ask something else like, are you back from holiday? Or, how was the trade show?

Thou shalt not abuse a mobile phone number. When a writer gives you their mobile phone number, don’t call it unless the situation is urgent. Typically people now can receive an email or direct social media message pretty quickly.

Thou shalt read a recent story by the writer before pitching. Read a recent story by the journalist before reaching out. If you don’t see any stories published in the past couple of years, they may not be worth your time. Maybe they took a job in PR, which is common these days. The exception is someone who edits but doesn’t have bylines. But lately it seems that editors publish as well.

Thou shalt not pitch via public Twitter profile. Journalists like scoops. They are not likely to discuss a solid story idea over their Twitter account for the competition to see. Some read direct messages but to send them a message they have to be following you. So it helps to have a quality Twitter profile and messages.

Thou shalt listen to what the writer wants. If a writer wants to only talk to customers and not the CEO, don’t keep offering interviews with the CEO.

Thou shalt say, “no” and add “try this instead.” When the lead marketing executive demands that you issue a press release on a drab, me-too, follow-on product, don’t be a yes man or woman. Offer a better idea like production of a video featuring a happy customer of the first product. Or write a pitch featuring a happy customer and success story: offer the customer as an interview source to a favorite writer. Mention the new product briefly as an aside.

Save the in-depth new product description for direct communications with customers and prospects and/or the right social media channels.

Boy praying photo:  Shutterstock

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Michelle McIntyre, an award-winning IBM vet and blogger is the president of Michelle McIntyre Communications LLC, a tech PR consulting firm in the Silicon Valley. McIntyre has served on several  nonprofit boards and was named VLAB Volunteer of the Year in 2017 for her marketing and blogging efforts. @FromMichelle on Twitter

 

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The Surprising Secret to Achieving Excellent Press Coverage

by Michelle McIntyre

The secret to landing media coverage in a top tier news outlet may surprise you. It could be as easy as picking out the right company spokesperson to do an interview.

Last night, The New York Times Deputy Technology Editor Quentin Hardy was interviewed on stage by Oracle’s Mike Moeller at a Public Relations (PR) Society of America Silicon Valley event in Redwood City, Calif.

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Here are Hardy’s words of wisdom for PR pros who want their companies covered. This seasoned tech journalist receives 200 story pitches daily so pay attention.

My experience working with him has been good. He’s a careful fact-checker and intelligent question asker.  He does his homework so the spokesperson needs to know the topic backwards and forwards.

My key take-away was that you can’t teach someone how to give a heartfelt interview. Top tier media outlets need quality stories that often evoke emotion.   (Think about great TED talks.)

Technology executives pay me to media train them and I have successfully done that many times. However, there is only so far you can go with this. Some people are naturally better at interviews than others.  Quentin Hardy needs a quality interviewee and interesting facts to mention a company.

Here are some other things Hardy said during the fireside chat.

  1. He likes to add value to a story.
  2. Accept rejection.
  3. He wants to explore how things we are doing here in the Silicon Valley or in tech affect other regions. For example, what is it like being a football coach in Texas when everything is being recorded?
  4. Tell him how “big tech” affects everyday life and make it heartfelt and interesting. Database technology helps at the ATM but that’s not interesting.
  5. Be patient. It was okay that a PR guy pitched Hardy a meeting with an artificial intelligence (AI) spokesman after he wrote about it. He didn’t meet with the expert right away though.
  6. He’s interested in cloud computing, AI, mobile, driverless cars, and drones. Here’s a recent Quentin Hardy story, “Reasons to Believe the AI Boom is Real,” (July 18, 2016)
  7. He doesn’t find security that exciting because companies won’t talk about problems.
  8. When he receives a story pitch, he asks himself, have I worked with the person before? He considers circles of trust and knowledge. For example, he says, people trust The New York Times.
  9. Here’s an example of how he researched a story. The topic was how cloud computing is affecting everyday people. He first researched AWS Meetups finding interesting ones in Omaha and Texas. He didn’t want to use a California example because that is not as interesting. He found that Hudl, a technology used by thousands of sports teams to review and improve play was popular. “No one had heard of Hudl” but they were used by 12,000 of the 14,000 high school football schools. The example he used was a team near San Antonio, TX, that regularly enjoyed 15,000 people in the stands.
  10. When he covered drones he used an example related to farming in the Midwest.
  11. Quentin Hardy follows Twitter, and regularly reads the Financial Times and The Economist. He added he does not read The Wall Street Journal as much as he should.
  12. He finds it amazing how much news is taken in via mobile devices.
  13. Event attendees asked him about the future of tech. He says he has no clue what life will be like in five years because change happens so fast.
  14. He was asked about the presidential election. He said he finds it interesting that the economy is doing fairly well but people love to say how broken everything is, especially on social media.
  15. He owns 3,000 books.
  16. He has enjoyed watching some of the Valley’s top executives and companies evolve. In 1999 Steve Jobs called him right after an earnings call asking if he had questions. As a result, the earnings story grew from three to five inches. (Hardy was at the WSJ at the time.) He remembers meeting with Google’s co-founder when the company was just a vision.

