Author: Stephanie Janard
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10 Things Your Publicist Would Do if S/he Ran Your Company
All of the below suggestions are offered by experienced publicists in the B2B arena, including myself and several colleagues at Amendola Communications. While we fully get that a public relations program is just one of many important contributions to creating a successful company along with a whip smart product development team, a terrific product, turbo-charged…
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Please, No More “No Comments”
By now it should be settled: when confronted by an inquiring reporter, never ever respond with “No comment.” Just don’t, no matter how uncomfortable a question makes you. As others before me have emphatically noted there is no faster way to make a reporter instantly suspicious. And the public, if the reporter decides to publish…
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5 Unexpected and Cool Revelations About My Career in PR
I’m at that point in my career in PR as an agency account director that I can take a clear-eyed stock of what my job is really like and entails. I’m fascinated by some of the main characteristics I don’t think they’d necessarily be noted in a class on PR, yet they are undeniably the…
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PR Pros: Beware of Busywork Masquerading as “Essential Skills”
Some hard truths on the PR skills we really should be developing for our clients and our own professional development. A well-known public relations trade site recently ran a “listicle” of so-called essential PR skills for our modern technology-driven era. Included in the list were graphic design, analytics, and even some light HTML coding. My…
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Time to turn your trade show booth from salesroom to learning lab
“Be sure to bring back lots of product literature from the trade show,” said no one ever. As my colleague Lisa Chernikoff pointed out in a recent blog, people simply don’t go to trade shows to buy your product. They go to learn. But when they approach your booth, what do they see to compel…
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Access Denied: The Other Kind of Writer’s Block
One of these days I’m going to put together a sort of “Road Warrior Olympics,” in which contestants compete on how well they can conduct business while riding in an Uber, going through security at the airport, and even in the midst of the plane’s takeoff and landing. That’s how impressed I am with the…
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Why I (Still) Hate the Term “Content Marketing”
A few years back, I made a minor ripple on the internet okay, make that a very minor ripple when I dashed off a plaintive lament about the use of the word “content” in content marketing. As I noted at the time, the industry couldn’t have picked a more lifeless word to describe using interesting,…
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A Case Study on How to Get More Case Studies
They’re effective, trustworthy, and prospects actually read them–but marketers can encounter surprising resistance in securing case studies from their customers. Here’s how to overcome the three most common challenges standing in the way of compiling a great collection of customer success stories. CHALLENGE #1: Your company’s sales reps keep blowing off your requests to schedule…
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The best indicator of company success? Believing in your value prop
Confidence. When you have it, life is a panorama of possibilities. Success just seems to follow, and even the occasional failure turns into a new opportunity. As a longtime marketing and PR copywriter, I’ve noticed company success follows a similar trajectory. Highly successful companies are, without exception, led by true believers in the company’s products…
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CEOs: It’s Time to Start Writing Your 2017 Manifesto
For what seems ages, you’ve mulled over an issue that you’re now convinced deserves a wider platform for passionate debate. Perhaps it’s an alarm to sound that no one in your industry is articulately ringing or a bold challenge to wake up a complacent profession. Whatever the intent of your message, if you’re a credible…