Public Relations
Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on February 07th, 2012
We’re doing some (early) spring cleaning at the AHA office. As we go through files, media coverage binders and jump drives, we have the opportunity to reflect a little on campaigns and projects from the past. This week, we came across the files for one of our favourite creative campaigns. In the early days of AHA, we were fortunate enough to be asked to work on a documentary series called Healing with Animals, produced by Mystique Films. This was a fabulous series that focused on how animals help humans heal.
We wanted traditional media coverage for the launch of the…
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Posted by Paul Holman of AHA Creative Strategies on February 01st, 2012
My friend, mentor and former boss, Della Smith of Q Workshops, is a smart cookie. She may, in fact, be the smartest person I have ever met. (And I have met a lot of really, really smart people!)
Now, I am not sure I would put Della up against Jeopardy genius Ken Jennings—that’s just a different kind of smart (and one that I believe has more to do with memory than anything else). But I have seen Della in a wide range of scenarios—from dealing with an organization facing a huge crisis to sipping a cold…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 24th, 2012
Once you understand what the story currently being told about your organization focuses on (see last week’s post on “The art and science of telling a great corporate story”), the next step is to identify the storyline that you want to tell. There are many story structures that you can use to tell the story in a way that engages your audience. While, at first glance, some of these approaches may seem a little “Hollywood” – keep in mind that show business is a very successful industry that is based on telling stories.
There are some standard approaches…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 19th, 2012
Telling your organization’s story isn’t as easy as some would think, but it certainly isn’t hard. It does take some time and effort, but the results provide excellent return on investment.
The fact is, stories are being told about your organization all the time. Whether the stories are good or bad, they are being told by clients or customers, by service providers, employees and contractors (and their families and friends), by competitors, your board members, government officials and by the media.
When we start working with a client, we often do a little bit of research and find some of…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 10th, 2012
January is an interesting month. People are setting goals in both their personal and professional lives. It’s a time of new beginnings, of focusing (or refocusing), of excitement and hope. We’re no different here at AHA. We took some time over the holiday season to set our goals and to outline what we want to achieve, experience and create in 2012.
One of my professional goals is to work with more clients who realize that great PR is about building relationships, about educating and informing, and about engaging with your target market or stakeholder group. Social media has made a…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on December 29th, 2011
We take media pitching seriously. We do our homework and our research. We review the work of the journalist or blogger in context to what we want to pitch. We spend the time to get it right and that shows in our results. At AHA, we have generated some exceptional media and blog coverage for clients.
It was refreshing to read this article on pitching on Ragan.com. New York Times Tech Journalist David Pogue talks about the pitches that grabbed his attention. (Just for the record, we are big fans of Pogue!) It’s worth a read. And if…
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Posted by Paul Holman of AHA Creative Strategies on December 07th, 2011
Ruth has a special video blog post from her hotel in Atlanta regarding Alec Baldwin getting removed from an airplane.
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on December 01st, 2011
Blogging has become a regular communications tool for organizations. One of the things that I have noticed is that when we work with the marketing department or agency of a client, there is a little bit of discussion over which area (communications or marketing) will develop and manage the campaign on Twitter and/or Facebook. There is never any discussion about the organization’s blog – it belongs firmly with the communications team.
Like any communications tool, blogging isn’t for everyone. It depends on the objectives, goals, overall strategy and, of course, the resources. It takes time and effort to produce a…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on November 21st, 2011
Technology makes it easy to share content. Your website, blog, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites provide the ability to publish your content. Where you publish depends on where your stakeholder group spends time and it is important to identify how they want to interact with your organization. But how do you create engaging, relevant, timely content?
Create an Editorial Schedule
Do you have a schedule of the content you will upload? A little forethought goes a long way when you are busy and need content or an idea in a hurry.
Here are some things to think about…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on November 16th, 2011
Our AHA blog is listed in Cision, a media database. It’s pretty clear, even if you only read a couple of our posts, that we write about communications: brand journalism, public relations, media relations, social media, positioning and messaging. It’s all related to strategic communication.
It seems pretty straightforward to me what to pitch to us. Which makes us shake our heads in wonder when we get pitches from random PR agencies and independent PR practitioners that have nothing to do with what we write about here. It looks to me like some people just grab any email they can…
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