Resources for getting out of your PR rut

Do you ever feel that you don’t really understand PR?

Even if you’ve been working in the PR and marketing industry for years, it can be easy for that world to feel muddled. After all, there’s often a great deal of differing information floating around.

Have you recently asked:

• How do I analyze results?

• Which channels should our company use?

• What exactly is the PESO model?

• Has the press release had its day?

• How do I prove my ROI?

• What the heck is brand journalism?

You’re not alone. Recently, a generous client said: “Tam, your PR is creating more interest in our products than all our other marketing efforts combined.”

Though that was definitely a career highpoint, he then added, “But we don’t really understand what it is you do.”

Though many clients understand the benefit of PR and its potential ROI, a lot of them share my clients’ feeling.

PR suffers from one of the biggest identity crises in all of communications.

RELATED: Learn new strategies to tell your story with social media, images and video.

If you ask 50 PR practitioners to describe what they do (semantics aside), you’ll probably get 50 different answers. That’s before we’ve even mentioned the fast-evolving technology landscape, or the seemingly endless ways people consume content.

There’s no need to worry, just yet. There are a few people absolutely nailing it when it comes to making sense of the brave new world of PR.

Here are five illuminating blogs and resources that will set you on the path to success:

1. Ten Symbols That PR’s “Industrial Revolution” Is Underway

"Today’s upheaval in the PR industry is redefining our business in a similar way that the industrial revolution retooled manufacturing." Here, the peerless Lou Hoffman captures 10 symbols that remind us this definitely isn’t our father’s PR industry.

2. The PR Butterfly Effect: How One Article Resulted in $500,000

Feel the need to justify using PR in your marketing budget? The bright sparks at Onboardly offer wise advice on finding your story, measuring your campaigns and demonstrating the power of PR. Authoritative. Candid. Indisputable.

3. The Complete Guide to Public Relations Tools

A free stash of 140 of the best PR tools, along with motivation and advice from top PR professionals on how to roll out and adopt them. A clever way to put some lead in your PR pencil.

4. Public Relations Digital Resolution

Enlightening stuff that’ll change the way you think about PR forever. Everything you need to reinforce your future communications strategies is here, plus the measurement you’ve long been looking for (and a lot more on top). Your ultimate PR handbook.

5. How B2B PR (done the right way) benefits your SEO

If you’re still not sure why you ought to integrate SEO into your PR, you must read this. It includes insightful research into how decision-makers in mobile/telecoms and business technology behave when researching and selecting new partners. Even if you’re not in the tech arena, you’ll learn so much from this.

Tamsin Henderson runs UK-based Gather Creative a PR and copywriting agency. Connect with her on Twitter. A version of this article originally appeared on Muck Rack , a service that enables you to find journalists to pitch, build media lists, get press alerts and create coverage reports with social media data.

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