Glossaries and terminology

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It’s a relatively new concept, so if you’re asking “hey, just what is brand journalism,” you’re not alone.

Brand journalism essentially embeds a journalist (in my view, a former journalist) within a company to help the company tell better stories and create content that adds value to the reader, viewer or listener.

The idea is to create content that meaningfully engages the audience in ways that don’t leave them feeling like someone is trying to sell them something. It is a different kind of content from that which is in a press release, but it is a type of PR content that PR and marketing practitioners manage or create.

A company will hire hire a journalist who is not affiliated with any one news outlet to create the content, relying on their skills to tell more engaging stories and create multi-media content. PR departments get journalism quality stories that look and feel like real journalism.

But they aren’t journalism. And they aren’t because the journalist is on the company’s payroll, which, removes any possibility of any real sense of objectivity.

That’s not to say they aren’t bringing a great many of their journalistic skills to bear. That isn’t to say they aren’t great journalists, maybe even brilliant journalists, but in this role, they are not journalists. They have transitioned to to a new career in PR and marketing.

They are performing a paid service to help certain messages about a brand to resonate within target audiences.That’s not a journalism.

Many will disagree with me, especially those within the PR community who are promoting issues and products that get push back. Hiring a journalist to create their content gives it the aura of a third party endorsement. But it’s in appearance only, and it’s spin, since the creator of the content is on the company’s payroll.

What’s the difference?

Call up a journalist to ask for a correction because he didn’t write the story according to the press release, and there’s a mighty fine chance your story will get killed.

Branded content, I can buy. But not journalism.

Some proponents argue that Brand Journalism is “honest brand storytelling that invites audiences to participate.” Others say it is “honest, informative and engaging.”

The latter describes what PR should have always been. And the first is what it should increasingly be aspiring to in the era in which we live.

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Slideshare is a site dedicated to letting people share slides. Often, those slides have been created in Powerpoint or Keynote, however, Slideshare has other handy uses. For example, you may want to put a video on your Linkedin page. You actually can’t do that right through the application, but you can drop in one slide housed on slideshare that has your video as the content of that one slide. To do that, you must have a paid Slideshare account.

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I’m sure you’ve seen them but you may not be familiar with the word and may be asking yourself “what is an infographic?” An infographic is a graphic dipiction (picture) of facts and figures, meant to make stats and bits of research more digestable. You can expect to see many more of them over the coming while.

Why?

They make it easier for us to scan information, and online, our brains are now trained to scan not read. Pictures are increasingly important on the web as we try and make as much understandable in increasingly shorter periods of times. And you know what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words.

Pinterest, the social sharing site which curates pictures users pin to virtual boards, is tapping into our growing love affair with pictures, and is growing fast. It even has an app called Piktochart that lets you build your own from their templates.

Here is an example of an infographic.

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What is a target audience? Essentially, your target audience are the people you need to reach or influence with a particular message. They may be grouped together by age, or by sex, where they live, by what they do, and a variety of other criteria in various combinations or alone.

Your target audience is essential to you achieving your business goals. Often, they are the people you need to buy your product or services or donate or support your cause. To check out the meanings of other PR terms, please click this link to PR Terms, Glossaries and terminology.

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What is microblogging? Microblogging is simply any writing or updating one does using social media sites that allow a limitted number of characters per post, including Twitter, Facebook and Google+. To check out the meanings of other PR terms, please click this link to PR Terms, Glossaries and terminology.

 

 

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You may have heard these terms used by PR folks and marketers engaged in the socially responsible movement space and wondered What is Top Down vs Bottom Up?

When you are trying to get your message out to the world, there are essentially two ways of doing it: Top Down and Bottom Up. Until the advent of Social Media, it was widely considered that Top Down, or via the media, was the way to go because it was the fastest way of reaching a lot of people.

In many cases, it often is. Increasingly however grassroots organizations and others are finding that they are able to reach the people they need through email marketing and social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Linked In, and through other sharing platforms like YouTube and Pinterist.

When those activities reach enough people or touch some kind of nerve or create an effective rallying cry or platform, the mainstream media come to the organization to cover the story instead of the organization or movement going to them. That’s what’s know as Bottom Up.

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If you’ve ever worked with a PR pro, you may have left shaking your head a few times and asking questions like “just what are key messages anyway?” Key Messages are what you want your target audience to come away knowing or remembering about your brand through any and all of your outreach and PR activities. They are crafted carefully to help you influence the people who can best help you achieve your business goals.

You may have different key messages for different target audiences.

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What are Video News Releases? Video News Releases are usually a news story created by an organization. In the US, they are commonly released to news stations and sometimes broadcast as news stories, as if they had been shot by the news organization. In Canada, that rarely happens and, when it does, the news organization usually identifies that the piece was produced by the organization and not the news outlet.

Video News Releases can be useful in getting media because they can show an outlet how a story could run and also, parts of it might be useful as b-roll or for use in related stories. Better video news releases are not overly promotional and actually have more of a neutral news feel, but many of them are easily identified because they feel commercial and more promotional than newsy.

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What is b-roll? B-roll is the video that you supply or that a news team gathers that runs behind the intro that an anchor makes to a story or as the visual when a reporter or anchor is narrating overtop. B-roll does not include interviews. To check out the meanings of other PR terms, please click this link to PR Terms, Glossaries and terminology.

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You’ve probably heard the term but might be wondering just what are keywords? People use the phrase “keywords” to describe the words that people punch into search engines (usually Google) to find the information they are looking for.

Ric Dragon from Dragon Search prefers the term “key phrases,” which is actually more accurate since most people don’t type in just one word, but usually a phrase. Because there is so much content on the internet, trying to optimize your site for any one word is increasingly difficult and more often than not impossible. Effective keywords (or as Ric would call them, Keyphrases) are usually at least a few words long – sometimes several words long. Most emerging bloggers will have more success with what’s known as LongTail keywords, keywords that won’t pull as many searchers but will still pull a core group specifically looking for information you can give them and put you on the first page of Google for a lesser searched term. Enough longtail searchers will ultimately add up to a more robust website.

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