Today we’re happy to bring you a guest post from friend of the site Shawn Paul Wood. Shawn is a PR and copywriting professional with more than 20 years’ experience in the field, and he spent 12 of those years as an on-air host and radio news director. He currently writes for HCK2 Partners in Dallas and contributes to Talent Zoo‘s Flack Me blog; his clients range from notable corporate giants to megachurches, entrepreneurs and even a couple of entertainment bigwigs. Follow him on Twitter!

We have all heard the aphorism, “All news is good news.” One of the champions of that familiar saying is Sir Richard Branson, social media “influencer” and CEO of all things Virgin, who put the sentiment to the test when his airline expanded its routes to Scotland this week.

After appearing at the airliner door and traipsing down the stairs to the tarmac, he took his position on a literal promo platform to discuss the plane’s maiden voyage to Edinburgh. He then lifted his kilt so as to better display a new, um, marketing slogan: “Stiff Competition.”

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Today we’re very glad to bring you another guest post by Lindsay Goldwert, a senior program executive at Hotwire PR who jumped into the field after performing editorial duties for New York Daily News, ABCNews.com, CBSNews.com, CourtTV, Glamour and Redbook. Here’s her previous post on writing better pitches.

I won’t lie — the first two months at my new job were an adjustment.

After spending twelve years as a working journalist, I simply did not know how to operate on the other side. The PR industry’s language confused me; I felt like I was starting over, and it was a scary, unsettling feeling. Most painfully, I was mourning the loss of a career path. It hadn’t treated me all that well but, frankly, it was was all I knew.

Then again, I hadn’t been doing much real journalism lately. Wasn’t that why I quit in the first place?

I turned a corner a few weeks ago and, for the first time in many years, I’m experiencing the warm glow of possibility. It’s a good feeling to leave a shrinking, scrambling, panicking field for one that’s growing, experimenting and writing its own rules for success. Ideas are valued. Insight is appreciated. Your time is money. Industry knowledge is gold.

For others who are contemplating a career shift, I offer these reasons why you may feel extremely valued in the PR field (and not just for your media contacts):

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Today we bring you a guest post via Sheldon Levine. Levine is community manager for Marketwired/Sysomos, an innovative social intelligence company offering global news distribution and reporting services as well as state-of-the-art social media monitoring and analytics powered by Sysomos. Marketwired and Cision recently partnered to allow Cision customers to connect with media, influencers and customers through Marketwired’s distribution channels.

With thousands of news releases being distributed every day, PR pros are constantly looking for opportunities to reach a broader audience and drive more views. Incorporating multimedia is one of the most effective ways to accomplish this goal — especially when some sources credit multimedia embeds for traffic bumps of up to 77%.

Perhaps we can, armed with this knowledge, officially declare text-only press releases as a thing of the past. We know visual storytelling is a critical pillar in any effective communication strategy. Just look at how brands continue to invest in image-driven social networks like Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. At Marketwired, we believe this best practice shouldn’t be limited to social media. Creating multimedia –photos, video, audio, or infographics, for starters – is a smart PR tactic. As an added bonus, the fresh content can be shared on blogs or across social channels, thereby spreading a release’s main messages even further.

Whether we’re considering products, food or information, we consume with our eyes. Multimedia often offers the extra “sizzle” journalists and bloggers are looking for in their content, and in some cases such releases become stories in their own right. Here are five tips to make your multimedia press releases “pop”:

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Today we bring you another guest post courtesy of Pasta, a provider of public relations management solutions. Today the company launched “Pasta PR Chats,” a new interview series where employees speak with public relations practitioners of all shapes and sizes—from agency folks, to PR-savvy entrepreneurs, to in-house managers. Their first interview is with Rod McLeod, an account manager at Bateman Group and finalist for this year’s PRWeek Young PR Professional of the Year Award. You can head on over to Pasta’s blog for the entire interview, but here are some choice excerpts along with a clip in which Rod discusses the truth behind a lingering PR stereotype:

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We know that PR firms love winning awards and telling people that they’ve won awards, so we think our readers will be very interested in today’s “tips and tools” guest post courtesy of Kevin Swanepoel, president of The One Club. The Club, a non-profit organization created to champion and promote excellence in advertising and design in all its forms, produces events like the One Show, One Show Design, One Show Interactive and One Show Entertainment.

Here’s the golden rule for winning an award: make sure your work is great. Simple enough — but even if you have the best product, service or creative work in the world, you can trip up your entry with practical mistakes that delay or taint a submission that might have been a winner. Consider the following tips in order to give your submission the best chance of winning:

1. Avoid the “Shotgun” Approach:  This may sound strange coming from someone whose organization thrives on a large pool of awards submissions, but submitting an entry for all categories under the sun won’t improve your chances of winning and may weaken them instead.  Some entrants believe that if they submit their work for consideration in six categories, their chances will improve sixfold! The reality, however, is that judges are people who are susceptible to desensitization and annoyance.  If they see a good submission in the correct category once, it’s fresh and original.  If they see it five more times, it becomes trite and even overbearing.

