Why women dominate PR

That women are so prevalent in the public relations business should be news to no one (especially frequent visitors to this site).

It’s a fact that women comprise 63 percent of PR specialist roles and 59 percent of PR management positions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, many believe that females are underrepresented at the C-level in PR.

Why? Why are there so many more women working in PR than men?

The Atlantic gave reporter Olga Khazan 3,700-plus words to answer that question in a piece that was published last week. Khazan interviewed 10 women who work in public relations to help find the answer.

It’s worth your time to chew on the whole thing, but we’ll hit a few highlights for you below:

• The media paints a glamorous picture of what comprises a female PR professional’s life. According to Khazan, “nearly every worman I spoke with mentioned Samantha Jones,” the fictional character from Sex and the City.
• Journalism is low paying and unstable. Plus, being a cub reporter is decidedly more awful than your first couple years as a PR pro. Khazan reports, “While female news reporters make $43,326, on average, (to men’s $51,578), female PR “specialists,” the lower-level job in the BLS categorization, make $55,705, while their male counterparts make $71,449.”
• In college, Khazan points to research that shows women “tend to value ‘non pecuniary,’ or non-monetary aspects of their college majors slightly more than men do, while men value their potential future earnings slightly more."
• “Studies have shown that women tend to collaborate more and prefer to work on teams, whereas men usually do better in competitive environments and prefer to fly solo. That male approach works well for journalists, while having a bit of a 'people-pleaser' gene probably attracts and/or makes it easier for women to excel in the PR environment,” Jennifer Hellickson, director of marketing at SweatGuru in Portland, Oregon, told The Atlantic.

The upshot? Khazan writes, “If there’s any takeaway from all this, it’s that the women-in-PR trend started happening for a number of reasons, and it’s not inherently bad, so it never stopped.”

By Kevin Allen

Click for Original Article

http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/17090.aspx


About us:
L&B Consultation: is a full service Multimedia Marketing & Consulting
company focusing on publicity, radio promotion,
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You Need A Social Media Manager On Your Team

There is added value in having a strategist and a communicator representing your company's brand

There are two job titles floating around the business world: social media manager and community manager. While they bear similarities, a community manager is the public face of brands, interacting with a community and generating buzz for their companies. A social media manager is a strategist and communicator, with the ability to measure and analyze effectiveness. Large companies will have both an SM and CM, while startups and small businesses are lucky to be able to fulfill even one of those positions.

Many small business owners have adopted a “do-it-myself” mentality when it comes to social media. This just leads to greater burn out. The reality is that you need someone on your team –be it a social media manager, a community manager, or a combination of the two–who represents your company on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, etc., and who is responsible for responding to comments/questions.

Below are just a few reasons why your business needs team member handling social media:

Act As Voice of the Brand. You want to have someone who is charged with managing your brand’s social media accounts in order to generate traffic and conversations. They’re the voice of the brand and act as the brand, not as their own persona. Also, this is the person who would work to create or add to the community, by generating leads and sales.

Create and Manage Accounts. This includes developing and posting content, such as Facebook updates, Twitter messages, and Instagram photos. Also, this is about following and interacting with other social media accounts, especially “influencers” and “thought leaders” in your field.

Share Video Content. If you have YouTube, a social media manager would post videos, respond to comments, and interact with other YouTube accounts, including commenting on their content and adding their videos to your company account’s playlists.

Increase SEO. In the social media training process, a strong manager will understand what it takes to boost SEO and improve your search rank. They will be able to create unique content and be able to navigate through search engines and other social media platforms that will help your company’s productivity.

Build Campaigns. This person also should be able to develop campaigns and strategies from the ground up and to see through the company’s social media endeavors. He or she should have the proper social media training to monitor campaigns in order to see what is working or what is not working and strive to improve the company’s online presence.

Focus On Automation. You want someone on board with social media training who is well-versed in different management tools and strategies (apps and content automation tools) to maintain a strong online presence for your company.

Monitor Trends. You also want someone who can stay ahead of the game by focusing on social media trends and researching best practices. This person should be able to implement new techniques for boosting your company’s online reputation and progress.

