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Tag: digital media

Zoom webinar.

How to Conquer Zoom: Webinar Edition

Written by Tiana Ware on . Posted in Elevating Reputations.

Since the start of COVID-19, we all experienced a mass migration into the virtual world. Over time, as America’s businesses and organizations are moving to a hybrid work environment, it’s still clear that Zoom is here to stay. Realizing that this would be our new normal, The Reis group has concentrated on how to maintain—and improve—our high level of client service by mastering this ubiquitous platform.

A key service that we provide for our clients is conducting virtual media briefings through Zoom’s webinar feature. As a health care PR agency, it’s our job to think through the key logistics of the platform, set benchmarks for materials development, and become experts in the platform and all its features. Conducting a Zoom webinar incorporates many moving parts. It’s not rocket science, but there are some important things to know.

Here are a few “tricks of the trade” to ensure your next webinar is a success!

Know the platform. Zoom, like other platforms, is constantly making changes to improve the user’s experience. As a designated “Zoom guru,” it’s your job to stay updated on updates. One of the best ways is by engaging with the platform at least once a day leading up to your virtual event and scheduling several practice sessions with your client. Recently, during a practice session, we noticed that Zoom’s annotation feature had been unexpectedly enabled. This could have been disastrous because it would have allowed non-host panelists to make live annotations or comments on the PowerPoint slide deck. Could you imagine the disruption that could have caused? We were able to quickly disable the feature and add that to the growing list of items to check each day to ensure a successful event.

Have a plan, but also be agile! Developing a detailed step-by-step timeline is super important. This ensures that all players are aligned on key activities such as developing the slide deck, disseminating the registration links, scheduling practice sessions, etc. The reality, though, is that we sometimes will be forced to scrap our plans to meet a client’s evolving needs—and that’s ok! I recently experienced this with a client, so we immediately scheduled additional check-ins, adjusted the timeline, and identified areas where extra support was needed. Clear communication and quick strategic thinking helped us to produce a high-quality webinar.

Remember to breathe. Doing your homework and having a good plan are crucial. But even with safeguards in place, things can go wrong—and often will. Recently, we were live during a webinar, but instead of sharing the slide deck, the host’s email inbox was shown by mistake. We quickly informed them privately and hardly missed a beat. When things go wrong, it’s easy to panic. Instead, I was able to remember to remain present—and to breathe! Remaining calm gives you a chance to respond in a timely thoughtful way and diffuse your anxiety. When the inevitable mistakes are made, our best service to our client is to just stay cool and carry on.

Running a Zoom webinar can be intimidating but it’s also an opportunity to build skills and position yourself as an expert. I often look at conducting webinars as a reminder to be committed to the process of learning—being open and hungry for new information. The Zoom platform is ever evolving but if we plan ahead and stay cool, we evolve too.

Artificial intelligence.

Four considerations to integrate AI into your health care PR practices

Written by Stacy Skelly on . 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 . 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.

 

Innovative Cancer Communications Tools Keep Survivors Focused on Healthy Behaviors

Written by Tamara Moore on . Posted in Promoting Science.

“Cancer survivor.” It’s a title of honor that 17 million Americans are proud to wear. While the title is hard-won, for many survivors the sense of relief and gratitude drift away quickly, leaving in its place difficult challenges such as depression, substance use, and unhealthy diet and lifestyle. These disturbances have a real impact — disrupting healing and putting survivors at risk of recurrence and secondary cancers.

Unfortunately, this post-treatment baggage often is exacerbated by changing relationships that disrupt survivors’ trusted healthcare teams and support systems, making it difficult to overcome challenges on their own.

Working with the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, The Reis Group helped launch Talk to Someone, a conversation simulation tool, through a mix of media relations, stakeholder outreach, and digital media marketing to bring the resource to those who would benefit most. The tool creates opportunities for cancer survivors to start conversations about living healthier lives. In each conversation simulation, survivors can ask “Linda,” the platform’s virtual cancer survivor, a variety of questions. Linda is programmed to give brief, informative, and emotionally supportive answers to help shape behavior change, while also citing her own experiences as a survivor.

As I was test-driving the tool, “chatting” with Linda felt a little like a guessing game. I wondered, for example, “How would she respond if I said I was considering changes to my diet?” But as the conversation progressed, I found myself becoming genuinely engaged. The conversation felt natural, a little like a chat with a friend. Programmed prompts helped keep the conversation moving forward in a constructive way without getting stuck in a frustrating customer-service-chatbot death spiral.

