Journalistics

9 Media Relations Tips for 2016

April 5, 2016 by Jeremy Porter 5 Comments

Cision recently published its annual State of the Media Report, which I find to be one of the most valuable resources for understanding changes in news media environment. The report is jam-packed with information about the current news media environment and how most journalists prefer to work (particularly around areas like social media and working with media relations professionals). If media relations is part of your job, I highly recommend you review Cision’s report in detail.

Of course, since I know how busy media relations professionals can be (and since I’m such a swell guy), I’ve gone ahead and done the work for you. I reviewed the report in detail, and turned the most interesting findings into an actionable set of nine media relations tips you can use to improve your results in 2016 and beyond. Enjoy! [Read more…]

30 Social Media Ideas In 30 Minutes

March 18, 2016 by Jeremy Porter 2 Comments

I recently had a chance to attend and moderate a panel discussion at the “4th Annual Social Media Conference for PR, Marketing and Communications,” organized by Ragan Communications and hosted by Disney Parks at The Yacht Club Resort & Conference Center at Walt Disney World (I’ll refer to the conference by the #RaganDisney hashtag from this point on).

The panel, “30 Social Media Ideas in 30 Minutes,” was designed to be a rapid-fire General Session to kick off the afternoon of Day One of the conference. Nearly 400 attendees fought back food comas (and the urge to skip the session to visit one of the Disney Parks) to hear each of our five experienced social media professionals share a quick one-minute tip on six different timely social media topics (in case you were wondering where the 30 ideas in 30 minutes came from). Our group selected six topics relevant to social media in PR and communications applications, but also based on audience feedback and the collective expertise and real-world experiences of each panelist. These six topical themes included the following:

Global, Local and Hyper-Local – how organizations can balance and manage social media communications and priorities across geographically-dispersed audiences
Crisis Communications – how to prepare for or manage crisis communications via social media
Content Storytelling – the best tips from each panelist on planning, producing and publishing stories for social media
Social Platforms – panelist suggestions for evaluating and using current and emerging social media platforms as part of their broader social media management efforts
Social Listening – how different organizations are using social listening as part of their ongoing social media management efforts
Grab Bag – each panelist shared a unique top tip or best practice for attendees, choosing their own topic or category to focus on

[Read more…]

7 Great Posts to Help You Create an Editorial Calendar for Your Blog

February 10, 2016 by Jeremy Porter 8 Comments

I’ve written a lot this past month about how to develop an editorial strategy for your blog – and I’ve shared some additional thoughts about how to create a broader content strategy for all your other channels. If you’ve successfully completed the assignment and have memorialized your strategy in written form, you’ll quickly find yourself in need of some help for making that strategy a reality.

Take a deep breath and muster up some patience, as you can’t do everything you’ll want to do all at once. You’ll need to develop an approach to help you prioritize and plan your work – and you’ll need to find a rhythm and cadence that works best for you – if you are to be successful in implementing the strategy you’ve worked so hard to develop.

How can you take your first steps towards realizing the vision, mission, purpose and goals you’ve outlined in your strategy? I’ve managed hundreds of communications programs over the years, and I can think of no tool more valuable than the almighty editorial calendar for translating strategy into execution.

A solid understanding of the editorial calendar will help you accomplish the following:

Prioritize and plan your work
Capture and nurture ideas for future posts
Encourage communication and collaboration across your team
Capitalize on opportunities across departments or disciplines
Inform teams about pending posts and to mobilize teams for sharing or amplification
Manage the content production and approval process
Provide a historical archive of past content ideas to accelerate new team member development
Open lines of communication with external partners, influencers and collaborators
Maintain consistent messaging and content balance across topics defined in your strategy
And much, much more

If you’re not already convinced about the value editorial calendars provide for the content team as a whole, or you’re unsure how to develop an editorial calendar that will work best for your team or organization, I’ve collected some of my favorite posts about this topic to help you find the right approach and fit.

In no particular order, here are some of my favorite posts about how to create an editorial calendar. If you know of a great resource that I missed, please share your suggestion in the comments below this post. [Read more…]

5 Great Posts on How to Create a Content Strategy

February 2, 2016 by Jeremy Porter Leave a Comment

In my recent post, “How to Create an Editorial Strategy for Your Blog: Part Two,” I mentioned my approach is one of many you have to choose from when setting out to define the editorial strategy for your blog. Your editorial strategy for your blog is really a content strategy – specific to your blog.

Since some of you may need to broaden the scope of your content strategy beyond your blog, and also because I promised to follow-up with some additional resources for you, I’ve pulled together five of the best posts I could find about “How to Create a Content Strategy.” You could use the suggestions in these posts as an alternative or complement to my post for creating an editorial strategy for your blog, or expand the focus of your content strategy to include all your earned, owned and paid channels.

