Tag: content

Four considerations to integrate AI into your health care PR practices

Written by Stacy Skelly on July 12, 2023. Posted in Firm Culture.

For the public relations industry, as for nearly every sector right now, artificial intelligence remains largely an unknown. AI’s ethical use is hotly debated. Its capability to accelerate our work is unmatched. Yet none of us can fully comprehend the impact it will have on health care PR practices or on health care overall.

In fact, the Federal Trade Commission is currently investigating generative AI platform ChatGPT. According to The New York Times, the investigation is based on “its collection of data and its publication of false information on individuals.” With the increasing adoption of this technology, it is crucial that we stay up to date with the advancements but remain cautious of the results.

That’s why our TRG team is staying connected to the changing nature of AI and know there are multiple avenues to explore:

AI-based services create new efficiencies for our team. We’ve been using it to create new efficiencies and enable our employees to spend their time on higher-level thinking. For example, our team now uses an AI-based service that transcribes voluminous material within minutes, enabling our staff to spend more time on higher-impact work such as our message-testing and commentary-development processes.

Generative AI, like ChatGPT, is a great tool for brainstorming. AI can elevate brainstorming to a new level. Stuck on how to reach a new audience? Looking for ideas on a tag line? Considering what tactics might work for a PR campaign? Now, a simple online query can eliminate the challenge of a blank screen and get those creative juices flowing. We intend to use ChatGPT to jump-start the creative process when needed. But this comes with a caveat: nothing generated by these programs should be taken at face value and used without careful checking. We also will not input confidential internal or client data into these platforms, which could then make that information available to others.

Accuracy is an issue and needs to be monitored. Another huge challenge with these programs is their potential to spread misinformation and disinformation and promote biases. In fact, AI sites even caution that their outputs might contain factual errors. So, while it might seem like the sky is falling—and the robots will soon be cranking out press releases and messaging platforms—there’s no replicating the human touch. We still have expertise and know-how that ChatGPT doesn’t. And it is our responsibility to ensure client content is accurate and fair. We’ll also be working with our vendors to closely monitor their use of AI.

Staying ahead of the technology will make us better PR pros. It would be easy to try to ignore the trend toward AI and let somebody else figure it out. But at TRG, we are always seeking innovative ways to meet client needs. AI has the potential to boost our creativity and speed our workflow as we give our clients cutting-edge communications advice. My research in ChatGPT, for instance, recently helped me provide guidance to a client considering the best way to announce AI enhancements to its own technology platforms.

My career in public relations has already seen massive shifts in how we do our work. AI is the next frontier. Rather than retreating from the unknowns, we believe that learning how AI can improve our skills will only make us better communicators.

Nourishing your Social Media Campaigns

Written by Alyssa Slovin on March 23, 2023. Posted in Increasing Awareness, Positioning Issues and Brands.

Your organization has worked hard and just finished preparing new resources, and you are excited for your audience to begin using them. You’ve posted all the new material on your website, but when you check your traffic, you don’t see the spike in page visits that you were expecting. It turns out that most of your audience is unaware of the new content because you didn’t effectively promote it on social media.

At TRG, we work hard with all our clients to perfect their messaging, and one of our goals as a health care public relations firm is to increase awareness of those messages — whether publicizing a scientific study, new client resources, or registration for an upcoming event.

Social media campaigns are a great way for our clients to reach their audiences since so much of the public is on social media — patients, doctors, educators, students and consumers — and it is a valuable source of owned media for any organization.

However, telling your organization’s story on social channels is not as easy as it may seem. Here are some key elements that we consider when implementing our social media campaigns.

Develop content around your organization’s goals. Remember, social media is not just a place where young people share pictures with their friends. Your organization’s social media posts should be strategically planned around your goals so your audience understands your mission and trusts you as a source of information.

For example, we recently worked with a client about the types of content they want to be posting. Their focus is on professional education, and they were debating posting about various national observances that were not necessarily relevant to their mission. We collaborated to work out a system to spotlight only select observances that felt authentically related to their current work and future goals.

Use paid social campaigns carefully. After putting in countless hours of work on a project, it’s tempting to just click the “boost” button on your Facebook newsfeed to increase impressions for a few dollars. If impressions were your only goal, that would be a fine plan. But putting real money behind a post only for the algorithm to show it to unrelated audiences will not increase the account engagement and bring more users to your site. Instead, when we create social media ad campaigns, we prefer using targeted audiences and conducting A/B testing to gauge reactions and make changes based on the results.

