Taming PR’s latest trend: Big Data

Big Data is the practice of collecting the information scattered across the Web to better target consumers, and it has a promising future for the public relations industry—from predictive analytics to mining data from social media interactions.

But for the PR professional on the ground, harnessing the deluge of data is not so much about the future as it is about the current challenges that demand an answer to the question:

How do you deal every day with two huge data explosions: the expanding universe of digital influencers and the massive volume of social media conversations and real-time digital mentions that concern your brand, industry and competition?

The number of digital influencers has grown 30-fold in the past couple of years. The monthly traffic on Facebook alone runs in the billions of page views, and social channels account for more than 20 percent of brand impressions.
The sheer volume of your brand mentions may demand that you start by prioritizing: Find out who matters, determine what they’re saying, and how it sways others, and decide the best (and perhaps most immediate) way to engage with them.

Finding out who matters

Early attempts at scoring the influence of social network users have provided a one-dimensional view. By taking into account only an influencer’s activity within a few social platforms, three important factors are missing to determine their potential impact on your brand:

1. Presence within news sites, blogs, print and broadcast media;
2. Influence with respect to particular topics, industries, products and places;
3. Participation in a “tribe” of other influencers who frequently share and comment on each other’s content in a particular topic space identified through a “network science” approach.

Piggybacking on early efforts, the nascent field of influencer discovery is sure to mature over the next two years. Metrics based on these and other more extensive criteria are already being introduced.

Determine what they’re saying

There’s a lot of noise in social media conversations. Even when you tap into a vein of relevant content, you can’t read every tweet, comment, or blog post. Here’s what that process looks like:

Tap a keyword or string of keywords to tune into the right online conversations, news sites, and blogs;

Aggregate that content in real time;

Make split-second decisions about whether (and how) to engage.

There are tools and listening platforms that help you monitor and analyze social media content, and they’re getting more sophisticated by the month. For years, PR pros have waited for tools like these to take the pain out of analyzing large volumes of content, and advanced text analytics solutions have finally materialized in the marketplace.

A variety of applications are capable of auto tagging your keyword search results to help you discover what else people talk about when they mention your brand. No longer simply detecting positive or negative sentiment, these tools now extract context, identifying an influencer’s intent to test or buy particular products or services in a moment of need. It’s powerful stuff when your goal is to build relationships with key tastemakers.

Decide the best way to engage

Influencer research also helps you understand how to engage appropriately. But this presents another Big Data challenge: where once there was a finite audience of journalists, analysts, and bloggers, there are now at least 30 million mass influencers and opinionated consumers.

The good news is, databases are getting bigger, faster, and easier to search by “mining” social content as well as by topic.

These solutions integrate information about digital influencers that help you better understand them—their favorite topics, deadlines, preferred ways of getting information, their pet peeves, and their most recent blog posts, tweets, and public Facebook updates.

The information comes from many sources: primary research compiled by teams of analysts, profiles that you can access from public social media sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Google+, Facebook), and “self-managed” profiles from content collaboration sites.

There also are tools that can help aggregate this data and help identify trends, tag topics, and group influencers by category—making you more productive. These technologies and tools will grow more sophisticated, faster and easier to use in the months ahead. PR professionals who use them every day, and who combine them with a practical approach to segmentation, monitoring and research, will better manage the data explosion.

As Big Data begins to live up to its promise, it will turn from today’s headache into tomorrow’s competitive asset.


Source:http://www.5wpr.net/?cat=1

5WPR – Delivering Existence, Delivering Excellence in Public Relations

The world has changed and so have people’s perspectives in life. With a wider vision and global awareness, the markets are conquering a wider range of territories. Companies and people in the public image thrive to keep their good name and reputation. As a result, there are companies that are dedicated just to manage such requisites through reputation management, digital marketing and effectively planned public relations campaigns.

