Public Relations Class for Libraries

Word of mouth marketing encompasses dozens of marketing techniques that are geared toward encouraging and helping people to talk to each other about products and services.

Word of Mouth: The act of consumers providing information to other consumers.

Word of Mouth Marketing: Giving people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place. It is the art and science of building active, mutually beneficial consumer-to-consumer and consumer-to-marketer communications.

Word of mouth marketing isn't about creating word of mouth -- it's learning how to make it work within a marketing objective.

Many companies focus on communicating to their external audiences; segmenting markets, researching, developing messages and tactics. This same care and focus should be turned inside to create an internal communications plan. Effective internal communication planning enables small and large organizations to create a process of information distribution as a means of addressing organizational issues.

What’s the state of the company? Ask questions. Do some research. One form of research is to take a survey. How’s your company doing? What do your employees think about the company? You’re bound to get more/better responses from an internal survey than an external one. Some may be surprised by how much employees care and want to make their workplaces better. You may also uncover some hard truths or perceptions. This information can help lay a foundation for what messages are communicated and how they are communicated.

Why not have an internal mission statement? The statement might focus on customer service, continuous learning, quality, or striving not only to be the largest company in the market with the most sales, but to be the best company with the highest satisfaction ratings.

When did you last step back and take a hard look at the messages — intentional and unintentional — that your organization is sending out? Communication affects relationships, and how people feel about your organization is an important factor in their giving. This feeling is forged and tested on a day-to-day basis, in countless moments of truth.

The operating concepts in today's successful corporations are total quality, social responsibility, and relationship selling. The two important questions that effective organizations ask are:"How do we manage our interdependence with the community?""How do we develop excellence within our organization?" [TOP]

Put together a matrix of stakeholders and issues involving your organization This is just a grid, with stakeholder groups running down the left side and issues running across the top.

Use your online press room to inform journalists, not try to sell them.

These days, citizen journalists can be crucial to giving you free publicity. If you're hiding your online newsroom, you're missing out on the buzz.

Planning is good for public relations people, and it can contribute to the success of public relations activities. But, it takes time and effo

But, all public relations planning is not the same. It's as diverse

Contemporary planners have added buzz words like strategic, visioning, and organizational advancement to the planning lexicon. They shift into an "organizational advancement mode" to draft "strategic planning documents that enunciate organizational visions."

Public relations is a key component of a successful marketing campaign, so it's essential that PR professionals speak the language of marketers.

THE FOUR P's OF MARKETING Product: goods and services, whether bottled water or car insurance. This ‘P’ includes a product’s design and development, as well as its branding and packaging.  Place (or distribution): where a product or service is offered for sale, and how it gets there. This is how the product gets moved from the producer to the consumer.   Price: at what charge the product/service is offered for sale. Promotion: this how you let the consumers know about your product for sale. This is done through advertising, personal selling, sales promotions, direct marketing, and publicity.

FOUR C’s OF CONSUMER-SIDE MARKETING

It can be a challenge for global marketers to develop messages that resonate across national cultures, or as well the many cultures within any single nation.  

1. Have I used any extra words or sentences that are not necessary?       2. Is my average paragraph approximately 50 words?       3. Did I use any headings or subheads in the text?       4. Could any information be presented in a bulleted format?       5. Would the use of bold print or other highlights enhance key points?       6. Should any information be linked to other documents?       7. Is my work mechanically excellent?

The bottom line is basically if you want to get out of the "paper based stone age" and make your electronic material more user friendly and enhance your message effectiveness, your focus in developing electronic content should include the Three Fundamental Rules for effective written communications.

A basic principle in developing any written communication is when content is developed in a user friendly format and adjusted to meet the needs of the consumer, readability increases and message effectiveness is enhanced.

followed by a solution proposal, and wrapped it up with an action plan, a memo can write itself!

ollowed by a solution proposal, and wrapped it up with an action plan, a memo can write itself!

There are more than 150 million videos on YouTube, for instance, and when these videos go viral they register millions of views per video.

ery few understand how to harness the power of YouTube to earn money, market themselves, connect with customers, grow their business and sell more books.

Another very successful application for YouTube videos is through video book trailers as part of a book marketing campaign. In an effort to obtain book publicity for my author clients we’ll create a book trailer about the book. A book trailer is like a movie trailer in that it allows someone to preview a book both visually and via audio.  A video book trailer brings the book to life and gives the potential reader a sneak peak at the contents. We’ll then post that book trailer on YouTube and... here’s the best part… we add it to more than 41 additional video sites online for even greater exposure.