As PR professionals we spend a lot of time learning journalistic techniques and rules to demonstrate to reporters that, even though we may not have a journalism degree, we follow their unparallel dedication to the craft. In Journalism 101, a student begins to learn about AP Style (Associated Press). This is the writing standard to which all journalists adhere to…and you should too.

It is also what public relations professionals should adhere to as well if you want to be taken seriously. Sometimes clients don’t understand why we use Calif. for California instead of the postal abbreviate of CA. AP style is the reason why.

Here are some simple tips to make your news release professional in the eyes of a journalist.

States

• STANDING ALONE: Spell out the names of the 50 U.S. states when they stand alone in textual material.
• EIGHT NOT ABBREVIATED: The names of eight states are never abbreviated in datelines or text: Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Ohio, Texas and Utah.

Titles

• Capitalize formal titles when used immediately before a name. Lowercase formal titles when used alone or in constructions that set them off from a name by commas. (i.e. “…said Shelby Kraus, vice president of public relations.”)
• Use lowercase at all times for terms that are job descriptions rather than formal titles.

Numerals

• Spell out first through ninth when they indicate sequence in time or location: first base, the First Amendment, he was first in line.
• Starting with 10th use figures: she sold 10 pineapples.

Here are a few words to watch when you are writing as well.

• Regardless, not irregardless
• Loose instead of lose
• Preventative vs. preventive
• Expecially vs. especially
• Wary vs. Weary
• Advice vs. Advise
• Assure in lieu of ensure
• Supposedly vs. supposably
• Titled vs. entitled.

You may think it is too much work to follow special rules created by the journalism community, but I have seen editors throw away news releases because they are unprofessional in their mind. To stay on top of the game, you may want to subscribe to the AP Stylebook (a guide to writing like a journalist) online at apstylebook.com.

Photo Credit: Flickr user wwarby

Let’s begin by saying I’m not a fan of reality shows. Obviously the networks love them because they’re cheap to produce (no Charlie Sheen-sized salaries) and they’re disposable (anyone remember “Amish in the City” or “Sorority Life?”). Plus, to me, having Snookie and the Kardashians elevated to the level of “stars” is beyond absurd.

But I have to confess there are two reality shows I find fascinating, probably because they’re so remarkably different and yet so remarkably the same.

The first is the AMC’s new series “The Pitch”… a behind-the-scenes look at the unique agency culture, and what actually goes on as two rival advertising agencies lock horns in a sudden-death competition to capture a new client. With only seven days from assignment to presentation, it’s intense, hard work for every team member. Nerves and emotions are tested, and every ounce of experience and talent is tapped as they look to find the big idea … the one that the prospect will find attractive, even irresistible.

It all leads up to the actual presentation, where they have to shelve their fears and find the energy to passionately sell their ideas to an often wary prospect. Then, it’s either total elation or utter despair when the client makes their selection on which agency has hooked their business, and which one, after all their time and effort, will see the prize slip through their fingers.

It’s work that’s exhilarating and rewarding, yet often vicious, discouraging and agency life-threatening.

The second is the series “Swamp People.” Its about people who live and work in the Louisiana bayou, specifically, about guys who make their living hunting alligators. (See, I told you they were different.) It’s all wrapped in the Cajun culture that’s built on the “deep-rooted traditions of a unique, hard-working people.”

The first Wednesday in September, alligator season in Louisiana begins and it lasts only 30 days. In this brief time, competing teams of hunters must earn most of their yearly income by capturing their limit of alligators. It’s a high risk occupation that depends on the skill and experience of the hunter and the whims of weather.

They’re always on the hunt, seeking the best location, then placing a hook with a hopefully irresistible bait and the goal of capturing the biggest, most dominant alligator possible.

(See, I told you they were the same.)

Hard working teams, fearlessly trying to capture “the big one” … in a job that’s exhilarating and rewarding, yet often vicious, discouraging and life-threatening.

And in both, as alligator hunter Troy says … “No guts, no gator.”

Have you heard of Pinterest? If not, you may want to find a female aged 18-44 to explain it to you before you get too far behind  the growing social media site!

The Pinterest site was launched in March of 2010, but I can even say I didn’t know about it until last fall, which is the timeframe the site started to catch on. However, the invite-only site has now climbed to third in the rankings of social media sites in total number of visitors according to Experian Hitwise. Pinterest falls behind Facebook and Twitter, but has passed LinkedIn and Google+. The site, co-founded by Iowa native Ben Silbermann, can no longer be ignored, especially in the marketing world.

