PR Chat

The big pitch

As part of the PR course at Leeds met the final year students are given a brief from Harrison Cowley, a national PR consultancy. This year our brief was to put together a pitch presentation and proposal for Learn direct business. The aims and objectives being to raise awareness of their Apprentice DVD's, boost sales and generally raise their profile. Students then have to get into groups and are given a few weeks to brainstorm ideas, put together a proposal and presentation. Each group presents to a panel of tutors and the four best groups are given the opportunity to present to Harrison Cowley  also entering into a competition to win £1000!

Our group, 'Mirage Communications', was fortunate enough to be a finalist and today we presented to Harrison Cowley. And guess what? We won!!!

A big thank you goes out to all team members! Viv, Han, Amy and Tommy it was a pleasure working with you all! Don't spend the cash all at once!!

A huge thank you also goes out to Harrison Cowley for  giving us this opportunity. We hope you enjoyed our presentation and we look forward to seeing you after the Easter holidays.

Thanks again!

Who has time for social media?

I found myself discussing social media today and conversation quickly turned to trends  such as blogging and social networks. During the conversation a friend of mine turned to me and asked "How many 'average' people use social media? How influential is a medium like this?" This got me thinking about the people who use social media and where they get their time from. As I'm sure you're aware it can be a very time consuming activity and is easy to get caught up in. So how do people make time for this or does it simply replace other activities such as going to the cinema or shopping? Just a thought for the day...

PR:ROI or reputation?

Whilst conducting my research I managed to get caught up in Epiphany Solutions blog frenzy regarding PR vs. search engine optimisation (SEO). It made me wonder how relevant ROI actually is in regards to a PR campaign. Sure, it all depends on a clients aims and objectives but I was taught PR is primarily about reputation. Should PR professionals be expected to demonstrate direct impact on the bottom line? Is that there job? More importantly, is this holding the industry back?

Transcribing interviews...what a bore!!!

I have finally transcribed all my interviews for my dissertation research. It was a long and painful process and i am soooooo pleased it's over. Just want to say thank you to all those who gave up their time to help me. Thanks to Daryl Wilcox, Antony Mayfield, Stephen Davies, Drew Benvy, Gaylene Ravenscroft, Eleanor Giles and Tim Gibbon. I couldn't have done it without you!

SEO PR interviews

My research is going well and I have had a few telephone interviews with experts in this area.  If you would like to take part feel free to drop me an email on sj_lassman@yahoo.com

Example questions are:

- How important is search engine visibility to an online PR campaign?

-Have you seen an increase in online PR activity in recent months? If yes why do you think this is?

-To what extend do you optimise a campaign for search engine rankings?

Interiews can remain anonymous if requested.

Wish me luck!!!

My Dissertation

Well, I decided to write about search engine optimisation and its benefit to online PR campaigns. My research is going fairly well but there is not a huge wealth of information available, so if anyone wants to recommend articles or know's experts in this field they could put me in touch with, it would be much appreciated.