Communications Strategy 101: Get your GAME on

Posted on: 01.04.16 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

Communications Strategy from David PR GroupOne thing that I often hear from executives is that they want to improve their corporate communications, marketing and public relations, but they don’t know where to start. Perhaps the conversation begins with an executive saying they want a presence on social media, or they want to blog, or they just want to “get their name out there.” How do you do it? How do you develop a communications strategy?

The answer: Get your GAME on.

While developing a complete communications strategy takes research and in-depth planning, one can make the first moves fairly easily and can quickly point the ship in the right direction. This process, which can take a few hours for a cursory approach or several weeks for a deep dive, focuses on four areas: Goals, Audiences, Messaging (and tactics) and Evaluation. “GAME,” get it? (Don’t feel the need to be snarky about the “T” in “tactics.” It’s my process, so I’m calling it “GAME.”)Read More

Preeminent Book on Marketing and PR Gets an Update

Posted on: 12.10.15 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

David PR Group PR and Marketing book gets an updateIf I’m being honest, I have never had much use for books about public relations.  When I was studying marketing and PR in college, much of the information in textbooks was dated and offered in a rote, dull manner.  As time passed and new books were written, few could capture what I was experiencing firsthand as a professional PR guy, particularly as the industry had shifted dramatically in recent years.

Yet there’s one book which caught and kept my attention; it also happens to have been recently released in its fifth edition.  The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott, first published in 2007, remains one of the top books about the industry.

When offered an opportunity to speak with Scott about his book, I jumped at it for a number of reasons.  As I mentioned, I think his book is the preeminent authority on PR out there. But he’s also a pioneer of “newsjacking.”Read More

The Politics of Authentic PR and Communications

Posted on: 10.22.15 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

Leading presidential candidatesThough I enjoy following politics and have had many lively conversations about the presidential campaign, I have hesitated to write about it given the polarizing nature of such things – and the fact that one person’s non-partisan observation can quickly be perceived by another as a partisan insult.

Yet as a public relations professional, it’s difficult to ignore what Stephen Colbert called “the big orange elephant in the room,” meaning Donald Trump.  He’s turned one side of the political landscape on its head, and while you may think he’s soon to flame out, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that he has brought a level of authenticity to the race that hasn’t been seen before.  Therefore, it’s time for me to weigh in.

Part of a classic strategy to win the White House in recent decades has included the following:Read More

What’s the Deal With Book Deals?

Posted on: 10.08.15 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

john p. david book artThe book publishing world has been in tremendous flux in recent years, but I had no idea how much so until I began researching options for my own book about how to defend your reputation online. I have included a link for anyone who wants to read the first chapter. But first, here’s what I have learned so far about the current state of publishing.

For decades, a limited number of publishing houses that distributed books through brick and mortar retailers controlled the book business. If you wanted to publish a book, you had to go through the traditional system. This meant finding an agent to shop your book to the publishing houses on your behalf. If they selected your manuscript, enlightened editors would massage it (at least that’s how I envisioned it) and carefully market it—including arranging a cover design, reviews, bookstore windows, signings, and maybe even a book tour.

The system worked for a long time, but a number of factors have contributed to recent erosion. Read More

5 Reasons to Start a CEO Blog

Posted on: 08.03.15 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

5 reasons to Start a CEO BlogPublish or perish!  We hear about it in the context of academia all the time.  In order for would-be professors to be considered for tenured positions, they need to regularly showcase their brilliance through publishing relevant scholarly works.  I would argue that CEOs should follow the same advice though they need not regularly publish doctoral-thesis-worthy communications but rather compelling blog content which can advance their business and personal interests.  Below are five reasons why companies should embrace the CEO blog:

Puts a face to your organization.  A CEO is almost always the best single human asset that a company has, particularly start-ups and smaller companies.  Yet many businesses hide their top asset behind a marketing curtain.  A short website bio, usually without contact information, makes most CEOs appear inaccessible.  If your goal is to be a customer-facing and customer-focused organization, a CEO blog can create a public face for a company.  Showcasing your company’s personality can go a long way to defining your values.Read More

Can Your Reputation Withstand Increased Surveillance?

Posted on: 07.28.15 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

Vatican_Pope_06523CCTV_CamerasSitting in a restaurant with a friend recently, I asked a simple question: How many cameras are in this place? He looked up and immediately pointed out several hemispherical domes in the ceiling, scattered around the restaurant. He identified the surveillance cameras and confidently guessed “about 10” — but he had fallen right into my trap. What about the cell phone cameras, I asked? He frowned as we upped the count to likely north of 50, when considering the camera-phone-bearing customers and employees. At that moment, if a customer were to try to sneak off with a pastry, steal someone’s wallet or go on an epic rant about the price of an extra scoop of guacamole, there were dozens of people at the ready to document it. Any misstep could turn into an online reputation issue within moments. And this is true not just at a Panera Bread in Florida but nearly every restaurant and retail store in the United States. Whether we like it or not, we are being watched.