In summary, when pitching Quentin Hardy, it helps to say something about how technology is affecting everyday life.  If he needs an interview, make sure the person is able to story tell and connect, and not just robotically convey facts and company messages.

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The writer of this story, Michelle McIntyre is @FromMichelle on Twitter. She took the PRSASV event photo. The emotional woman photo is from Canva.

Also follow @qhardy @newyorktimes @newyorktimesbusiness and @prsasv

Feb. 8, 2018 UPDATE Since this story was filed Mr. Hardy left the NY Times and went to work for a technology vendor.

Two Surprising Facts to Boost Your Media Coverage by Michelle McIntyre

Here are two facts about journalists and public relations (PR) that might surprise you.

Press InterviewThe first might make some experienced PR folks angry.

These facts come from a quarter of a century of media relations experience that included a decade stint at a $100 billion corporation, working with 13 start-ups and 10 awards.

#1 Journalists don’t owe you anything.

The first surprising fact is that reporters don’t owe you anything. Did you set up a one hour interview with your startup’s CEO? Did she rearrange her schedule to be there? Did you buy them a $300 dinner with the best wine at the hottest restaurant in New York? It doesn’t mean a thing. What matters is that the founder actually says something that can be quoted or made into an angle. If your company is hot right now, the reporter may have come armed with an angle already though. It is rare that you would be working for a “hot” company though. Most start-ups are unknowns.
#2 The boss doesn’t always know what a great press release looks like.
Great PR pros are not “yes” men and women. Are you a PR manager supervised by the vice president of marketing or founder of a start-up? Have you ever heard, “We need a press release on software upgrade x” or ,“We need a press conference on new product y.” Have you ever just written the press release because the boss demanded it? And what happened when the journalists ignored it, or did an interview to be nice. . . but didn’t write? There was no coverage and you wished you would have strategically said, “No.”

The key to great PR is to work hard to figure out what is interesting about your company, founder or solution. Then say the right thing at the right time to right reporter.

Doing the first thing the boss requests may not be the best route to PR career success.

And don’t believe that any reporter owes you anything. They don’t.

[The photograph above was purchased from Canva.]
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Michelle McIntyre is the president of MMC PR, an IBM vet, and on the executive team of TEDxSanJoseCa. @FromMichelle on Twitter

Two Simple Tricks to Increase your Retweets

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By Michelle McIntyre

Twitter’s usage facts are impressive. According to the company, there are 255 million active users monthly and 500 million Tweets are sent a day.

Twitter is an important tool used by companies in conducting social business. According to Gartner, businesses leverage social media to drive growth, improve business processes and drive innovation. Marketers use it to gain valuable insight from customers and prospects.
Let’s face it. Twitter is important so community managers want more followers and tweet shares.

Retweets are definitely sweeter than being ‘favorited,’ especially if the retweeter has more followers than you, or at least a list of followers strategic to your business. Sometimes 50 strategic followers are better than 5k random ones.

I’m proud to say that when I Tweet about entrepreneurship or tech trends, I have been retweeted more than once by @SVForum, the top Silicon Valley organization for tech startups and their investors. My client prospects follow SVForum on Twitter. This is a good thing.
I noticed I am more likely to be retweeted if I do these two simple things.