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Today we’re glad to bring you a guest post via Laura Kelso. Laura is a co-founder of Pasta, a Bay Area startup providing public relations management solutions to tech clients. A former tech PR pro turned fledgling front-end developer, she now focuses on building smarter approaches to the management and execution of PR.

Earlier this month at PyCon 2013 — a big tech industry conference for developers — a female attendee tweeted a picture of two male attendees, publicly shaming them for making inappropriate sexist jokes. This tweet led to at least two people losing their jobs. One of them was the woman herself, who worked for SendGrid as a “developer evangelist”, and the incident has sparked heated debate about sexism in tech and attacks on all sides.

But stepping away from the commentary regarding her intentions or actions, we can learn some valuable PR lessons from the actions of a company facing fire due to the actions of an individual employee. As the title of the CEO’s public statement implies, SendGrid did an excellent job of handling a “difficult situation” by taking a stance and communicating it quickly to stakeholders.

SendGrid correctly decided that the incident required a corporate response.

The behavior of an individual employee via personal social media channels is always a gray area. Since the employee in question was officially representing the company at PyCon and her actions directly affected her responsibilities, SendGrid was correct to address the situation directly and publicly.

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Today’s guest post comes to you courtesy of our friends at PressDoc, the (social) media-friendly press release distribution, tracking and measurement service. To celebrate the release of PressList, a new service designed to help users pitch stories to journalists, the PressDoc team conducted a series of Q&As with experts in the field.

Their first interview subject is Kevin Dugan, a veteran of both the journalism and PR disciplines. He is the co-author of the Bad Pitch Blog, winner of an Award of Commendation in the Blog category from the Public Relations Society of America and a listed member of the AdAge “Power 150“. He tweets under the @prblog handle. 

From your experience, which email pitches do journalists pay attention to, and what makes them read the press release?

Pitching success boils down to relevance. In fact, the list is more important than the pitch. If it’s relevant? It can be long. It can have large attachments. I don’t care because I’m focused on the relevant content and not how it was packaged.

How often is it relevant? Rarely.

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Today we bring you a guest post courtesy of Leslie Campisi, managing director for global communications consultancy Hotwire PR. Like every PR agency around the world, Hotwire wanted to use the best available tools to connect its clients to the most influential individuals in their respective fields. But the Hotwire team found that the available technology didn’t meet their needs as directly as they would like, so they did what any truly enterprising business would do: they made their own!

I wish I could take credit for Listening Post, Hotwire’s new influencer analytics platform, but it was in development long before I arrived. What I can do is to draw a line under why it’s so important to our business here in the US and what I think it says about our agency.

Data has a big role to play in PR.

There are lots of influencer management tools already available to communications pros. It’s easy to dismiss the proliferation of dashboards, scores, and workflow tools by the sheer number of them that are on the market. (And, in some cases, by their complexity, price point, and lack of understanding about how PR people actually do their jobs.)

But a booming market for influencer management software is testament to just how unwieldy the challenges of effectively managing important relationships have become. The volume of data contained in the social graph, and where it intersects with proprietary client–and agency–information is too rich to be ignored by PR folks. In many cases, it contains the very proof that we’re doing our jobs effectively. Who’d want to ignore that?

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Today we’re happy to bring you a guest post by Lindsay Goldwert, a senior program executive at a global tech PR firm. Before she leapt to the dark side, Lindsay worked at the New York Daily News, ABCNews.com, CBSNews.com, CourtTV, Glamour and Redbook. In her spare time, she writes short stories.

As a communications vet who’s worn both the “journalism” and “PR” hats, she provides us with a very unique take on the delicate dance that we call “media relations.” Enjoy!

I have a confession: until very recently I was a working journalist–and I was very cruel to PR people.

Who could blame me? Tasked with writing and producing “life & style” content for the New York Daily News’s bustling website, I could not be bothered with endless email pitches that had nothing to do with my beat. I got snippy when people called to ask me if I had received their e-mail, yet every time I cleared my inbox it managed to fill up again within the hour.

By mid-morning every day, I already had a slate of content to work on–most of it stories that bounced off the day’s news. Yet PR people still called me (always when I was on deadline) to ask whether I might have time for a desk-side client interview or a three-hour lunch event.

Didn’t they know that, as a digital reporter, I never left my desk? Soon, I didn’t just ignore emails from PR people — I deleted them en masse without reading them. Eventually, I got so frustrated with the ill-timed telephone calls that I just stopped picking up my phone altogether.

Sound familiar?

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The past decade has seen both a significant spike in interest in the public relations field and an abundance of jobs. Get your foot in the door of this exciting industry with Mediabistro’s online Public Relations class starting Wednesday, February 6!

Instructor Linda Marsicano (left) is the former VP of corporate communications with Playboy Enterprises. Her experience includes prepping CEOs for appearances on 20/20, Dateline NBC, and The Today Show–along with every other aspect of the PR equation.

In her class, you’ll learn to:

• develop a tactical PR plan that generates results
• write dynamic biographies
• effectively distribute your own news releases

By the end of the course, you’ll be impressing interviewees left and right. Spots are limited, so sign up soon!