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August 15, 2012

Want to know an easy way to put a fine polish on virtually any video or audio produced by your organization?

Brand it with a donut.

A "donut" is simply two short, but professionally produced, files that brand your organization and can be tacked onto the beginning and end of all your video and audio. Here's a donut intro we just produced for our upcoming video blog.

Even something as simple as a recorded-on-your-laptop podcast can be dramatically transformed into a high-quality piece by a well-made branding donut.

As noted above, our company is about to unveil a regular video blog called "Keybridge Live." We'll film it using low-cost equipment in our conference room. These videos will be posted on our website and certainly aren't meant for primetime. Nevertheless, we want them to reflect the fact that our company delivers high-quality services and doesn't compromise on quality. Also, if one of our posts goes viral, we want people to know who produced it.

So we cooked up a donut. Our weekly video posts will be sandwiched between the intro shot above, and the outro shot below. The same concept can be applied just as easily to audio.

Branding donuts give you a lot of bang for your buck. They're short, which makes them relatively inexpensive to produce, and they can be used repeatedly. The intro/outro shots seen here were produced in just a few hours, yet this donut will give a professional polish to all our future video blog posts.

August 9, 2012

In late June, Keybridge Senior Writer Rob Montz took a vacation. Unlike most employees, however, he didn't go to the beach. Instead, Rob flew to North Korea to eat clams doused in gasoline, drink soju, and work on his upcoming documentary, "Juche Strong." When he's not toiling away at Keybridge, Rob is an up-and-coming filmmaker and a fellow at the Moving Picture Institute. This week, Rob was featured in the Huffington Post. Here is a preview of his documentary, which will debut in theaters this Winter.

Profiles in PR — MarketingScoop

August 6, 2012
Your Name: Michael H. Fleischner Your Business: MarketingScoop Your Position: CEO Services You Offer We offer marketing consulting services and training. Your Niche Area of Expertise Search engine optimization and marketing strategy. How Did You Get Started in this Business? When I launched my first website nearly 10 years ago, I was excited to get into the game of online business. After six months of development and thousands of dollars spent on "the next big thing," my website was nowhere to be found on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. It wasn't long before I was reading every article, following SEO's, and experimenting with different SEO techniques to improve my website's ranking.

PR Tips — How to Run Your Own PR Campaign

July 31, 2012
One of the dirty little secrets about public relations is that you don’t need to hire an outside firm to do it effectively. If you have the time and desire, you can easily run an effective PR campaign yourself – and save a lot of money. In fact, when companies hire us to run an earned media campaign, these are some of the most critical steps we take.

  1. Establish a spokesperson. Someone at your organization needs to be able to field calls and answer questions from the media. Choose someone who is a clear writer, knowledgeable about your organization, and comfortable speaking to reporters on the phone.

  2. Refine your message. If a reporter from the Wall Street Journal calls you, what will you say? Your talking points should be clearly defined on paper, so you don’t fumble when the big moment comes.

  3. Build a list of journalists (and this should include influential bloggers). Chances are, there are only a limited number of journalists who really care about your industry and would be likely to write about your organization. In fact, there are probably fewer than 200 of these reporters. So make a list of them and keep it up-to-date.

  4. Embrace Twitter. Follow your list of journalists on Twitter – and, if you have a good Twitter feed, invite them to follow you.

  5. Establish yourself as a source. When appropriate, let those journalists know about your areas of expertise. When interesting stories break, offer yourself as a source of information for their articles.

Profiles in PR – Evolving Strategies

July 30, 2012
Your Name: Adam Schaeffer Your Business: Evolving Strategies Your Position: Partner & Director of Research Services Offered Public Opinion Research Your Niche Area of Expertise My area of expertise is the design, execution and analysis of message experiments. But I’m a generalist at heart; intellectual cross-pollination and creativity are essential to sustained success.

Embrace the Uncomfortable Silence

July 3, 2012
In 1996, I landed my first newspaper job in DC. One of my neighbors at the time was the Washington bureau chief of Forbes Magazine, and a really top-notch reporter. We became friends and one day I told him that I was having difficulty getting people to open up during interviews. I wanted them to give me their real opinions, but all I was getting were prefabricated talking points. So my friend gave me one of the most helpful pieces of journalistic advice I've ever received. "Embrace