1. AIM FOR 100 CHARACTERS OR LESS. People are more likely to retweet a shorter Tweet. Twitter rules say your tweet needs to be 140 characters or less, but Twitter users actually like 100 characters or less.
Use these free and easy services to shorten your URL links: TinyURL.com and Bitly.com. To use the services, copy paste your long link and make a short one. You should not have to register, sign in or pay for either service.

2. USE TWO HASHTAGS INSTEAD OF ONE. When I am managing the Twitter handle for @SVIABC, I like #communications and #pr since the organization promotes quality in the communications field. Sometimes I add #social, #socialmedia or what the social studs use, #SoMe. What a hashtag does is it includes your tweet in the ongoing group conversation on that topic. Many more people can then see your tweet even if they are not follow you. Pretty cool, huh?

What other tips do you have to increase retweets?
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Michelle McIntyre is the president of MMC high tech PR. @FromMichelle on Twitter

 

Do You Charge for an e-Book?

By Michelle McIntyre

Oakland-based business coach for midlife entrepreneurs, Dina Eisenberg recently spoke to my Women in Consulting (WIC) group in Los Gatos last week about how to kick start an information product or “infoproduct” business.

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An information product is any product or service that you can sell to people to provide them with information. It includes e-books, books, audios, CDs, DVDs, seminars, videos, tele-seminars and more.

Because the event description mentioned her law degree and creating a “passive income,” I was expecting tips on self-employed (S.E.) IRAs and 401Ks. I had just set up a S.E. 401K so I figured it will probably be redundant to what I already just learned after spending hours with a Fidelity representative to set up my own plan. I went to the meeting anyway for the networking. 

 I was pleasantly surprised when Eisenberg started talking though.  

What it was really about was creating sustainable income to make, what Eisenberg calls “a cushion for life’s bumps.”  Consultants and entrepreneurs who are typically actively involved in delivering their service benefit from creating passive income streams that work, even when they cannot.

A self-proclaimed “information product junkie,” Eisenberg has also produced a range of products from online courses to retreats and subscription programs.

She said she it all started when her husband, whom she considers a successful entrepreneur just like herself, went on disability for two years due to a medical issue that has since mostly gone away. He was her fiancé at the time.

She shared her tactics with the consultants, many of whom had created their own infoproducts. Several consultants had their products on hand and the talk turned into a brainstorm and information share of sorts instead of just a presentation.

Two of her messages stuck in my mind.

First, start charging!  Yes, the internet is awash in free material however, people will pay for the exact right product that solves their specific problem at that time. Don’t assume you have to start with free.

Second, ask first.  The difference between a profitable infoproduct and one that flops is research.  Search Linkedin threads and comments for a wealth of topic ideas for your information product.

To learn more about Dina Eisenberg, visit her website at http://infoproductdoctor.com/.

Here are related Twitter handles.

WIC: @WIConsult

Dina Eisenberg: @DinaEisenberg

The author of this post: @FromMichelle


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Michelle McIntyre is a blogger and high tech PR consultant based in Saratoga, Calif. She’s also the director of marketing communications for the Silicon Valley International Association of Business Communicators and on the executive team for TEDxSanJoseCA.

 

15 Tips to Become a more Effective Entrepreneur

by Michelle McIntyre

 

Late last year, my Silicon Valley entrepreneur meet-up group gathered for a breakfast networking session. During the event, participants shared answers to two questions posed by Host Sean Murphy.

 

 

 

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He asked, “What have you learned in 2013 that will make you more effective as an entrepreneur in 2014?” He added, “What will you stop doing to make time for it?”

 

There was a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge in the room and I found the 15 tips quite valuable. Here they are.

 

1. Be more patient.
2. Fail faster.
3. Focus early on value proposition, less on technical implementation.
4. Drop less important details.
5. Hire more carefully. Fire faster.
6. Stop coding so much. Spend more time on sales. (Several attendees were software developers.)
7. Delegate more and more effectively.
8. Always build a simpler product than you first dreamed of.
9. Network more. Listen more.
10. Take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
11. Plan more. It’s really hard to recover wasted hours.
12. Take more time to listen.
13. More focus on time management and effective action.
14. Concentrate on one line of business. Focus for effect.
15. Build on strengths.