5wpr is a firm that has revolutionized the world of public relations and global branding with its innovative ideas, event management, social media and digital marketing campaigns. This is a PR firm that finds its inspiration in the five important questions of public relations - Who, What, Where, When and Why in order to provide solutions to a wide array of businesses including; consumer products, corporate communications, event marketing, crisis communication, health, food, lifestyle, travel & hospitality and social media.

Under the leadership of Ronn Torossian, 5WPR renders services to clients from Fortune 500 list and delivers outstanding results on different fronts. Through the years, the PR solutions provided by 5WPR have earned the firm hundreds of happy customers, which eventually helped the firm to be ranked as one of the 25 largest public relations firms in the United States.

Collection of Interesting Public Relations stories

As The Dallas Morning News says, All Press is not good press. Any crisis PR agency can tell you the job is to minimize damage – and you can ask American Airlines amongst many other brands if all press is good press.

http://aviationblog.dallasnews.com/2012/10/who-said-all-publicity-is-good-not-american-airlines.html/

The Public Relations industry isn’t going anywhere as this op-ed in Huffington Post rightful points out: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-ramah/its-called-public-relations_b_1938121.html

What does body language say to voters: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/02/us/politics/what-romney-and-obamas-body-language-says-to-voters.html?hp
Ronn Torossian

 5WPR

Source:http://ronntorossian.com/collection-of-interesting-public-relations-stories

American Airlines Facing Turbulence With PR Crisis

http://www.prnewsonline.com/watercooler/American-Airlines-Facing-Turbulence-With-PR-Crisis_17152.html?hq_e=el&hq_m=2534737&hq_l=16&hq_v=dec1e12191

Hitting a patch of turbulence on a flight is one thing. Having your seat come loose all together? Well, that’s an entirely different problem.
In two separate incidents on Sept. 28 and Oct. 1, American Airlines flights had to be diverted after seats came loose during travel.

It just happens to be the latest in a long list of problems that have brought the airline under scrutiny.

According to a CNN report, AA, which filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2011, has been hit hard by labor troubles, delays and flight cancellations. The airline persuaded a judge to throw out its contract with the pilots union in September. Since then, the pilots have been engaging in what the airline calls a slowdown that has caused the number of delayed and canceled flights to skyrocket.

Slowdowns lead to delayed flights, which leads to unhappy customers, which leads to a major PR crisis. A “Friends Don’t Let Friends Fly American Airlines” blog post detailed one customer’s bad experience on the airline. In the social media age, one bad consumer complaint about a brand can create a snowball effect of bad publicity on the Internet.

What PR pros have to be prepared for is how to respond when problems arise on multiple fronts your brand seems headed on a downward spiral. With the public perception of American Airlines in flux, not only is the organization in crisis management mode, but reputation management has to be a priority for its communicators as well.

In a previous PR News article, John R. Brooks, associate director of Communication Services of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Chicago, offered the following tips to consider when responding to a crisis:

Distribute your response/comment/story through multiple channels: Post on your Web site; post links on your organization’s Facebook and Twitter accounts; send to news distribution services such as Business Wire or PRNewswire; e-mail key reporters and constituents; and to respond to constituents’ phone calls, provide printed copies to office staff for use when answering questions.

Transparency matters: Tell as much information as you can, but guard what should be kept private, such as personnel information.

Have a crisis management team: Never try to develop and execute a crisis communication plan by yourself. It’s best to have small team already designated, with about four standing members, who will work with you. Have standing rule that any member of your crisis management team may call a meeting should the need arise.

Use a single spokesperson: You want your response to be as uniform as possible. Determine who will speak for your organization and provide that person with talking points. Tip: Don’t ask an attorney to be your spokesperson. You want a key leader in your organization to speak, often with the advice of an attorney.

Be prepared to correct inaccurate information: Sometimes information reported by news organizations is just plain wrong. Ask that incorrect information be corrected if there’s a critical error that changes the facts.

I would add one more thing, fix the problems!