If I missed a really great post you think should be on this list, please add your suggestion for readers in the comments below. I hope these additional resources help you in your quest to create your content strategy. If I can answer any questions or provide any additional information on this subject, please let me know. [Read more…]

Six Quick Tips for Writing Short Blog Posts

January 28, 2016 by Jeremy Porter 9 Comments

Some people give me a hard time about how long my blog posts are (you know who you are). They tell me I should break my posts into smaller posts, or suggest I consider a 500-word post for a change. I deserve the razzing, particularly when I publish a couple of 3,000-word posts back-to-back.

In the absence of column inch or word limit restrictions, I’ll use as many words as I need to get my point across. It’s not that I don’t know how to write short posts, it’s just not my preferred style. If I’m limited to 140 characters (for now at least), I’ll use 140 characters. If I decide to write a 500-word post about how to write shorter blog posts, I can do it.

To prove my point, you’re actually reading that 500-word post I mentioned. Here are six of the most-helpful tips I’ve come across for writing shorter blog posts: [Read more…]

How To Create An Editorial Strategy for Your Blog: Part Two

January 27, 2016 by Jeremy Porter Leave a Comment

You lived through my value-sized “How to Create an Editorial Strategy for Your Blog: Part One” post and have come back for more – I like your determination. Or maybe you’re one of the readers I told to skip Part One – and you followed that advice? In either case, welcome to “How to Create an Editorial Strategy for Your Blog: Part Two.”

As promised, I’ve mapped out a step-by-step process you can follow to create your editorial strategy. I’ll warn you, I’ve pretty much shared everything I know on this topic – and as a result, have really written a small book on the topic for you. If you’re looking for a thorough, step-by-step process that ends with you having a written editorial strategy for your blog, you’ve come to the right place.

It wouldn’t be fair to ask you to follow the steps in a 5,000-word post without first being willing to follow the advice myself. As we work through each step of the process, I’ve decided to do the same for Journalistics – in part to finally have an editorial strategy for the blog, but also to help you move through the steps by providing context.

DISCLAIMER: Before I ask you to give up a big chunk of your time to work through the assignment below, I should mention there are many different approaches for creating an editorial calendar. In follow-up to this post, I’ll share a list of great posts other experts have shared (some much smarter than me) about creating a content strategy. I ultimately want you to select an approach and framework that works best for the way you think and work.

For now, I’ll assume my approach to be the best option for you – and will finally share my steps for “How to Create an Editorial Strategy for Your Blog: Part Two.”

[Read more…]

How to Create an Editorial Strategy for Your Blog – Part One

January 25, 2016 by Jeremy Porter Leave a Comment

In my first post of the year, I confessed my blogging sins and provided some insights around what caused me to blog less the past few years, and what I learned from the process. This posts was the first step in my journey to blog more in 2016.

If you read my post, you know I put some of the blame on not having a clearly-defined editorial strategy. If you’re going to blog, I believe it’s worth taking the time to create an editorial strategy. Doing this will help you maintain focus over time, but also help you to be more successful in your blogging efforts.

About This Two-Part Series

Inspired by my recent reflection and subsequent thinking about where I want to go from here with Journalistics, I’ve written a two-part post on how to create an editorial strategy for your blog. My hope is these posts will help you clarify the strategy for your blog, as well as provide me with a timely excuse to do the same for Journalistics.

In this age of content marketing we’re living in, it seems like every organization is blogging in hopes of capturing some inbound marketing magic (you can thank HubSpot for that). Whether you’re publishing on behalf of an organization or for personal reasons, I suspect many of you don’t have a written strategy for your blog. In survey after survey about content marketing, it’s pretty consistent that 40-60% of organizations don’t have a written content strategy.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of HubSpot – and content marketing, brand journalism, inbound marketing, demand generation and marketing automation. Whatever category your work falls into, these programs are successful because they work. But you will be far more successful on the other side of completing this strategy exercise. If you fall into the group that works off of a written editorial strategy already, these posts will probably tell you what you already know – in which case, I hope you’ll add your thoughts to help our less-fortunate readers.

Over the course of these two posts, I’ll explore this topic in depth, and also providing you with a process you can follow to create your editorial strategy from start to finish.

In this first part, I’m providing some suggestions for existing blogs that either will be creating an editorial strategy for the first time, or rather want to revise their strategy to better reflect their focus in 2016. If you’re just starting out, or you plan to launch a blog later this year, you should skip ahead to Part Two (which I’ll be publishing tomorrow), which will provide the step-by-step process for creating your editorial strategy for the first time.

