Digital PR Tools
Digital PR Tools
In a digital world, information circulates at light speed and the funnel of that information can easily expand through syndication and spread at an exponentially viral rate. Creating and managing a reputation between a business, brand, or celebrity and the general public requires an ongoing honest effort. By crafting and distributing information that is genuinely informative for the masses and makes a personal connection with the audience, a digital public relations campaign is a very powerful soft selling action. Armed with an effective set of digital pr tools, you can create and disseminate dynamic press releases, quality editorial articles, and a variety of digital assets that help to generate positive buzz.
Digital PR Books
On a personal level, The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott is one of my favorite books in the Internet marketing genre. This digital pr book explains the market transition from traditional public relations models to digital pr models that include a heavy dose of inbound marketing strategy and direct to consumer messaging. In a concise but comprehensive step-by-step format, David breaks down an executable plan for operating a digital pr campaign. He covers the importance of blogging, social media, audio, video, press releases, content, mobile, and the entire gamut of digital public relations options. In my opinion, this book should be on your desk at all times as it is extremely easy to reference and tends to spur a creative thought process.
Rethinking Reputation: How PR Trumps Marketing and Advertising in the New Media World by Fraser P. Seitel and John Doorley provides a big picture outlook on how traditional public relations should be conducted within the digital world. From picking a story and sticking to it to the strong suggestion of relying on transparency, Fraser and John offer a reputation management plan that is conceived to address public relations with truth and acknowledgement of fault at the forefront. Using modern day stories of big brands, they suggest that rather than glazing the truth, accept the responsibility, and address the forward thinking path.
Digital PR Certification
With names like Donald Lim, MRM Worldwide Managing Director and Jonathan Chua, Tribal DDB Managing Partner contributing their efforts as faculty, the PRSP IMMAP Digital PR Certification is a respected e-learning program. This three month online course is broken into four primary sections:
- Introduction to Digital PR
- PR and Social Media
- PR and Other Channels
- PR 360: Integrated PR
Students can elect to study the sections independently or complete the entire Digital PR Certification program.
Digital PR Conferences
The most notable digital pr conference is organized by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). The PRSA Digital Impact Conference offers more than 30 sessions and three primary tracks. Featured speakers range from names like Danny Sullivan, Founder and Editor of MarketingLand and SearchEngineLand to Steve Rubel, Chief Content Strategist at Edelman. For those seeking to engage the influencers in the digital pr community on an interpersonal level, this event is a cannot miss.
Another very popular digital pr conference is the PR News Next Practices Conference that also features a litany of noteworthy names as featured speakers. This conference focuses on high impact digital pr tactics including but not limited to digital storytelling, industry influencer identification, how to conduct outreach, and content marketing solutions. The importance of visual representation in social media is heavily covered at this valuable conference.
Digital PR Software
As mentioned, conducting a digital pr campaign requires significant effort but there are digital pr software platforms that streamline various common functions. Two key areas of any digital pr campaign are influencer identification and outreach to those influencers. The following digital pr software platforms address both of these two options. Yet, there is a significant level of variance in the operation, complexity and usage of each of these three software platforms:
Having utilized all three, Cision is the venerable pr tool and it is incredibly comprehensive, the most challenging to utilize, and really designed for large scale agencies. BuzzStream is fantastic for identifying influencers and targeted sites and the outreach system is probably the best around. Muckrack is the cost effective new kid on the block and in many ways, it is a highly efficient version of the formers.
Digital PR Is All About Relationships And Information
You can have all the digital pr tools in the world but, at the end of the day, digital pr is not that different from traditional pr. The name of the game remains about establishing relationships with publications and media outlets so that information is distributed in discovery areas of a target market and intended readership. Some key differences are that in addition to catering to the media, there is a direct path for disseminating information that goes directly to the intended audience. Blogs, social, mobile, video, audio, and other digital assets represent a direct to audience information pathway. The new world of public relations provides an even greater opportunity to project your voice so it is all the more critical to have a strategy in place before you start projecting.
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