In order to join Pinterest, an invitation is needed. An invitation can be obtained by requesting it from Pinterest or from a friend (which is faster). Log-in then requires going through a Facebook or Twitter account, which allows for postings about new pins to show up in the feeds of the other social media channel.  This connection to Facebook and Twitter is what has made Pinterest take off so quickly.  It automatically finds your friends already on Pinterest – and you can follow all of them with only one click.

What makes Pinterest different than other social media?

Pinterest is an online bulletin board,and users can ‘collect’ items of interest by pinning them to their boards. Images, videos or articles, can be ‘re-pinned’ from other users, uploaded or pinned from any website with the ‘Pin it’ button. The items are pinned with an image, which is linked to a source website, unless it is an uploaded image. The boards are simple, with the image featured on a white background and the text is minimal. The images and simple design are appealing to the eyes of users and it keeps them scrolling down the page, which continues to load pins as the scrolling continues.

From a business standpoint, Pinterest, according to Shareholic, has been driving higher volumes of website referral traffic than Twitter and other social media sites in the past months. Pinning an image, article or video that links directly back to your site will draw followers into visiting your site.

Tips for Businesses:

• Make your site ‘pin-able’. Add a ‘Pin It’ button to the business website, have attractive pictures to pin on your site, rather than just words.
• Build a lifestyle around your brand. Start your own Pinterest site and pin more than just brand items. It makes creates a lifestyle for your brand, makes the brand engaging, more personable and develops more than just a ‘push’ relationship with followers.
• Keep it consistent. Don’t pin a large amount of pins every once and awhile, build it up. Every time something new is pinned it is featured on the Pinterest homepage, so scatter your pinning and the business name will come up more on the homepage.
• Use keywords. In the description bar, insert keywords or use hashtags or include a link back to the original page. Keywords will help the Pin come up in Pinterest searches.
• Create a promotion. Whether it is through a pinning contest or by pinning coupons, followers will take notice and may become more engaged as followers.
• Check out HubSpot’s Ebook: How to Use Pinterest for Business

Pinners to Check Out:

• Drake University: The Drake marketing team has developed their Pinterest account to help showcase the college experience and lifestyle at Drake.
• Panera Bread: Panera is building up their Pinterest site, while dispersing items that drive followers to their site they also pin items to promote a happy, healthy lifestyle. Their contest called #MakeTodayBetter, is a great example of getting followers engaged with the brand.
• Visualities Videography: The videographer does more than showcase their videos, they help suggest ideas for the entire wedding planning along with recipes and gifts.
• Salvation Army Family Stores: Salvation Army, a non-profit, has used their boards to promote the sales of the Family Stores with boards that suggest how to re-purpose items that may be found in their stores.

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Online Advertising Manager ranked in CareerCast's 10 Best Jobs of 2012.

Two things happened within the last few weeks that have reminded me of just how cool my job is.

First, I was reading my iPad at the gym a few weeks ago and came across a story about the “Best and Worst Jobs of 2012.” My curiosity forced me to open it, even though not seeing marketing occupations listed among the top numbers in the past few years has been more than a little depressing.

Guess what? “Online Advertising Manager” just made the Careercast.com Top Ten list of Best Jobs. That’s part of what I do here at HRB so I’m finally in the company of the software engineers!

It seems that not only the current value, but the potential for job growth, in online advertising is finally being recognized. Since online media has such a huge, and constantly increasing, daily influence on people, more work in the online media area appears not only logical but likely.

To see the story yourself, check it out here:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/04/best-and-worst-jobs-of-2012-most-stressful-careers/

The other “how cool my job is” reminder was my recent opportunity to present to a class of Mt. Mercy University graduate students. Being a marketing class, I shared my role and experiences with Internet marketing and how that dovetails with what they’ve been learning about developing strategies. The class had mostly non-traditional students with work experience in not only marketing, but also in finance and IT. They had some truly insightful questions, which spoke both to their interest and also to my good fortune at being engaged in the ever-changing online climate.

Having to organize and speak about the things I do on a daily basis really revved me up. I’m making another presentation on May 17 and I can’t wait. (This time though I’ll avoid the coughing attack by bringing some water and cough drops.)

I have been interning at HRB for nearly four weeks now and there are still several family members and friends that I have been updating. However, when I tell them “I am a PR intern at a marketing agency,” they have the confused look pass over their face. What is a marketing agency? What do they do?

This was a question I asked myself many months ago. “Marketing agency”, sounds interesting, but I wasn’t sure what they did. Well, a quick Google search yielded some results to my inquiry. The first definition I came across was from About.com, “An agency that handles all aspects of the advertising process, including planning, design, production, and placement. Today, full-service generally suggests that the agency also handles other aspects of marketing communication, such as public relations, sales promotion, Internet and direct marketing.”