 

Thank you, Sean Murphy, for sharing your meeting notes with me for this article.

 

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Michelle McIntyre, a high tech press relations consultant in Saratoga, Calif., is on the executive team of TEDxSanJoseCA and the director of marketing communications for the Silicon Valley International Association of Business Communicators. 

 

 

Timely PR Advice for BART Workers

A commuter at the BART Fremont station (Photo from iStockPhoto.com)

A commuter at the BART Fremont station (Photo from iStockPhoto.com)

I’m not taking sides in the fight between BART management and the BART union. As some of you know BART is a transit system that’s really popular here in the Bay Area. It gets people to work, school, events, shopping and other places. When I last took it, I was going to Golden State Warriors basketball game in Oakland. The Warriors won. It was a great night.

What’s happening now is that the BART union workers are threatening to strike unless they get an agreement for more pay and better benefits.

However, I’d say management is winning the publicity war so BART workers, step up your PR game a bit to get your point across better.

According to today’s San Jose Mercury News, BART union members argue that they are due a pay raise and haven’t had one in a few years. BART is doing well financially so they should be rewarded.

Management’s take on this is that the average blue collar BART worker makes $76,000. That’s a nice salary for someone who doesn’t need a college degree to get a job, even in the expensive Bay Area. So the PR team for management gets more points for getting this point across and in most stories I’ve heard or read about this issue.

I read an Op-Ed by a teacher a month ago who uses BART who made a lot less than the BART workers who might strike. She made at least $30,000 less than $76,000. She was furious that they were complaining about the high salary considering she had to get an undergraduate degree, master’s degree to do her job and, “Shame on them for complaining.” Her letter said she needed BART to get to work so, “Striking is bad,”

But then again, two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because teachers are underpaid, doesn’t meet hard working BART workers need to be underpaid.  When we took BART to the Warriors game, I noticed the workers did an awesome job so kudos to them.

I also heard a radio interview yesterday. A news talk show host was interviewing a BART worker who was fighting for better pay and benefits.  The worker who had a ton of time on air to say his peace could not articulate why they deserved more.

I was hoping to at least hear, “There’s a problem with the health insurance. Here’s what it is!” but no, all he did was complain endlessly about how goofy it was for someone PR person to make up that it costs $70 million when they walked off the job about a month ago.

He said, “That can’t be right. Who makes that stuff up?” Seriously, this is the union defense on a popular radio show? Most intelligent people can understand how much money a transit strike could cost the economy. I don’t need proof of the $70 million. In fact I could easily make a case that it’s higher.

I was really just trying to understand what’s so bad about the current package but instead they insulted people in my profession. Epic message fail on his part and waste of an interview to help the union’s case.

One reason BART management is doing better in the publicity wars is because of its great PR team.

So my advice to the soon-to-strike BART Workers is this.

Clearly articulate what is so unfair about your benefits package. Be very specific so that people understand with some proof and not just, “We need more.”

Make the message very short and add a number to it so that every media outlet picks it up, even in the shortest of stories. 

The net is quantify in a compelling manner to fight the “$76k for a blue collar worker” argument.

By the way, thanks for the nice ride to the Warriors game. BART rocks and keep up the great work.

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Michelle McIntyre is the president of Michelle McIntyre Communications LLC, based in Saratoga, CA. She does PR for high tech start-ups headquartered in California and Europe and is also the director of marketing communications for the Silicon Valley International Association of Business Communicators, a non-profit that promotes ethical and quality communications.

Three Trends That Have Drastically Changed the Way I Collaborate

One of my colleagues at the Silicon Valley International Association of Business Communicators (SV-IABC) just asked me about major collaboration trends.

She’ll be on a panel at our SV-IABC luncheon event at Michael’s at Shoreline in Mountain View, California, on Thursday, April 18. Here’s the website to register, or if it’s too late since it’s happening tomorrow, just pay at the door.  http://sv.iabc.com/

I have so much to say on the topic that I decided to blog about it instead of just giving her a couple of quick comments.

 Three trends have affected the way I collaborate in the work place in big ways.

