Loader
 

PR Tips

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.

PR Tips — How to Run Your Own PR Campaign

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.