Track the sources of your website traffic. There are countless ways for your audience to find your website, a factor you should always be aware of and use to your advantage. A great way to do this is by UTM tagging, a method of tagging the links you share to quantify the traffic based on source, content type and content topic. UTM tags are not directly related to social media, but UTM-tagged links can be shared on social media to get a better idea of your organization’s analytics and make informed decisions for the future.

For example, we might learn that the blogs we post on your organization’s LinkedIn page with messages from leaders are the most-clicked links. With this insight, we could increase the focus on creating and sharing this content.

Carefully crafted social media campaigns allow organizations to introduce themselves to both new and familiar audiences in ways that would not be possible otherwise. Having a specific strategy is key to putting your best foot forward.

Executive Thought Leadership: An Important Investment for 2023

Written by Lauren Musiol on January 13, 2023. Posted in Building Credibility, Positioning Issues and Brands.

You are reading through your morning news when a story piques your interest about how to tell whether respiratory symptoms signal COVID-19 or the flu or RSV. You begin to read the article in more detail and notice that a physician from another health system is quoted as the main expert in the article.

You are scrolling through LinkedIn and see a post about an executive at a competitor organization who has won Modern Healthcare’s 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare.

You are checking your email and notice several promotional emails from major industry meetings, including HLTH, ViVE and Becker’s Annual Meeting. When you click and scroll through the confirmed speakers you notice several notable names of other health care executives from other organizations who are confirmed as speakers.

All these situations are thought-leadership opportunities which can be capitalized on to build the reputation of your organization and its key executives. And, if any of these situations sound familiar, you may want to start thinking about making a bigger investment in building your organization’s thought-leadership platform.

So what exactly is thought leadership? It’s the process of publicly establishing an organization or an individual as a recognized authority within a particular industry or on a particular topic. It occurs when an organization or individual’s opinions and advice become widely accepted and valued as a trusted source for perspective on an important subject.

Building a successful thought-leadership platform does not occur overnight. You must be in it for the long game and understand that establishing credibility and clout can take years of cultivating relationships, carving out areas of expertise and identifying the right opportunities to showcase members of your leadership team. While you likely will not see dividends from your effort very quickly, you must stay the course because your investment will eventually pay off by helping to:

Create visibility for your executives and, in turn, your organization,
Position your executive as a leader in the health care industry,
Establish your executive and organization as the go-to source for reporters,
Build lasting trust with key stakeholders, and
Open doors to new opportunities for engagement with other top minds/organizations in the health care industry.

I’ll give you two examples. One TRG client is an Alzheimer’s research institute that has become world-renowned. This scientific organization had been doing groundbreaking work for more than a decade, but it was not on the national radar screen of the leading health care reporters because they had not yet made a strategic investment in becoming recognized thought leaders. Through their engagement with TRG and our work to build the reputations of both the organization and its key leaders, the client is now a go-to source for every major national reporter from The New York Times to The Associated Press to NPR whenever breaking news occurs about Alzheimer’s. Another client is a children’s health system that is paving the way for a new approach to whole person care. Changes in their executive leadership meant rebuilding and re-establishing the health system as a leading source. After several years working to establish their new executives as go-to sources, they are now frequently sought after for speaking opportunities at major industry meetings and widely quoted in the media and recognized with top industry awards.

So, what can you do to raise your executive team’s thought-leadership profile? Here are four tips to consider as you get started.

Carve out a specific area of issue expertise.

This is a crucial first step to building any thought-leadership platform. You must establish which particular topic/area of expertise you want to be known for and have the most information to contribute to. It’s important to determine where your executive/organization can provide a unique perspective that adds value and depth to the public conversation and doesn’t just repeat the current discussion. You must be able to provide fresh ideas and thinking so that people want to hear what you have to say.

Start small and set realistic expectations.

It’s unrealistic to think your executive will be the keynote, mainstage speaker at a major industry event right off the bat. You need to recognize this and identify opportunities to help build your executive’s credibility, so they become a more sought-after speaker. Look for opportunities such as a panelist or even a moderator at smaller industry-focused meetings so you can begin to establish that credibility and use it as a steppingstone for more prominent opportunities.

Keep a running list of opportunities.