Not a bad definition, but it still left me with some questions, so I searched on and found another definition from Business Dictionary, “Firm that (1) creates new promotional ideas, (2) designs print, radio, television, and Internet advertisements, (3) books advertisement space and time, (4) plans and conducts advertising campaigns, (5) commissions research and surveys, and (6) provides other such services that help a client in entering and succeeding in a chosen market. In general, advertising agencies are not deemed agents of the advertisers, because they act as principals for the services they buy on behalf of their clients.”

Wow, they can do all that? The second definition adds depth into the capabilities of a marketing agency and it made it clearer to me. The idea of interning and working in an agency was intriguing to me because not only were the many areas to channel my experience and knowledge into, but there were also numerous clients in various industries. I am looking forward to helping meet client’s marketing needs through all the services HRB offers throughout my internship.

However, I may not rattle off the entire definition to the next confused person I run into, but rather I may just say, “A marketing agency provides all the services a company needs to reach and connect to its target audience and meet its marketing needs.” Or, send them off to watch an episode of “Mad Men”.

Sara Mouw, a University of Iowa MBA student focusing on marketing, has joined HRB (Henry Russell Bruce) as a public relations intern.

Mouw, a 2010 graduate of Central College with a BA in Business Management, spent a year as an Assistant Sports Information Director at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Ore. before returning to her home state to further her education. She brings the experience of interacting with the media, writing news releases and creating a buzz on social media to her role at HRB.

“Not only was her degree a good match for HRB, but her experience in a highly competitive sports marketing arena gives her an edge in understanding the expectations of coworkers and clients,” said Shelby Kraus, V.P of Public Relations/Account Supervisor.  “Her maturity will also give her the ability to get up-to-speed quickly and have a very diverse and effective internship.”

When not studying marketing theories or writing news releases, the former Central College volleyball player is teaching the game she loves. Upon returning to Iowa, Mouw joined the coaching staff of the Iowa Rockets Volleyball Club and is currently coaching a 17 and under team that recently qualified for the USA Volleyball Junior Nationals.

You might’ve seen our recent post announcing our new mobile site. We’d like to dive deeper into the design process, and point out the key components we set out to achieve. There were a few clear goals we had in mind while designing & building our mobile site. We chose some of them in order to go beyond what we’ve seen with the usual assortment of mobile sites today.

Seamless & Responsive Design

This phrase has been getting thrown around in website design for mobile devices discussions quite a bit lately, and we know that means the need for keeping focused on what people want becomes more difficult than simply following trends without fully understanding the rationale behind it. To counter that, we found that taking some common conventions head-on would help focus us on making the user experience better than ever.

Initially, we found that the use of something like http://m.hrb-ideas.com is fine & something that people have grown to terms with, but there are still some issues with detecting a mobile site by using a separate web address. For instance, link sharing has a discrepancy from person-to-person due to the device-specific URL rather than simply pointing to the content and adjusting for the visitor when the page is being viewed. It also restricts and isolates the mobile site in a way that we didn’t want to limit. For instance, we had the idea that, by having everything located at a single URL, the site could seamlessly respond to what the user is using/wants in a (hopefully) useful way. As a result, we’ve introduced a new feature on our site where the site automatically switches to the mobile site as soon as the screen is too small to show the full site.

Here’s a video of it in action (running in Google Chrome & sped up 2x for the sake of keeping the demonstration short):

This is especially useful when viewing the site via an iPad as the screen isn’t wide enough to show the full site when held vertically, but it is wide enough if held horizontally. It’s entirely up to the visitor to determine which way works best for them, and the level of control & custom tailoring is something we haven’t seen much of yet. If the mobile site isn’t for you, there’s still a button to switch between the full & mobile site that will remember the preference from that point forward.

Designing for Touch

The use of touch screens changes some fundamental design concepts set with a keyboard & mouse in mind. This is not just due to hardware limitations (e.g. you can’t have stuff happen when hovering over something anymore [a tap is required]), but there are also design decisions that have to be made in order to avoid overlooking the niceties that people have come to expect when using a mobile device. To address this, we reworked our entire navigation to fall in line with modern mobile and touch conventions while streamlining the featured navigation to be tailored to what people would want when using a mobile device. Another important aspect was adding touch gestures where one would expect, and now all of the content cycles/slideshows (e.g. homepage & portfolio) have the ability to be navigated via swipes left & right rather than needing to tap on the left & right buttons.