Source:http://www.5wpr.net/?p=7219

Random Public Relations Musings From Ronn Torossian

Interesting that Edelman, the largest independent PR agency in the world with over $600 Million in fees is celebrating its 60th Anniversary this year – they have more than 65 offices globally, and more than 4,500 employees. Interesting article with CEO Richard Edelman — whose father founded the agency. http://www.businessinsider.com/qa-with-edelman-ceo-richard-edelman-2012-10#ixzz286LflU86

Fascinating Read from the LA Times: “PR firms and nice suits hide authoritarian intentions” http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/lat-na-tt-yanukovych-20120930,0,4412852.story

Some great client wins in last few months we are all very proud of at 5WPR, including:

Videogame company, Majesco Entertainment on their latest release, NBA Baller Beats, a first of its kind video game that tests basketball skills with a real life basketball to the beat of 30 of the hottest artists including Kanye West, Wiz Khalifa and others

ESquared Hospitality, which includes BLT Restaurants, including BLT Steak in NY, Washington DC, LA, and other cities, and the BLT Burger chain, and many more

Ronn Torossian

5WPR

Source: http://ronntorossian.com/random-public-relations-musings-from-ronn-torossian

PR Agency Thrilled That Public Relations Study Says PR Industry to Grow

Veronis Suhler Stevenson, an investment firm that works in communications released a report today that the PR and word-of-mouth marketing spend grew 12.4 percent to $6.41 billion in 2011, and they project further growth for the industry.

Public Relations is projected to increase 8.3 percent to $4.22 billion.
In general, the U.S. Communications Industry spending grew 4.4% in 2011 to $1.129 trillion despite a sluggish economy in which nominal Gross Domestic Product expanded 3.9%. According to the growth pace that the VSS Communications Industry study projects, the Communications Industry will be the fifth-largest industry sector by 2016.

All of this is good news to the entire public relations industry, and certainly 5wpr is feeling the growth effects. We project 2012 to be our highest revenue years ever, and remain very excited about the future.

Ronn Torossian

Source: http://ronntorossian.com/pr-agency-thrilled-that-public-relations-study-says-pr-industry-to-grow-2

Reflections from My 20-Year Stuyvesant High School Graduation Reunion

This weekend I thoroughly enjoyed attending the 20 year Stuyvesant HS reunion party for the Class of 1992. Mothers, fathers and old friends – today, professionals ranging from Internal medicine specialists to Ford Motor Executives living in Mexico City, Producers for Good Morning America to California restaurant owners, employment attorneys at a white-shoe midtown NYC firm to a toy distributor attended and it was just great. I really enjoyed attending and reconnecting with people whom I graduated high school with.

Of course it was very interesting to see who and what people have become (everyone had on those cheesy name tags), and attending what was (and is) considered as one of the best public academic high schools in the nation in the last ‘80’s and early 90’s was a truly enjoyable experience. (Albeit one I have to thank my mother for as I didn’t want to travel 1.5 hours each way, but did and eventually preferred it over my local zoned high school.)

I played varsity basketball, which shaped a lot of my experience – and rarely attended class (as I was reminded of again last nite). Seeing half of the team show up was fun as we shared war stories about our aching backs, knees and stories which today would be qualified as hazing and have arrests made. We relived a lot of humor, shared and laughed about stories which I didn’t remember – and all in all was so nice seeing old familiar faces.

New York City was a different city then – graffiti ridden subways, at times dangerous but I wouldn’t have traded attending Stuyvesant for anything. On so many levels it was really such a special place and for this boy from the Bronx it really opened up my eyes to so many things, places and opportunities.

And now, I am off to prepare my kids to be the best they can academically so when the time comes in a few years they will also get into Stuyvesant High School.

Ronn Torossian

5WPR
  
Source:http://ronntorossian.com/reflections-from-my-20-year-stuyvesant-high-school-graduation-reunion