This may sound like an oversimplified piece of advice, but missing deadlines can hinder your ability to build a thought-leadership platform. Many speaking engagements and award opportunities have ongoing deadlines throughout the year. For example, a meeting scheduled for September might have a submission deadline in March. Make sure your tracker is up to date and that you are constantly looking for out-of-the-box opportunities that may put your executive in front of an important key audience. Sometimes, the quality of people in the room is worth more than the quantity.

Never underestimate the power of social media.

Building your executive’s social media presence is another important way to build their credibility and clout, helping them to make connections with key audiences. Working with them to share an interesting perspective related to a news article on LinkedIn can help expose your executive and your organization to new stakeholders. Additionally, working with your executive to retweet relevant news articles can help build reporter connections as many reporters are held accountable for the virality of their articles.

An investment in thought leadership can reap huge benefits for both your executives and your organization but remember to be patient with the process. Your hard work will eventually pay off!

Be Your Own — and Your Team’s — Best Editor: Six Tips for Editing Like A Pro

Written by Beth Casteel on April 26, 2021. Posted in Building Credibility.

This article also appeared in Bulldog Reporter.

Everyone needs an editor. In our world of public relations, everyone is a writer and an editor at some point. Here are some tips for being a better editor, whether you are reviewing the work of a colleague or giving your own first draft one last look:

Read it first — All of it. When you are editing someone else’s draft, always read it all the way through before you really try to edit it. Don’t try to edit sentence by sentence. Absorbing the entire piece, without stopping to edit anything, will help you understand where it is going, how it is structured, and how the transitions work (or don’t work) before you dive in to make edits. You show respect for the original author and ensure cohesion when you edit the piece as a whole.

Read it out loud. When you review something that you have written, repeatedly retooled, and refined, it’s easy to skim past phrases or whole sentences, assuming that they say what you think they say. It may seem odd at first, but try reading it aloud. This helps you see (and hear) more clearly what is actually written on the page. Saying the words gives you a feel for the flow and a sense of how transitions work. As the words flow — or stumble — from your mouth, awkward phrasing and construction become more obvious.

Change the layout. Changing how the copy looks on the page by resetting the margins or choosing a two-column layout can help you see it in a fresh way, especially after you’ve spent a lot of time on revisions. Narrow columns are easier on the eye than a wide page and can help you more readily spot errors and weaknesses.

Walk away. A short walk or a good night’s sleep can help you see the world — and your writing — in a different way. Make time to step away and come back to your copy fresh, even if time away from the screen is brief.

Read backwards. Read your article one paragraph at a time from the bottom up. This is another way to provide a fresh view after you have toiled for too long.

Listen to your gut. If something seems off, but you are not quite sure why, don’t just let it go. Stop and re-read the troubling section until you understand what triggered your gut reaction. If it is a “fact” that seems wrong, take the time to look it up or ask questions. If the language seems difficult or confusing, take the time to understand why it bothers you and fix it. Common solutions are breaking one sentence into two, removing excess words, or using simpler, more direct language.

Take time to ask questions and look at writing in new ways to make your team’s copy shine.

Optimizing Facebook Live to Engage Your Target Audience

Written by Stephanie Wight on November 15, 2016. Posted in Elevating Reputations.

The Reis Group has recently taken Facebook Live by storm, actively utilizing this relatively new broadcasting tool to bring added value and drive key messages to our clients’ target audiences. Facebook Live has proven to be highly relevant for our health care PR industry and appears to be a lasting trend that will continue to grow.

As we’ve managed several Facebook Live events for our clients, from Q&As to event broadcasts, we have gathered several lessons learned in the planning, implementing and going-live stages. Here are five helpful takeaways for optimizing Facebook Live:

