Vancouver PR Firm





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 huge impact on public relations. There are many avenues for great PR and they include traditional approaches and new media. One of the areas I am excited about is in the area of brand journalism. Brand journalism allows organizations to create interesting, useful pieces – video, articles, Q&As and more – that share relevant information that is of value to the stakeholder group.



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There have been good articles written recently (The Globe and Mail and BC Business) that talk about Air Canada and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) labour negotiations and how Facebook played a strong role. Both articles are worth a read, whether you work in a union environment or not. They are proof that social media is a key tool in your organization’s communication. It’s here to stay. Even if you are engaging and facilitating open and relevant discussion, groups will still form (and are forming at this very moment) without your input. At the very least, you need to know about them.



At AHA, we have done a great deal of work studying online behaviour relevant to communication. What is being said and discussed online is a key component for an organization – from building and managing its reputation to dealing with potential issues and crisis communication. However, there are still large organizations that have not yet come to terms with this for some reason. Some aren’t even monitoring what is being said or who is saying it. More and more we are seeing issues come up, not from an outside source, but through online discussions by employees.



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At a recent client brainstorming meeting about brand journalism and how we could better tell the story of the organization, there was a senior staff member that was clearly not engaged in the process. For the purpose of this blog post, we’ll call her VP Skeptical. She sat back with her arms folded, checked her BlackBerry every minute or so, and in pure Survivor Tribal Council fashion – rolled her eyes when someone else said something that she didn’t agree with. Yet VP Skeptical didn’t speak up. So I asked her what she felt was the best story they could tell. Her response was interesting. She said (with a little bit of sarcasm in her voice): “I just don’t see the value in any of this. Why can’t we just buy an ad?”



That was an interesting comment and one I felt we had to address. As communicators, we often see the value and rationale for telling an organization’s story through a range of approaches such as media relations, videos, articles, etc. Not everyone’s brain works that way and it’s important to engage in discussion around this.



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