This got me thinking… what exactly is PR? Do we all have a different idea of what it means to influence our publics?

On the way home from the conference, my friend and I got on a Southwest Airlines plane to go home. As we walked on the plane, we noticed a King of Hearts graphic that looked like it had been ripped out of a magazine taped on the wall near where the attendants stand. My friend and I both noticed it.

A few minutes after the plane took off, my friend leaned over to me and said, “That what the king was about!”

“What?” I responded.

She gestured to the passenger in front of us, who was reading a USA Today. A huge graphic on the newspaper showed Southwest as the king of the airlines.

We looked at each other and said, “Wow, that’s cool.”

No one made the these Southwest airlines employees proudly display their status as king. They ripped it out of the newspaper and taped it there because they were proud of their company. And we were glad to be on a plane with happy employees. I gained a new respect (and loyalty) for Southwest Airlines that day. No ad, press release or media relations effort would have made Southwest’s employees react this way. It was the best PR… however, this opportunity to feel and show company pride came as a result of Southwest having a hardworking PR staff, I’m sure. Southwest wouldn’t have gotten that kind of press had their staff not worked well with the media.

The best PR comes from doing good and then having someone who can share it with the world.

So I guess this is why we’re particular when we choose clients to work with; we need to first find a company who’s doing something good before we can help them share it with the world.

P.S. By the way, it’s interesting to note the reason I was on Southwest is because I’ve always had good experiences, and I felt dissed by American after they deleted all my hard-earned frequent flier miles after only 18 months without a flight.

Let’s face it, everyone’s always looking for a cheaper way to do everything. So I’ve decided to embark on a journey to try out most of the free press release distribution services to see what kind of results they produce. Are they worth my time as a PR person, or am I better to stick with the establishment?

I think it will be fun and interesting. I’ll report my results here when I’ve done a few field tests.

However, the best way to raise rankings without buying Google AdWords, is to simply have a lot websites linking to your site. This is a great differentiator for search engines like Google to be able to tell if a website is the real deal or not.

With a background in PR, I know how to get free publicity. And now, there’s even more avenues to get news published! Press releases are often published on the websites of publications, especially when they don’t have space in the print edition. This used to be a lesser thing in PR because everyone loves to see a printed clip. (The web can sometimes be a bit invisible to those leaders who like physical printed materials.)

However, now with SEO coming to the forefront, press releases offer companies with a cost-effective and powerful tool to send out a message AND raise the ranking of your website, as long as your press releases link back to your website. I’m going to using this approach with a few of my clients that I also have access to their web stats; it’ll be interesting to see if I can measure a correlation between web stats and press release distribution. It’ll be fun! I’m going to use this website as a guinea pig also.

How do I know?

On company websites of all sizes, I find typos, outdated information, vague details, and very little about the people who work there and the products or services they sell. Sometimes its even a chore to find a phone number – hard to believe, but true!

Ironically when I make it through the red tape to appropriate person to interview for the article — usually a marketing director or CEO — then I am often sent a capabilities brochure on the company. These brochures are amazing: great photos, interesting text, and all the proof that this is indeed a professional company.

So why is it that the boss cares more about a printed piece stored in their backroom than the website which is available to entire world in one click? Because that’s what they see. They aren’t looking for information about their own company. They are looking to hand something to someone they meet. And yet, if they actually went to their own websites on a regular basis, I think they would be shocked at the less than professional image they are projecting.

So if you are part of a company, go to your website. Pretend that you are a first-time visitor. And if you can’t, ask someone else to check it out for you. Get their honest opinion. Then consider: what image do you want to project to the world?

He always looked at me and said something like: “It’s on the list.” I usually then shook my head and thought that he needed better planning skills.

This was before I left my 9-to-5 job as PR director of a national association to start my own business. Since then, I’ve been whisked into the crazy world of entrepreneurship, or what I lovingly call, “finding work to get paid.”

I made many lofty goals and business plans. I created to-do lists using my favorite service, www.rememberthemilk.com. I planned on writing a blog post every week and networking on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook. I would do everything to market my company, plus some. It’s what I do for a living!

Then reality hit. My blog posts went from once a week to once every other week. My tasks got postponed…again and again.

For the past month, we’ve both been slammed. I haven’t written a post in a month, and I haven’t done much proactive marketing either. I’ve just been working for clients.

So is this irony? I’ve got so much work to do that I haven’t had time to market myself, even though this is part of what I do for others. It’s like doctors who smoke and let their waistbands expand: they take care of your body all day long, so they let their body go.

So you either work and make money… or you market yourself and sacrifice some cash. Tough call.

I guess that’s why my husband’s new website is still three-fourths done, while his clients’ sites all look great. I’ll have to work a bit harder at fitting it all in this year and start “hiring” myself to promote this company.

Uh-oh, I thought: PR disaster. Some auto-billing mechanism is creating a havoc.

Sure enough… The city of Attleboro, Mass. sent a nastygram to a 74-year-old blind resident threatening a lien on her house if she didn’t pay her water bill balance of 1 cent.

To make matters worse, the city was unapologetic and blame-focused when questioned by the newspaper. My mouth actually dropped open when I read the city’s spokesperson’s statement on the whole mess.

Read and be in shock: City Collector Debora Marcoccio said, “My question is, how come it wasn’t paid when the (original) bills went out?”

Yeah, how dare an elderly blind woman mess up her payment by a cent!