Create an event page: In order to drive awareness in promoting your Facebook Live event, create an event page sharing a description and inviting followers to join. You can promote the event page on your social channels, and add some ad dollars to boost it to your target audience. Just before going live, remind guests who responded “interested” or “attending” to the event that the video will be live on your Facebook page, not the event page.
Minimize scripting: Since Facebook Live is a less formal video format that is meant to be conversational, consider offering the speaker several talking points, rather than a script. You may want to write out the introduction, however, so the moderator or speaker makes sure to include all the important points. Since consumers will be tuning in and out of the video throughout the live event, it is important to periodically reiterate some of the key information about why you’re having the event, who the expert is, how to get more info, etc.
Coordinate bodies in the room: Based on the format you choose for your Facebook Live, you will need additional people off-camera to staff the event. Coordinate who will be monitoring questions from Facebook, and whether they will be sharing questions verbally off-screen, or monitoring while on-screen. Also, designate who will be in charge of filming and who will be moderating for the speaker, if necessary.
Conduct a practice run: Set up a private Facebook group or private stream to practice your Facebook Live set-up in the location of your event. This will help you determine the best seating, branding, lighting, camera set-up, staff assistance needed, etc. Additionally, be sure to test your Wi-Fi connection, speed and reliability.
Plant seed questions: In the beginning of the live event, you may not immediately see an influx of questions, so it’s a good idea to have friends or coworkers on stand-by to ask pre-determined questions via the comments section. Additionally, if you have a moderator on screen, they can have some initial questions to address with the speaker as well.

We are excited to continue managing Facebook Live events for our clients, and tweaking our methods each time, based on lessons learned. Do you have any additional takeaways from your experience with Facebook Live? Share with us in the comments.

Write Like You Talk — and 5 Other Unorthodox Writing Tips

Written by Peter Perl on October 12, 2016. Posted in Positioning Issues and Brands.

Clients hire PR firms to tell their stories. Accurately. Interestingly. Powerfully.

It’s not easy work, so that’s why they pay someone else to do it. To be successful, PR professionals can’t just go through the motions. With each project, we must tell stories in a compelling enough way to attract the attention of key audiences, particularly the news media. Here are a few tips accumulated over my 40 years of writing for mass audiences:

Try to write more like you talk. The goal is to make the topic as interesting and accessible as possible to readers. Colleges teach us to try to sound intelligent by using big words in complicated sentences. Don’t.

Imagine your aunt or uncle. If they were to ask you what you are writing, you should be able to explain it clearly. Write it that way.

Tell a story. Don’t write a report. Reports are usually boring. Sometimes boredom is inevitable because of the topic. But it doesn’t always have to be that way.

Avoid “Stop Signs.” The goal is to attract the reader’s attention, and then reward them by having them sail through the content and easily absorb the message. Lo-o-ong sentences with complicated structure, multiple clauses and unfamiliar words can all break the flow.

Mix up your word choices. One Stop Sign for readers is excessive repetition. If you use the word disease 10 times in a 300-word medical news release, readers get annoyed and distracted. Use illness, ailment, infection or whatever else accurately substitutes.

Proofread–and proofread. The biggest mistake is failing to do this. Read it to yourself. Read it one more time. (Maybe even read it aloud, somewhere privately.) See whether you have unwittingly created Stop Signs!

5 Tips to Building a Strong Media Monitoring Methodology

Written by Jean-Paul Horrigan on August 11, 2016. Posted in Positioning Issues and Brands.

Content is everywhere. It’s printed, uploaded, and broadcast through a vast array of media on a daily if not hourly basis. So how are you ensuring that your media monitoring program is getting through the noise and capturing everything? Follow these five tips for maintaining a methodical approach to news and social media monitoring.

Tip 1: Develop Keywords.

Brainstorm a targeted list of keywords relevant to your client. At The Reis Group, when choosing keywords, we’re mindful of the domain in which our content might be found. Periodically review what you have captured and attempt to identify any emerging trends in coverage. You may find that your brand is mentioned in ways your keywords might not cover. Further refining of what you capture could help you find relevant media.

Tip 2: Prioritize Capturing Types of Media.

Determine the types of media that are important and prioritize how you spend your time capturing content. For example, a client may care more about articles published in online and print sources over blogs. Knowing which type of content you’re after is critical to efficient monitoring.

Tip 3: Use a Media Monitoring Suite.

Once you have your keywords and know what types of media your client values, you can choose a media monitoring suite to help capture articles. Mention, one of many suites, can categorize content by its source. Choose to view content from news sites or blogs, social media posts on Twitter and Facebook, videos, and more.

Tip 4: Track your Key Messages.

Feedly and other media monitoring tools are great resources for finding relevant articles. But what they don’t always help with is capturing metrics such as tone, or key spokespersons, and messages. To counteract this, establish a list of variables (like the above three) by which you will evaluate content. Evaluating this data will contribute to in-depth reporting and help measure the client’s impact.

Tip 5: Create An Integrative, Comprehensive Strategy.

