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Top Take-Aways from Workshops Past

This July and August we featured two exciting workshops. If you missed them, we’ve provided some take-aways. 

Keep it Real!

July’s Summer Social Mixer featured Chris Brown, lead journalist at Inside the Bills, who shared his experience in brand journalism. PRSA assembly delegate Bobbi Lonobile and James Mignano of Text100 Global Communications provided us some of the highlights:

• Dig for stories that humanize your brand and make a real connection with readers—e.g., Bills running back, Fred Jackson returned to where he grew up to play a game against the Dallas Cowboys in 2011. (The Cowboys Stadium was built on top of the street Jackson grew up on!)
• Optimize your website and content for a mobile audience to help keep a site’s bounce rate down. “Good content” needs to work for both traditional and mobile device audiences.
• How to handle negative storiesabout your organization? It is sometimes necessary to be critical of your organization to establish the trust of readers. To mitigate potentially negative situations, use facts, statistics and quotes from others involved to tell your story.

PRism Best in Show Winners Share Secrets

At the August meeting, 2015 PRism Best in Show Award winners revealed the creativity and solid work ethic that brought them to the finish line. Brief highlights below, courtesy of Connect Managing Editor Susan Trien.

• Horsing Around with Rebranding: Rose Anne Feor, Senior Account Supervisor & Insights Manager at Martino Flynn, told the tale (or, “tail”) of the highly successful integrated campaign for ShowSheen®, a specialty horse coat product. Despite appealing ads portraying beautifully groomed equines, brand awareness dipped; consumer research proved it was detangling horses’ manes that horse owners really longed for. Hence, a new “Detangling Like a Pro with ShowSheen®” advertising tagline and a sweepstakes campaign using well-combed horses tails (staff created and affixed more than 7,000 plus real horse hair tails to dramatically dangle off every point of purchase sweepstakes display).
  
• Human Interest and Chutzpah Take Campaign to New Heights: Mike McDougall, APR, Fellow PRSA, of McDougall Communications revealed the work behind the successful National War Plane Museum event – Take Flight: The Return to Normandy, which secured nearly $200,000 in funding to allow the plane and its crew to represent the U.S. during the 70th Anniversary commemorations in France. His secret weapons? A 90-year-old war veteran who was transported to Normandy to fly in the historic WWII plane he flew during the war. (The human interest angle proved irresistible to media.) And an agency intern who, Mike says, knew no bounds, had no fear—and by sheer chutzpah got through to the Pentagon and White House and spoke to people in the highest positions in the land. The result: an uber successful event with soaring national and global media attention.