And with that, let’s jump into “How to Create an Editorial Strategy: Part One”: [Read more…]

What I Learned From NOT Blogging

January 3, 2016 by Jeremy Porter 11 Comments

In the first three years of Journalistics, we published 236 posts. In the following four years, we only published 34 posts. While I’m tempted to convince you the past four years were simply a sabbatical (why should professors have all the fun?), it’s hard to justify such a dramatic decline in post volume.

As part of my effort to get the blog back on track in 2016, I spent the past month doing some quantitative and qualitative analysis to better understand how this happened. I’m a firm believer in using historical performance data to guide or inform strategy development (more on that topic in a future post).

For the quantitative input – because numbers don’t lie – I did a thorough review of our Google Analytics data going back to 2009 when we launched. I’ve shared my findings from this exercise, along with some recommendations for action in the form of “lessons learned,” for each insight in the second half of this post (starting with my first insight, “You Can Increase Traffic By NOT Blogging”).

For qualitative input – to add color and context to what actions (or inaction) produced the numbers – I conducted an objective self-assessment. I forced myself to be honest and to take responsibility for the past decisions I made which led me to post less. I’ve shared the results from this exercise in the first half of this post below (“Why I Was Not Blogging”).

Why am I admitting this publicly? I know I’m not the only one to find themselves in a slump. I’m openly sharing this experience, what I’ve learned, and how I plan to use this information to fix things – because I want to help anyone who’s been here, is here, gets here, or wants to avoid getting here all together.

I hope you find this post helpful – if not now, at some point down the road. If that happens, please share your story (it will help me feel like this Jerry Maguire moment I’m having was worth the effort).

And with that, let’s get into the first part of my analysis… the dreaded self-assessment. [Read more…]

The State of the News Media 2015

May 27, 2015 by Jeremy Porter 6 Comments

One of my favorite annual reports is the Pew Research Center’s State of the News Media 2015. Now in its 14th year, the report is one of the best indicators of the health of the news media industry. The major theme from this year’s report is the rising challenge news organizations face managing mobile and social media audiences. Most notably, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites have more traffic coming from mobile than from desktop computers.

For those of you working in digital marketing or related fields, this should come as no surprise to you. More consumers are accessing all kinds of websites via mobile devices than from desktop computers. What’s surprising is how slow news organizations are adapting to the rise of the mobile consumer. This may be intentional, as mobile visitors are less valuable to advertisers (and therefore publishers) according to Pew (validated by comScore data). [Read more…]

Periscope and Meerkat : The New ‘Twitter’ for Reporters

March 27, 2015 by Jeremy Porter 4 Comments

Believe it or not, Twitter has been around for nine years now. Shortly after Twitter launched in March of 2006, The American Journalism Review (AJR) published an article that referred to Twitter as “…the latest in an ever-lengthening list of overhyped technologies and cultural techno-fads stretching back to CB radio.” The industry largely doubted the viability of Twitter as a news platform. They will not repeat this mistake with Periscope and Meerkat, two new live-video apps that enable anyone with a smartphone to broadcast a live-video feed to their Twitter followers. Just as Twitter has become the first broadcast breaking news in text and photo formats, so too will it now bring us live-video coverage of news as it unfolds.

Back to the AJR article for a second – because it provides a great illustration for how news organizations have evolved their approach to new platforms and consumption patterns across their audiences – the author posed the question of whether Twitter was a fad, or if it could actually end up being useful for news distribution, reporting or source-building. It was a wait and see attitude that dominated an industry rooted in traditions and paralyzed by a lack of innovation and willingness to change.

In one of my first blog posts on Journalistics, nearly two years after the launch of Twitter, I shared the results of a survey I conducted with more than 100 professional journalists at the time. I interviewed reporters and producers about the biggest challenges facing them in preparing the news in a rapidly-changing media environment. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t a single mention of “learning how to use Twitter in my reporting.” I’ll say it again, that was two years after the launch of Twitter.

Fast-forward to 2015 and we’re witnessing the next transformation in social media-based reporting with the launch of Meerkat and Periscope. These services launched over the course of the past couple of weeks. Every minute, news organizations, reporters and a bunch of other early adopters are starting to leverage these new platforms to broadcast their live-video feeds to anyone that will watch. If you aren’t yet familiar with how this works, once you click a button to begin the stream, your Twitter followers are notified that you’re broadcasting. They just have to click the link and their preferred device becomes the new window into the world of breaking news (or anything else publishers choose to broadcast). [Read more…]