Manage Company Reputation. In the social media world, this means monitoring location listings like Google+ Local as well as tracking and responding to mentions of your company’s name and relevant keywords and reviews on sites like Yelp and Foursquare that get pushed to Twitter. A social media manger would respond to reviews as needed.


by Carolyn M. Brown  (For BlackEnterprise.com)

Click For Original Article

http://www.blackenterprise.com/small-business/you-need-a-social-media-manager-on-your-team/


About us:
L&B Consultation: is a full service Multimedia Marketing & Consulting
company focusing on publicity, radio promotion,
brand identification, brand management

Check out www.LbConsultation.com
Follow us on Twitter @LBConsultation

A guide to measuring social media ROI

There's a popular misconception that it's difficult to use targeted metrics to measure social media's return on investment (ROI). That's not true. Nor is social media only good for measuring brand awareness.

The fact is social media can offer some of the best metrics for measuring ROI. All you need to do is set your success guides—what you want to achieve and how long it will take—and measure your results against them.
Here are six simple metrics for the main social networks that you can use to measure your social media ROI across earned, owned and paid media:


1. Blogger outreach
A key component of many (if not most) social media campaigns, blogger outreach programs can offer some of the best results of any marketing tactic. Measuring your success isn't too difficult, either. All you have to do is determine the answers to the following questions:

• How many bloggers wrote about you?
• How many comments did these posts receive?
• How many social shares did the post get?
• What was your traffic pre- and post-outreach?
• How much product did you have to provide to bloggers, and how many sales did you receive?

2. Twitter
Twitter not only offers instant eyeballs, but great returns. Again, measuring your impact is relatively simple:

• What was your retweet value (cost of manpower and resources versus followers who take action)?
• How often did people use your hashtag?
• How many times did people click your vanity URL?
• How many new (genuine) followers did you get during your promotion?
• If you used something like sponsored tweets, what was the cost versus the click-throughs and conversions?

3. Facebook
Although it has its critics (including me), Facebook offers some great built-in tools and demographic options to help gauge a campaign's success:

• How many new, worthwhile fans did you make, and how many did you target?
• How many times did people like or act on your promotion message?
• If you built a Facebook application, how many times did people install or share it?
• Did you successfully reach your target demographic? (Facebook Insights can help.)
• How much did you spend on a Facebook ad, and how did click-throughs and new sales/customers compare?

4. Google+
While we don't quite know the effectiveness of brand pages on Google+ and in-line Google Ads complement Google+ content, there are ways to measure your activity:

• Has Google+ raised your profile on search, as well as resulting traffic to your site?
• How many circles have people added you to?
• How many +1s do your comments and discussions receive?
• How active is your community?
• How many ripples do your discussions create?
• How many attendees take part in your hangouts?

5. YouTube and other video sites
More than just a fun place to see kids hurt themselves on bikes, YouTube is a key tool in any marketing campaign—just ask the companies that used it during this year's Super Bowl.
Here are the questions you should ask:

• How many views did you get?
• How many likes and favorites did you receive?
• How many downloads did you get (on video sites that allow downloads)?
• How many embeds has your video seen elsewhere on the Web?
• How many subscribers did your channel attract?
• If your video had a call to action with a vanity URL, how many times did people click through?
• How many social shares did you get on the social networks your target demographics use?

6. Mobile
As marketing evolves, the different ways to reach an audience combine to create new outlets. Mobile marketing is the perfect complement to social marketing, and is easy to measure:

• Did you use a push SMS system to drive traffic to a mobile-friendly site? If so, how many views did it bring?
• Did you use QR codes? If so, how many times did people use them?
• How many downloads did your mobile app receive?
• How many times did people check-in on Gowalla and Foursquare?
• What was the most popular operating system? (This can tell you a lot about your audience's demographic and buying options.)

These questions offer just some of the immediate ways you can measure your social media success. There are more ways to measure your success, including monitoring tools and more defined analytics. Which ones you use will depend on the goals you've set and how you define success.
No matter how you collect the information you need, it all comes down to comparing man hours and financial outlay to your return.
It's important to remember that marketing can come down to luck and circumstance as much as brilliant strategy-timing and a welcoming audience are key. The one thing you can control, however, is measurement, and with social media and mobile marketing, measurement has never been easier.


A version of this article originally appeared on DannyBrown.me.


About us:
L&B Consultation: is a full service Multimedia Marketing & Consulting
company focusing on publicity, radio promotion,
brand identification, brand management

Check out www.LbConsultation.com
Follow us on Twitter @LBConsultation