Screening articles can be time-consuming, and studies have shown that readers can miss between 30% and 40% of keywords. This has caused many PR professionals to rely on media monitoring suites. However, it is not enough to rely on these systems alone. You will want to create redundancies. Set Google Alerts for your keywords. Double check that your media monitoring suite is capturing everything. Get in the habit of completing a periodic search, outside of your media monitoring suite and Google Alerts.

By following these five steps, you’re well on your way to creating a comprehensive media monitoring strategy that is optimized for your client’s PR needs.

Measurement Tactics: Improving Messaging & Engagement

Written by Stephanie Wight on July 8, 2016. Posted in Increasing Awareness.

In a crowded online space, social media posts require targeted messaging and visuals to reach and engage your desired audience. In order to gain traction with consumers, brands must understand what motivates and influences them, and produce content that is helpful and relatable. By utilizing measurement tools, brands can get a better sense of what drives engagement and action in their community, and help reach their organization’s goals.

This article will demonstrate how to incorporate social media measurement tactics to test and improve your content, leading to a more successful social media strategy.

Set your goals: In order to be successful on social media, it is important to set specific goals to lead your efforts. First, determine who your target audience is—whether that is women 45+ who experience chronic pain, or adults over 30 who have experienced Alzheimer’s in their family. Next, figure out what social media networks this audience is active on—you want to create a channel of communication where your audience is already engaged.

At the start of 2016, Facebook had 1.59 billion monthly active users—which is more than 20 percent of the global population. Facebook has become a major content discovery platform. According to recent data published by traffic analytics firm Parse.ly, more traffic to news and media sites is driven by Facebook than Google. This means that people are often finding content in their Facebook feed and clicking through to articles directly from their feeds.

Google versus Facebook | Improving Social Media Messaging and Engagement through Measurement Tactics — Parse.ly network traffic from Google versus Facebook

After discovering where your audience spends their time on social, figure out what actions you want your audience to take. Is your ultimate goal to drive people to sign up for research studies or to your website to learn more information about your cause? Reversely, what can you provide your audience to better reach their goals? How will following your page benefit them?

Implement your content strategy: Figuring out the best content to share on your social channels starts as an experiment. You won’t be able to determine what works best with your audience until you test out different messages and apply measurement to the results. As you brainstorm content to share, figure out several different categories of content that may be relevant to your audience.

Erin Hildreth, Senior Manager of Marketing and Communications at The Vision Council, shares how social media plays a role in her organization: “Social media has personified all of our campaigns, and the sheer reach of one interaction has the power to grow your message exponentially. It is something that we think about constantly when preparing our campaigns because it is a way to truly touch people as they go about their days and live their lives.”

Test your content and optimize: Facebook and Twitter offer very in-depth insights for organic and paid posts. It is important to review your page analytics often to note trends and see which categories of content are performing best. Here are a couple things to look for:

What day of the week and what time of day is your content getting the most engagement (likes, comments, shares, retweets, favorites, replies)?
What types of content are eliciting the most comments? Are these all positive comments?
When promoting your organization, what messaging works best with your audience?
What types of links are receiving the most clicks?
What types of images or graphics seem most eye-catching/appealing to your audience (based on the engagement)

Another measurement tool that often comes in handy is Google Analytics. Aside from seeing how much traffic is coming to your site from social each week, you can set specific goals on Google Analytics that will allow you to see when consumers from social complete a certain action on your website. By pulling weekly analytics reports, you can see what aspects of your content strategy are contributing to your bottom line.

Measuring success: In order to show your results and improvement on social media to others within your organization, it is important to do monthly or quarterly dashboards that highlight your growth. I’ve found that showing the percent change in followers, engagement and/or impressions is a strong way show success—for example, “Since January 2016, we’ve increased engagement on the page by 123%.” Another important metric to share will be goals completed through social media on Google Analytics.

Stacy Mowery, Director of Brand Development at Banner Health shares, “Measuring our social media analytics helps us understand our message reach: Who are we reaching? Who is most interested in our content? The metrics can also help us understand which topics or types of posts are most engaging to our audiences. A few years ago we began studying the differences in engagement between heavy visual posts vs. posts with just written content. The data showed visual posts are clearly more engaging, so we now have shifted to a heavy visual social strategy.”

Thinking strategically about your online goals and always staying up to speed on the latest social trends, changing algorithms and measurement tools is key to having a successful approach across your social platforms.

This is an excerpt of an article originally published in the PR News Writer’s Guidebook.