PR and Brand Management at Pubcon 2009

It’s been a hectic week in Las Vegas for Pubcon, but I’ve managed to sit in on a couple sessions and pick up a few tidbits of advice from the panelists. Below are some helpful tips about PR and brand management that I gleaned from two sessions this week.

Social Media and PR

Top tips from the Social Media and PR session:

1. Online PR should incorporate search and social media reach (via Guillaume Bouchard)
2. Capitalize on social media for PR by building and leveraging relationships, researching where you need to spend your time (be social where you need to be), and enabling your message to be shared by optimizing for the social audience (via Joanna Lord)
3. If you’re not building trust, you need to evaluate what it is you’re doing and how you’re doing it (via Pat Strader)

Online Brand Management Strategies

Top tips from the Online Brand Management Strategies session:

1. The different stages of the sales funnel are Category Awareness, Brand Awareness, Brand Consideration, Brand Preference, Purchase Intent, Purchase, Customer Retention, and Advocates. Each of these stages is impacted by branding. (via Sean Jackson)
2. Build and maintain your social media profiles — don’t just “set it and forget it.” Also, build links to your social media profiles so that they can rank better for brand and reputation management purposes (via Kenny Hyder).
3. When it comes to crisis communication, you need to have strong internal communication with your staff. Policies must be laid out in advance to advice employees how they can respond in a crisis, and honesty and accountability are typically the best policies with employees and vendors (via Tony Wright).
4. 6 tips for dealing with negativity online (via Krista Neher):
   1. Humanize your brand (it’s easier to hate a company than a person)
   2. Listen and try to understand the problem
   3. Thank them for caring
   4. Be transparent and explain
   5. Build a community of passionate brand defenders
   6. Know when to walk away