 They are industry collaboration, content marketing and the crazy fast rise of social networking.

 1) Here’s some elaboration on the first one. When the recession hit a few short years ago, industry consolidation grew rapidly. The large New York based company I worked for acquired 100 companies in just about a decade. They were smart strategic acquisitions and today the company is doing quite well just based on the stock price alone.

 

I had a lot of new coworkers. Many of my PR projects involved working with the new company communications teams.

 

Because it wasn’t economical to continually fly to all the sites where these new coworkers were, our company started massively collaborating on-line. Instant messaging (IM) became the “norm,” meetings in Second Life became the norm for some groups and then a few years ago, the company standardized on an enterprise social collaboration tool, a sort of Facebook for the enterprise.

 

Management loved IM because you could better tell if someone was working or not. The challenge was that if you turned it off, for example to focus on writing a press release or to run a meeting, some people thought you were not working.

 

2) The second trend is the growth of content marketing. More and more, the communications siloes of internal communications, press relations, product marketing, advertising, and web communications have blurred. The company I worked for changed the press relations folks’ titles to “external relations.” We were charged with “finding” and driving news and trend stories that would publicize our key messages and back our growth strategies. These stories might be part of a sales pitch or become the lead news peg on the website. As you know, a nice Youtube customer use story can be used by any group want to demonstrate the value a company provides.

 

3) The third trend is the crazy fast rise of social networking, especially Facebook.  I have spent the past 12 years mostly physically working alone from my home office, both at my last corporate job and while I consult for my new clients which are mostly software start-ups. However, I do feel like part of my work teams and collaborate in a higher quality manner because I know my faraway coworkers due to getting to know them through Facebook. The vast majority of Facebook friends are coworkers, former coworkers and business partner types.

 

Yes, I’d see them at a few of our annual events like industry conferences or events we’d hold for press and analysts so it wasn’t all on-line but the on-line connection certainly helped.

 

However, since LinkedIn has become so popular, I’ve mostly just connected with business associates on that site instead. For example, I’m connected with all of my software start-up clients and new business partners on LinkedIn but not on Facebook.

 

As a result, my number of FB friends has stayed consistent but my LinkedIn contacts list has grown dramatically.  I’ll elaborate on that topic in another blog someday.

 

In any case, collaboration is a hot topic and some big happenings in recent history like the rise of social have definitely changed the way we do this task.

 

I hope to see my Silicon Valley communicator friends at the SV-IABC luncheon on April 18.

 

 

Three Trends Driving Demand for PR Now

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I attend a lot of business networking events and talk to a lot of smart, experienced and educated people who are on top of industry trends. I also enjoy talking to people who have just a little work experience. Sometimes the ones who have only a couple of years of work under their belts are more in the know about what’s hot and what’s not. 

The Silicon Valley Public Relations Society of America Future of PR round table earlier this year in East Palo Alto was excellent with Facebook, Dell and others on the panel, as was a meeting I recently had with Global Fluency, a marketing communications and strategy firm headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. That firm runs the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council.

I used to work at Global Fluency in the early 90s when it was called something else. It was awesome to touch base with Donovan Neale-May who runs both Global Fluency and the CMO Council again after such a long time. The firm seems to be doing just fine and has evolved over the years along with the market.  It was great to see that Executive VP Dave Murray is still there and doing well.

Additionally, I enjoyed the Silicon Valley International Association of Business Communications (SV-IABC) event on gamification in Santa Clara in November.

I took notes at all of these gatherings and have put together the top three trends driving for PR now.

1. The new IR is influencer relations. 

There’s a new acronym in town. It’s IR. No, not investor relations. I mean influencer relations. Because so many people blog now, from large corporations executives and industry analysts to consumers posting on Yelp, organizations should be focused on influence and not necessarily “press relations,” “analyst relations,” or “client relations.” Typically the acronym for external relations is public relations but the term is often misused.

 Public relations actually means “changing someone’s mind.” But over the years, most of us in PR mostly came to know it as press relations.

I advise that all communications departments at organizations globally reorganize their staff and put all of their PR and external communications people in a group called influencer relations. Rumor has it that SAP done a bit of this already and if that’s true, good for them. Nice job IBM for calling its PR team “external relations” because that is a nice start in moving in the direction of the trend.

