Go beyond PR spin! Master better ways to communicate honestly and regain the trust of your customers and stakeholders with this book.

Public relations is invasive, pervasive and seemingly everywhere. The news media is preoccupied with it: never-ending reports of "PR exercises", "PR jobs", and "PR spin" use the term as shorthand for implied deceit, corruption or specious pleading. PR professionals, though, see this as no more than the lazy journalist's punchline. So what is PR and what is its practical use in a noisy world of hype and mistrust?

Drive more value from all your marketing and communications channels--together! Demolish your silos and sync all your messaging, strategies, and tactics (really!). Optimize every medium and platform, from iPad and Facebook to TV and direct. This book is a must-read for every senior marketing, communications, and PR decision-maker. It’s not about social media. Or new (or old) media. It’s about results—and there’s only one way to get results. You must finally bite the bullet, tear down your silos, and integrate all your marketing and communications. That’s how you choose the best platforms and messages for each customer. That’s how you make research and metrics work. That’s how you overcome today’s insane levels of complexity and clutter. You’re thinking: Oh, that’s all I need to do? “Just” integrate my whole organization? Are you nuts? No. We’re not. It can be done. This book’s authors have done it. They’ve shown others how to do it. And now they’re going to show you. Step by step. Strategy. Tactics. Research. Metrics. Culture. Social. Mobile. Direct. Broadcast. Print. All of it. With you, the marketing/communications decision-maker, right at the center...right where you belong! Even now, organizational silos prevent most companies from conversing coherently with customers, delivering the right targeted messages, and building real synergies across all their marketing and communications programs. Now, Gini Dietrich and Geoff Livingston show how to finally break down those silos, bridging traditional and newer disciplines to drive more value from all of them. You’ll learn how to create a flexible marketing hub with integrated spokes including sales, PR, advertising, customer service, HR, social media, and the executive team. Then, you’ll learn how to use your hub to speak cohesively with each customer through the tools and platforms that deliver the best results at the lowest cost. Dietrich and Livingston guide you through hands-on strategic planning, illustrating key points with real case studies and offering practical exercises for applying their principles. You’ll learn how to perform baseline analyses of media from iPad apps to radio, optimize resource allocation, change culture to overcome siloed behavior, use measurement to clear away obstacles, and gain more value from every marketing investment you make. Pull it all together--finally! How to successfully integrate your tactics, tools, messages, and teams Better goals, better results: beyond “SMART” to “SMARTER” Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound, evaluate, and reevaluate Better listening: stakeholders, customers, and research that works How to make sure you hear what really matters Four powerful ways to market in the round When to go direct, come from above, use the groundswell, or execute flanking maneuvers

Proven techniques that maximize media exposure for your business A seasoned PR pro shows you how to get people talking When it comes to public relations, nothing beats good word of mouth. Want to get customers talking? This friendly guide combines the best practical tools with insight and flair to provide guidance on every aspect of PR, so you can launch a full-throttle campaign that'll generate buzz -- and build your bottom line. Discover how to * Map a winning PR strategy * Grab attention with press releases, interviews, and events * Cultivate good media relations * Get print, TV, radio, and Internet coverage * Manage a PR crisis

In this updated edition of the successful Public Relations Handbook, a detailed introduction to the theories and practices of the public relations industry is given. Broad in scope, it; traces the history and development of public relations, explores ethical issues which affect the industry, examines its relationships with politics, lobbying organisations and journalism, assesses its professionalism and regulation, and advises on training and entry into the profession. It includes: interviews with press officers and PR agents about their working practices case studies, examples, press releases and illustrations from a range of campaigns including Railtrack, Marks and Spencer, Guinness and the Metropolitan Police specialist chapters on financial public relations, global PR, business ethics, on-line promotion and the challenges of new technology over twenty illustrations from recent PR campaigns. In this revised and updated practical text, Alison Theaker successfully combines theoretical and organisational frameworks for studying public relations with examples of how the industry works in practice.

The second edition of Pitch, Tweet, or Engage on the Street offers a modern guide for how to adapt public relations strategies, messages, and tactics for countries and cultures around the globe. Drawing on interviews with public relations professionals in over 30 countries as well as the author’s own experience, the book explains how to build and manage a global public relations team, how to handle global crisis communication, and how to practice global public relations on behalf of corporations, non-profit organizations, and governments. It takes readers on a tour of the world, explaining how to adapt their campaigns for Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Along the way, readers are introduced to practitioners around the globe and case studies of particularly successful campaigns. This new edition includes updates to country profiles to reflect changes in each local context, as well as expanded coverage of social media and the role of influencer engagement, and a brand-new chapter on global crisis communication. The book is ideal for graduate and upper-level undergraduate public relations students, as well as practitioners in intercultural markets.

Bring guest lectures into the classroom with Public Relations in Practice, a collection of practitioner stories that takes students behind the scenes of the industry. It offers a series of case studies by PR professionals from diverse areas of the field that give students a snapshot of daily life in that area of PR. This approach moves beyond the reach of a traditional textbook by presenting the personal and practical characteristics needed to succeed in the field. These practitioners discuss their paths, their experiences, what they wished they had known, and practical tips for breaking into the industry.