But before The Reis Group started promoting the tool, I tested it with several friends who actually were cancer survivors to get some direct target-audience feedback. I wanted to know whether they found it helpful and reflective of their own experiences. Were these the type of conversations they wanted or needed to have, with a virtual human no less?

I was pleasantly surprised by how open and receptive they were to it. They all said they learned something new, which seemed like a win. But most surprising was one friend’s unexpected admission of opening up to Linda about a post-treatment experience with depression.

She told me, “I wish this had been around after my treatment. It took me months to recognize my own depression. It could have saved me a lot of time and pain having someone to “talk” to whom I didn’t feel like I was burdening with another problem.”

Personally, I thought the tool had a nifty factor that would work for promotion, but to hear first-hand the benefits it could have with survivors brought home to me the fundamental reason we do the work that we do: the power of proactive, creative health care public relations for getting the right messages to the right audiences.

As the world changes, innovative tools that offer new and different ways to provide evidence-based health information are critical for public health. Public relations is a critical component to ensuring cancer survivors achieve awareness of these tools to help improve their health.

If you have a cancer survivor in your life, please consider sharing the tool with them, or checking it out for yourself to understand how you can better support post-treatment healthy lifestyles for your loved ones.

Five Tips for Being Pitch Perfect

Written by Tamara Moore on . Posted in Building Credibility.

Below is an excerpt of an article originally published on PR News. Read the full article on PR News.

Great stories—about medical breakthroughs, heroic acts by children, emerging infectious diseases—are relegated to the trash bin, while “Grumpy Cat” is featured on national evening news. There are plenty of reasons this happens. Newsrooms are shrinking. Reporters are more harried since they are asked to write, blog, tweet, appear on video, among other duties. Brand priorities change and resources are limited. But most likely the problem lies in the execution of the pitch.

It is easy to understand why many organizations shy away from media relations in favor of brand journalism to tell their story, instead of seeking earned media to share this information. While these can be complementary approaches, a strong media footprint brings with it independent third-party validation. As such, news articles often are viewed as more trusted and can have more influence than advertising, social media or some forms of brand journalism.

An inPowered study found that reviews and articles from third-party websites and blogs improved consumer familiarity nearly 90% more than owned channels, such as websites or social media platforms.

Master the Pitch

Media relations is part storytelling and part selling, but for an in-touch profession, PR relies on surprisingly few tools to get the job done: namely, email, social media and phone calls. Any pitch needs to be capable of attracting a journalist’s eye in 15 words or fewer, regardless of the type of outlet. With smartphones and social media, brevity is key to media relations, but it doesn’t replace the need for carefully crafted, well timed pitches. Initiating and nurturing strong relationships with journalists and securing earned media coverage remain crucial in the age of social media and mobile technology. Since many journalists evaluate pitches on their smartphones, a lot are deleted with a simple swipe immediately after the subject line and a short excerpt are skimmed. Some tips:

  1. In email pitches, the subject line is most crucial. Subject lines should be descriptive and to-the-point, avoiding hyperbole or buzzwords. The pitch itself can go into more detail, but should remain focused and easily skimmed.
  2. Pitches must compel and offer multiple angles. Why should the journalist, and their readers, care? Why now? Add context; it can demonstrate how the pitch fits within a topically broader trend, inspiring the reporter to consider how to use the information. Providing multiple potential angles for the reporter’s work adds value to the pitch.
  3. Forecasting an ideal news environment can add immediacy to your pitch. Understanding and planning for these eventualities, such as major industry meetings, legislative calendars or even seasonal events, can help avoid releasing your news at the wrong time and succeed in securing coverage at the perfect time.
  4. Timing also means understanding publication schedules of the outlets that you pitch. While most media outlets have a digital presence, many newspapers, trade or broadcast stations look to publish longer, well-researched pieces in their flagship publications. Planning by you is critical here.
  5. Ask. And do it clearly. The end goal is maximum media coverage, but that’s not where to start the conversation. Do you want the reporter to learn more about your issue? Spend 30 minutes to meet with your organization’s leadership? Attend a briefing? It’s easy to get caught up in crafting a beautiful narrative that places your issue in the center of the world, but never actually gets to the point of why you’re writing, calling or tweeting.

The chasm between journalists and PR professionals will continue to grow. Consider this: the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2024, the PR profession will grow 6% from 208,030 professionals, while the pool of journalists will shrink 9% from 54,400. It’s essential to hone the art of pitching to break through the noise of competing interests and achieve earned coverage.

Read the full article on PR News.