200 Million Camera Phones
According to analysts, there will be more than 200 million camera phones in the United States by 2017. (The U.S. population is around 320 million, by the way.) We have about 50 million surveillance cameras in America, and that number is likely growing at a rapid clip as the prices for such devices fall, and they become easy to monitor with web-based technology.Read More

Make your mobile phone valueless

Posted on: 07.20.15 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

davidpr.com online reputation securitySince I started helping people with online reputation issues, I have heard some amazing tales but few as educational as this one.  A lady called me up with an awful problem.  Her phone had been stolen from her locker at her job and now, yes you may have already guessed it, inappropriate pictures of her were now on the Internet.  She made three mistakes, all preventable.  Yet, the main lesson is that we all need to make our mobile phones valueless.

First, what the girl did wrong.  Taking naked pictures of oneself — duh!  This one confounds me but just continues-on in our society.  We need to teach our sons and daughters not to do this, and also teach them not to ask it of other people.  In addition, this young lady failed herself in two other technical categories.  She didn’t enable the passcode feature on her phone, and she didn’t set up the Find My iPhone/remote data-erasing features.  In her case, three strikes equaled revenge porn.

Sadly, we can buy purchase protection to replace a lost or stolen phone, but no such insurance exists for a damaged reputation.

On to my main point, if you truly want to protect yourself from the many perils of a lost or stolen phone, you need to have everything of value backed up, preferably automatically.  If you lose possession of your phone, the physical value of your phone should be the only concern you have.   Here’s how you do it, and the cloud service providers are going to love me.Read More

3 Pieces of Advice From an Online Reputation Fixer

Posted on: 07.08.15 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

Originally published on PRDaily.com

For the past two years, I have been building a segment of my business around helping people with online problems.

Striving to get negative content removed from search on behalf of my clients has been, without question, one of the most interesting things I have done in my 25-year career in public relations.

I gained interest in the practice due to a number of factors. Part of it was directly related to hearing an increasing number of online horror stories, and the other part of it has to do with my sometimes overly righteous personality. I have strong opinions about what is fair and what is unfair in life, and the Internet can be incredibly unfair. It enables people to say almost anything they want. The door to the online world is wide open for crazy people, mean people and folks with an axe to grind.

As I develop my own reputation as something on an online reputation fixer, I have learned that a huge number of folks have issues with our digital world. The Internet plays a major role in how we are perceived, and many of the challenges facing PR professionals today have to do with online issues. Quickly and steadily, the two worlds are starting to collide.Read More

Attention Graduates: You Will Be Googled

Posted on: 05.27.15 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

David PR Grads will be googledDavid Geffen lied on his first job application. I recently watched Inventing David Geffen, a documentary that details the life of the billionaire entertainment mogul who has many legendary accomplishments, including putting the Eagles and Jackson Browne on vinyl, Cats and Dreamgirls on Broadway, and Risky Business and Interview with the Vampire on movie screens. One of the many anecdotes Geffen shares is about his first job at the William Morris Agency in New York. He lied on his application for a mail-room position at the talent agency, stating that he had graduated from UCLA. The agency hired him and put him to work, but they checked his credentials with UCLA via old-fashioned postal mail. After learning that a fellow employee was fired for lying on his application, Geffen sorted every piece of mail coming into William Morris. When the incriminating letter from UCLA arrived, he steamed it opened and altered its contents. The rest is blockbuster history.

Today’s recent college graduates can’t use the same solution as Geffen. Employers may instantly check credentials by using Google searches, and they’re looking for a lot more than proof of matriculation.Read More

Crisis Management Begins Online

Posted on: 05.07.15 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

Crisis Management Begins OnlineA friend called me recently in a bit of a panic. One of her college-aged children was tangentially involved with a crisis at her university, and my friend and some of the other parents were wondering if it would be beneficial to engage a public relations expert. Should they reach out to the media or not? How might their kids be perceived? They had many questions.

Before we dug into the details of the incident, I told my friend that the very first thing that needed to be done was to ensure that the students did not say anything about the incident that might end up online. I cautioned: Don’t post anything about it on Facebook, don’t tweet about it, and absolutely do not speak to anyone from the media. I told her that the most important thing was to guarantee that her child’s name was in no way associated online with this situation. She needed to keep her kid’s name shielded from this crisis, so the student would not be associated with it in any way – pro, con, or indifferent.

We are in a whole new world of public relations crisis management because the Internet is now king.Read More

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