Details, Details, Details

There are certainly things that many visitors will overlook while using our mobile site. We set out to use CSS layouts, shadows, etc. when possible so they show at full-resolution at all times. In addition to that, some of the primary images on the site were made at 2x resolution so they show at full-resolution on Retina resolution displays (which is not exclusive to Apple devices).

Text was made to be more compact on smaller screens so it’s a more efficient use of space (while still being legible), and text is shown at a larger size on tablets since they have more room and are usually held farther away when reading.

iOS users get the added benefit of complete home screen integration as they can add our site alongside all of the apps on their device. They then get treated to a high-res app icon on their app screen, can visit our site with one tap, and don’t have any of the web browser’s interface taking up room on the screen. It’s really worth checking out.

There’s definitely more to our mobile site than what was highlighted, but this should cover the three primary goals that we set out to achieve while we asked ourselves to “build a mobile app” with us as the client. We’re excited to hear what you think about it, and we would love to hear feedback or any questions you have that we could address in a future article. Most importantly, we hope you enjoy our new mobile site!

St. Louis Cardinal mascot “Fredbird” talks baseball with Denise and Colleen at the grand opening of Jumer’s new “Blue Square Café.”

“Fredbird” points out his displeasure at seeing a chicken dish on the “Blue Square Café” menu.

It’s finally time to give everyone’s taste buds a workout.

The new “Blue Square Café” menu, designed and produced by HRB.

No related posts.

You can get bumped even if you’ve paid for it.

As we move forward into the 2012 election year, there are several things to be aware of in the world of broadcast advertising. There are specific political windows that will have an impact on our clients’ advertising schedules. The two key dates to keep in mind when scheduling advertising during a political year are the primaries and the general election. In Iowa, the caucus is Jan. 3 and the Presidential election is Nov. 6. The political window for a primary is 45 days prior to the election date and the general election is 60 days prior, so plan accordingly.

Broadcast Television

Television advertising is the main concern. During a political window, political advertisers buying broadcast television time are entitled to the lowest unit rate, which could lead to rate increases prior to the political window. They also have the right to reasonable access, which means stations cannot refuse candidate ads. This could affect inventory and availability for other advertisers. All dayparts are affected by political advertising; however, the news dayparts will experience the greatest impact. A daypart is a period of time in a day during which TV and radio stations broadcast programs. Here are a few tips to navigate this crazy season:

• Avoid the last two weeks of the political window if possible and adjust your daypart mix around news programming.
• Purchase broadcast television early before the rates increase.
• Plan for pre-empts, regardless of how far out your schedule has been placed.

Cable Television

Political advertising has increased in cable television, but because cable has greater availability, rates are less likely to be impacted on local cable. The major news networks such as Fox News, CNN and MSNBC will be affected by political advertising much more than the broader networks so look at your audience demographic and see if those broader networks can work for you.

Radio

The political windows remain the same for radio advertising. But because there is less political ad spending on radio than on television, there is less concern regarding radio inventory. Political advertising tends to be focused on news/talk stations rather than on music stations, which works to most businesses benefit. In general, any added value opportunities or bonus commercials, more than likely, will not air during a political window, because that affects the lowest possible unit rate that political advertisers are entitled to. The reality is, the closer it gets to Election Day, the more difficult it becomes for our clients’ to maintain their advertising schedules. If you do not use a professional media buyer, make sure you talk to your reps so you are not surprised about being “bumped” due to political season.

On the heels of Apple’s iAd last year, Google announced that they are adding rich ad serving to mobile devices courtesy of HTML5. This announcement has flown under the radar for the most part so what makes this stand out from Apple’s service? The biggest difference is that these ads can be shown on regular websites whereas iAd is limited to only be used in apps. Google has added this service to DoubleClick, a company Google acquired in 2007 for $3.1 billion, under their rich media toolset called DoubleClick Studio.

Downloading the information sheet (pdf) that Google provided alongside this announcement shows that Google predicts, by 2015, mobile devices are going to be the number one screen though which people engage with advertiser’s brands. This is no small claim considering the level of adoption the personal computer has reached, but I’m not sure if television is included in that claim seeing how they are talking about interactive advertisements.

Mobile advertising can provide a level of usefulness that other forms of advertising haven’t been able to achieve. People bring these devices with them everywhere, and that on its own is an incredibly important aspect (ex. seeing an advertisement for a restaurant while at home might bring it to your attention to go there someday, but an ad for the same restaurant while you’re looking something up on your phone might help you choose where you’re going for lunch that day).

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These devices have integrated cameras and a bunch of sensors so the level of interactivity and intuitiveness can surpass previous mediums. What has been seen on mobile devices thus far is just the tip of the iceberg, and having established distribution platforms evolve to accommodate these capabilities is a good starting point.