New PR Skills to Complement Traditional Ones?

 

New Skills in Pr?

 John Bell wrote in his blog , Digital Influence Mapping Project about the “ideal practitioner of the future.” A kind of idealistic view of the skills and the person required for the new communications environment.

Skills

1. Create an integrated marketing and communications strategy
2. Deploy live ‘listening posts’ online and offline
3. Design and deploy an advanced search engine optimization program
4. Plan and run a new media relations program inclusive of head-of-the-tail and long tail “media”
5. Identify & engage with influencers online and offline
6. Manage communities
7. Integrate new technologies into their own lives
8. Model measurement and performance metrics including new “engagement” metrics
9. Run quick pilot programs  and evaluate on-the-fly
10. Train staff and clients continuously
11. (What am I leaving out)?

I would add to this that to really communicate effectively in the New Zealand context on behalf of clients, communications advisors need to have , or have access to the traditional PR skills as well.

The two different skill bases (with some overlap) make for a winning combination. Would you add any skills to this list in the New Zealand Context?

How to Grade Your Media Release?

The press release is dead. Long live the media release!

The power of newspapers around the world have shaped the vocabulary of public relations profesionals for decades, with those corridors of power dictating the shape, length and content of client’s release.

Today however, with the rapid assent of new media, the industry has moved to calling them media releases, since there are so many options for the eventual publishing of the material.

The Earth Times recently published a very good article on how to evaluate if your media release is making the grade. Does your release appeal to search engines? How readable is the release? and gives it a score. It’s a neat tool and its free. Not quite as comprehensive as fully optimising your release, however, it’s a good first step.

Here is the link to the article.

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/is-your-pr-making-the,418002.shtml