To the Death of Cold Calls!

One of the key aspects of my placement has been not only creating a PR role that had not previously existed, but more importantly creating some brand value for the company and generating sales leads. It amazed me upon first entering the company that there was no defined PR or marketing strategy, and my first thoughts were, “how do they make any sales?” The Business Development Manager and sales team were previously really the only driving factor behind generating sales leads and operate predominantly though cold calling.

As a PR assistant, my idea was to help generate as much publicity and general awareness for the organisation as possible in order to have customers come to the company instead of the other way around. When I first joined the company, they were setting up a new website which we then launched in March and although mostly finished, as any website, it is a constant work in progress.

Over the almost 5 months I have been with the company one of my main jobs has been in creating content for the website, adding in keywords and generating a media presence. This included uploading all of my media releases to the website which has helped us to gain more coverage in google searches, a necessity as we have not yet committed to ‘google adwords’. Additionally I have added case studies, testimonials, news and photo galleries to give customers as much information as possible, not only generating traffic to the site but also trying to keep people interacting with our site for as long as possible.

Having a presence on the internet is crucial to our company’s success, particularly as we are a business to business organisation. Not only is important to have a functioning website, but it is also important to monitor how the website is being used and by who, something I have been covering each month in a monthly website and social media report. This report covers things like the number of hits we have received and the demographics and behaviours of the people that are visiting.

It has been really rewarding on a personal level to see aspects of the website that I have created or been responsible for receiving high levels of traffic, reassuring me that I have been on the right track with what customers expect. Not only this but it is also very satisfactory to see sales leads generated from contact forms on the website or to hear people say they have seen our website and ask us about specific programs. Hopefully in time the sales team will start getting more and more leads each month and maybe some day cold calls will be a thing of the past!

Tick, tock, not much time left on the PR Placement clock!

Last week I had a massive realisation – there are only a few short weeks left til the end of my final semester at uni, which means there are even fewer short weeks left of my internship with Perth Zoo!

This scary thought had me panicking, realising that I have only a matter of days left to finalise and edit my report, and got me thinking about what this means....
My internship with Perth Zoo is drawing to a close and I’m starting to wish that I could freeze time and work on my report for another year, because it doesn’t seem real that I will be handing it in to my supervisor and potentially the CEO next week. But this is the reality of the ‘real world’ and being out of the comfort zone that is uni life.

On the other hand, this week makes me really excited thinking about what I have achieved. I have learnt how to turn something suitable for my uni tutors into something that a real life CEO or manager would want to read, and (hopefully) something that will actually be used by an iconic Perth organisation, how thrilling!
Someone wise once said: “Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back”. This I am afraid is very true. The week ahead of me, leading up to my final report being handed over is I’m sure, going to be a very, very stressful one. I have already had a giant red bull and two cups of coffee today in order to keep my spirits up to the tedious but, alas, necessary task of editing.

Another thing that has me worried is (however pathetic) my executive summary... I think back to all of the assignments I have handed in over my 4 year uni career and still wonder how I ever manage to get through these horrendous executive summaries. The reality of this situation is that they are also extremely important. As we have been told countless times by our lecturers, most executives only read this part of the document. This worries me, in that over the massive amounts of information I have put into my actual report, it is my least favourite and probably my least impressive part that will be read.

Anyway, for those of you who are coming to the end of your placements like I am, I hope you have learnt something valuable as well and I will be sure to update you as to how my report looks when it is finished and just how well my executive summary writing goes!

Elle

Ethical Reporting

When a student nears the end of their university degree, there is always that question of just how similar real life practice will be to the material learnt at university. Interestingly, a lot of what we learn at uni does go on in the real world. Do you like report writing? I hope so, because if you enter the PR industry, you will be writing reports, particularly in consultancy. One of the tasks I had to carry out was write a report for one of Devahasdin’s clients. The purpose of the report was to demonstrate the work carried out and the results achieved by the consultancy in a media relations campaign. Now cast your mind back to our consultancy unit. We were taught that we had to demonstrate to clients the return on their investment (ROI). This is the focus of my blog post.

The report contained an overview, objectives, a section on targeted media channels and whether publicity was obtained, a publicity value table and press clippings. The publicity value table describes where media coverage was achieved as well as the estimated value of publicity. You may remember this as being called “advertising value equivalency” (AVE). Although through our study of consultancies we learnt that AVEs are an invalid form of measurement with questionable ethics, clients using PR services love them. AVEs provide a numerical figure which makes it easier to quantify ROI. As we all know, ROI is quite difficult to determine in a PR context. The unethical implications of using AVEs result from PR practitioners adding ‘credibility’ multipliers. For example, say media coverage was secured in the West Australian. The PR company would determine the cost of the space if it was an advertisement and then multiply this figure to take into account that publicity is viewed as more credible then advertising etc. Some consultancies multiply by 3 to 10!!! I am proud to say that my organisation does not engage in this practice. They merely provide the value of the press clipping dimensions if it were a paid advertisement as there is a pressing demand from clients.

AVE can be used to calculate print and electronic coverage. It must be remembered and communicated to clients that AVEs measure costs of an ad, not the dollar value of publicity. AVEs do not take into account factors such as whether the editorial was positive or negative. Furthermore, AVE can underestimate the value of the exposure due to the credibility provided because the publicity is endorsed by a third party. Here is a very interesting argument by the Digimarketing Convo Blog http://digimarketingconvo.blogspot.com/2010/01/debate-eav-what-is-it-actually.html

Prior to discovering that organisations in practice do use AVE to demonstrate to clients the success of a publicity campaign, I thought of this approach to be unsuitable and unethical. However, after witnessing the use of AVEs in action, I believe there is some value in the adoption of this measurement. At the very least, it provides clients with the figure that they demand. Furthermore, I don’t see a problem with this measurement as long as there are no credibility multipliers. Clients should be informed that certain factors lead to AVEs overestimating or underestimating the value of publicity. As long as AVEs are used in conjunction with other reporting measures I think they are helpful in aiding the clients’ understanding of publicity and its value. I will likely adopt the use of AVEs in my future as a PR practitioner.

Kind regards,

Suzi Petkucevska