I was appalled as a communicator. How hard is it to apologize? The spokesperson only needed to say that the city’s water billing system has faults and that they would immediately settle the account, forgiving the 1 cent mistake. An apology supplemented by swift action would have saved the day.

The homeowner pointed out that paying the bill would cost her 42 cents just for the stamp. Not only does the city of Attleboro look like its made up of a bunch of jerks, but it’s also being made a laughingstock by the national AP newswire.

What a kind word–and action–would have done to save this city’s reputation in this situation.

Read the full article.

Yesterday, thanks to a Twitter post from Peter Shankman of Help a Reporter Out, I read a post on the 10 Best Social Media Tools for PR Professionals and Journalists on mashable.com. I love this post, and I’ll probably be spending some time tomorrow checking out all these tools.

The list includes Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out, as well as tools like PitchEngine and ReportingOn. I was especially excited to see Media People Using Twitter and Twellow, because I find Twitter’s search functionality difficult to use.

Why are these tools so wonderful? Because accessing the right people for an effective PR pitch can be an expensive and time-consuming job–not easy for those of us with smaller budgets. However, this enables us to get great, well-written information into the right hands. I guess I’m becoming a bit of a social media junkie.

Writing has never been more important as we all spend hours every week writing emails. Although this list applies to nearly all business and promotional writing, I wouldn’t suggest applying it to essays and creative writing.

This is, however, a great checklist the next time you sit down to write anything. I know I’ll be using it to polish up the article I wrote last week.

Here’s a few tips to follow to improve your writing process:

• Determine the purpose. Start out by jotting a few notes: Who is going to read this? What main points do you want to make? What actions do you want to inspire the reader to take?
• Structure the outline. Even a simple business letter or email improves drastically with a little forethought. Clarify what you are communicating and plan the flow of the piece.
• Keep paragraphs short. My general rule is to keep paragraphs under 3 sentences for most purposes. Think about thick, black blocks of impenetrable text. Don’t you find that daunting as a reader?
• Use bulletpoints, highlighting, and subheads. These “reader entry points” help a reader scan and follow along with what you are saying. They make reading easier. Plus, they often show the writer when a point or paragraph is unclear.
• Know your style. Most people don’t realize that many writing styles exist, each with its own set of rules. Most business people are familiar with Modern Language Association (MLA), which is taught in English class. Publications use Associate Press (AP) style or Chicago Manual. The science and education fields use American Psychological Association (APA).

So often, bad writing results from rushed, sloppy words. Good writing can evoke joy, teach new skills, inform and entertain, and improve lives, not to mention increase your paycheck!

Although I have a lot to say on website redesign, I’ll save that topic for a later post. Instead, I’d like to share the useful tips shared by Kurt Greenbaum, director of social media at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He writes a blog for the Post’s, Virtual St. Louis. Although Kurt’s tips were specific to St. Louis, I am going broaden them out so they’ll be useful anywhere.

Thanks again to Kurt for these great tips!

1. Use the news submission tools on your local papers’ websites. Many papers, like the Post, enable press releases to be posted or submitted on their website. The Post-Dispatch has a nifty feature, PR Zone, on its site, stltoday.com.

2. Read blogs. You can engage in your community by searching blogs or checking out those being offered by local media. Post comments, answer questions…The Post also is offering blogs now at their Blogzone.

3. Watch forums. Forums are usually more utilitarian, set up in a Q & A format. Again, you’ll be shocked to find out how much discussion is going on. What is being said about topics of interest to your organization? Anyway you can participate? Again, the Post-Dispatch (and many other metros are offering forums).

4. Use Google Blog Search. You can set up an alert that emails you every time someone mentions you or your organization in a blog or forum. You can create an RSS feed of those searches or get email alerts. Check it out at blogsearch.google.com.

5. Use Summize to set up specialized Twitter searches. Like Google, you can watch specific topics, set up an RSS feed to be alerted when anyone talks about your topic. Kurt shared that he uses Twitter feeds to stay on top of breaking news for his newspaper.

6. Use Google Reader. Set up your RSS feeds for a variety of websites that you want to watch. You can search the feeds you subscribe to in Reader. It’s a great way to monitor hundreds of websites quickly and easily. Check it out at reader.google.com.

I’ve done it on the cheap and with a big budget. And, since I only had one video class in college, I learned from experience…and from my incredibly talented crew of video editors, videographers, and directors.

Plus, most of the videos I created played in front of a crowd of 500+ people, and there’s nothing like a live reaction to know if the video is a success or a flop. Luckily, I experienced more successes than flops!

Video Creation Tips:

• Have a point: what is the action you want the audience to take or the piece of information you want them to remember?
• Keep it brief: Five minutes of video is an eternity. It doesn’t matter that you spent 3 days shooting the footage. Be ruthless when you cut.
• Cut ruthlessly: Remove anything that doesn’t move the video forward.
• Consider the audience’s perspective: It’s not all about you.
• Boring is boring: If it puts you to sleep, no magic can make it interesting.
• Entertain: Be funny (or fun) if you can.
• It’s a video for a reason: Provide as many visuals as you can.
• Set the tone: Music is really important.
• Make it flow: Have a plan and work on the transitions. People remember stories as long as they’re brief.
• Be considerate: Make people look good.
• Go for quality: Hire a good editor and videographer or learn to be the best yourself.

Videos are a powerful medium; I hope you get the most bang out of your buck!