2. Content marketing is white hot. 

In order to gain attention and make noise in a crowded market place, companies must focus on being great content creators and communicators. It’s called content marketing. They need to hire people who can come up with timely and interesting content.  People with a journalism background do great at this task. Kudos to Global Fluency’s Dave Murray for his recent white paper related to this topic. Here’s the link:  http://www.globalfluency.com/news/index.html

3. Digital marketing is top of mind.

CMO Council and a partner firm recently released a survey (http://tinyurl.com/cckvb3e) that said, among other things, that the thing that most marketers are concerned about is digital marketing. Digitizing everything is a “modern” communications task and it’s an interesting change from decades ago when we just had to hire a graphic designer, write some prose, slap them together, get them printed and mail everything to the intended audience.

I believe the CMO Council survey was much more complicated and meaningful than my summary here, but that was still my key take away from it.

Today the communications expert or marketer creates smart and interesting content and then digitizes it so it can be properly socialized.

It’s wild when you think about communications 20 years ago versus today. Back then, you’d fax a press release to your top 10 reporters or mail a hard copy invitation to 100 customers. Today, you’d socialize survey results on Youtube, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and use the online invitation tool to get everyone to the party.

The funny thing is, I remember asking someone 20 years ago, “What did we do before faxes?”
My 12-year-old who is now begging me for his own Youtube account just asked me, “What’s a fax?”

If you want to keep up on the latest trends, join me and my other IABC colleagues at our March 21st luncheon at Michael’s at Shoreline in Mountain View, Calif. I’m a director with the SV-IABC and I personally invite you to come.  It’s not free but it’s also not expensive and the networking benefits are priceless.

This month’s speakers will talk about the pros and cons of consulting for a big IT corporation. To register, visit: http://www.sv.iabc.com/

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Top 10 Take Aways from the 2013 Silicon Valley PRSA Future of PR Panel

Last night I attended the Silicon Valley Public Relations Society of America’s “Future of PR” networking and panel event at the Four Seasons Hotel in East Palo Alto, California.

Panelists and audience members ended up speaking mostly about modern PR, as opposed to the future of the profession.

They highlighted the importance of creating content with entertainment value that is interesting to a more general audience than an organization’s specific industry.

Also, great PR people need to add business value and when driving a campaign, consider the gamut of tools from videos to events.

The panelists were Andy Getsey, Co-Founder & CEO Agency Atomic, Kelly McGinnis, Vice President, Communications at Dell, David Swain, Director of Technical Communications, Facebook and Burghadt Tenderich, Associate Professor of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. The panel was moderated by Steve Barrett, Editor-in-chief, PRWeek.

New Silicon Valley PRSA President David McCulloch, a Director at Cisco, also added a few comments.

Here are my 10 top take-aways from the event:

1.  When measuring PR campaign results, showing strategic outcomes is better than showing number of hits, views or clicks. The strategic people are more successful. – Tenderich

2. To be respected and valued, a PR manager needs to have a seat in the board room and add business value.  -McGinnis

3.  Attendees and members were surveyed and understanding influencers is top of mind. –PRSA president

4. Facebook places a lot of emphasize on PR. We have a lot of PR agencies but only one ad agency. -Swain

5. Companies have turned into media companies. I like when someone links to Dell’s news material.  That shows success. Sometimes your news content has nothing to do with your company and that’s fine. -McGinnis

6. The only proper way to measure a PR campaign is pre and post surveys. This is expensive -Tenderich

7. PR people need to be bold and have a seat at the branding table. I like to work on the corporate side because I can stay close to the action. -McGinnis

8. Attitude is more important than skill. You have to have the mind set to stretch beyond in PR. -McGinnis

9. It is sad that we need to show analytics results to prove the worth of PR. -Getsey

10. Facebook’s plan is to hire communications people, empower them and then scale projects. –Swain.

For more information about Silicon Valley PRSA news and events, visit http://www.prsasiliconvalley.org/

Additionally, I’m a director with PRSA’s “sister” organization, the Silicon Valley International Association of Business Communicators and for information about our news and upcoming events, visit http://sv.iabc.com/

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