(W)right On Moves San Diego Head Office to La Jolla

(W)right On Communications San Diego La Jolla office

LA JOLLA, Calif.; May 24, 2018–(W)right On Communications, Inc. has moved its local head office into new quarters overlooking La Jolla Cove after 10 years in its former Solana Beach location. The San Diego public relations agency’s new address is 1200 Prospect Street, Suite G100, La Jolla.

“We’re a short drive from both North County and downtown San Diego for convenient access to our local clients, while also providing an attractive office location for their agency meetings,” said Julie Wright, (W)right On Communications’ president. “It’s also an exceptional setting for our team with great shopping and dining right outside the front door and one of the world’s most beautiful marine areas outside of their windows.”

The office is equipped with a pair of bicycles and kayaks to encourage the team to enjoy their land and sea surroundings.

To celebrate the move, the (W)right On Communications team will participate in San Diego Coastkeeper’s June 9 La Jolla Shores beach cleanup at Kellogg Park. Additional volunteers are welcome and pre-registration is not required. For more, visit www.sdcoastkeepers.org.

About (W)right On Communications, Inc.

Founded in 1998 with client partners coast to coast, San Diego public relations agency and strategic communications firm (W)right On Communications provides award-winning public relations, community outreach, graphic design, social media, employee communications, video production, presentation and media training, and crisis communications services to a diverse client community in the B2B, energy, healthcare, hospitality, infrastructure development, nonprofit, professional services, technology and clean tech sectors. For more, see www.wrightoncomm.com.

 

PR Best Practices Can Restore Public Trust in the Post-Truth Era

By Julie Wright —President
Twitter: @juliewright

It is not business as usual in the media industry.

Some say we’re in a post-truth era. One thing is for sure: the role and honesty of spokespeople, the press and state-sponsored fake news has us all talking. And, it turns out, this controversy has had an enormous impact on public trust.

Trust levels in the U.S. and around the world are measured by the Edelman Trust Barometer. This annual report provides an in-depth analysis of trust in the U.S. breaking it down by trust in the media, CEOs, businesses, experts, NGOs and more. This year, the Edelman Trust Barometer showed a crisis in trust in America. The deep plunge recorded year over year was akin to a stock market crash.

It found that  63 percent of the U.S. general population struggles to distinguish between what is real news and what is fake. Trust in U.S.-based companies dropped from 55 to 50 percent continuing a decline that began in 2014. Trust in NGOs fell from 58 to 49 percent.

This is the environment in which public relations professionals, their employers and clients are communicating. Information from most sources is greeted with skepticism or outright disbelief by the public.

So, here we are. The scarcest commodity in the U.S. today is trust.

Last week, I interviewed Lynn Walsh, project manager of the Trusting News project to find out how the media is working to restore trust with its readers, viewers and listeners. This week, I’m asking how PR pros can work to restore trust with the public?

The answer is to stick to PR best practices and good media relations fundamentals and to recommit ourselves to the crucial role that public relations best practices play in building and restoring trust.

Let’s Refresh on Media Relations’ Primary Goals

Media relations strategies typically start with two high-level goals in mind.

The first is to raise awareness of a brand’s story and messages with its target audiences through well-placed articles, features and other media mentions.

Since earned media cannot be bought, unlike paid media (advertising), it is more credible—with the public and with Google too. Have you noticed that news articles in major media outlets have a much higher search engine ranking? That’s because the websites that they’re published on have a much higher search engine authority, so Google ranks them higher. (This can cut both ways: it’s awesome when the news in such links is great, and terrible when it’s bad.)

The second goal is to influence perceptions and preserve or build an organization’s reputation.

This starts with ensuring media coverage is accurate and fair. It continues with proactive strategies to communicate a brand’s excellent financial performance, corporate social responsibility program, product innovation or corporate culture.

As brand storytellers, the PR team is approaching these communications as an ongoing process or narrative and not as a one-off event or announcement.

When both of these goals are achieved, the news stories topping your brand’s Google search results are the stories you’re most proud of and not the cringe-worthy ones. Plus, you maintain your organization’s trust with its stakeholders (customers, employees, constituents, vendors, partners, patients, donors—whoever you need to keep onside in order to operate effectively).

In short, PR’s first goal is to get you into the media spotlight and its second goal is to ensure, once you’re there, that you’re lit to show your best side so that your audience applauds, or at least understands, your behaviors and decisions versus throwing tomatoes at you.

Along the way, we apply media relations best practices: knowing what’s newsworthy, building good media relationships and being authentic, timely, accurate and transparent.

Truth and Accuracy are PR Best Practices

We are also ethical. Most PR professionals are members of the Public Relations Society of America. As such, we are expected to uphold the society’s professional code of ethics (PDF). This means that we are advocates for our clients and respect their confidential or privileged information, while also being honest, accurate and truthful in our representations to the public. We take responsibility for the authenticity of the information we represent in our communications and outreach.

It’s not an easy task. Public relations is consistently ranked as one of the top 10 most stressful jobs in America, and it’s not a thankful task to be the media spokesperson when the chips are down or the heat is on. (That’s one big reason why so many of us appreciate our thankful clients and employers so much.)

But, here’s the point of this refresher. Ethical PR that follows PR best practices like transparency, accuracy, authenticity and timely communication is what builds trust.

And trust matters. It has an ROI. There’s even a name for it: brand equity. When brands and people are trusted, they’re valued. When things go wrong, trusted people and brands get the benefit of the doubt. When you look these benefits, an investment in PR best practices makes incredibly good sense.

If this resonates with you as either a PR pro or someone who can influence a company’s PR strategy, I encourage you to fight for PR best practices, to remember that PR is not happy talk and spin. It is also tough talk and the hard work and soul searching that sometimes come when tough conversations are required with your stakeholders.

Remind your colleagues in the C-suite and at the board room table that when they hold strategic communications to the same high standard as you do, the public will hold your brand in higher regard. And when your brand consistently communicates with transparency and truthfulness, you’ll earn the public’s trust. Trusted brands have higher valuations because trust is a precious commodity. So, stand up for standards and stand up for trust.

 

5 Questions for Journalism Expert Lynn Walsh on Trusting News

Lynn Walsh Trusting News project

By Julie Wright —President
Twitter: @juliewright

The public’s lack of trust in news sources is not just a problem for journalists. It is clearly one for public relations professionals and the organizations that they represent too.

To understand what got us to this low point in trusting news and what might be done to restore trust in the media and information, I spoke to Lynn Walsh of the Trusting News project.Lynn Walsh Trusting News

Lynn spent the first 10 years of her career as an investigative journalist and most recently oversaw the NBC San Diego investigative team. She served as president of the Society of Professional Journalists last year regularly speaking on and advocating for journalism ethics and press freedoms. She teaches journalism at Point Loma Nazarene University and recently, took on her new role at Trusting News. It perfectly blends her journalism and digital media experience with her passion for a healthy, thriving free press.

As project manager for the Trusting News project, Lynn works with newsrooms and journalism schools in the U.S. and Canada to conduct news engagement experiments and research leading to new best practices intended to restore trust between news media and news consumers.

Alongside project director and Poynter Institute adjunct faculty member, Joy Mayer, Lynn studies how people decide news is credible and shares that knowledge and actionable strategies that newsrooms can implement. Currently, close to 30 newsrooms are trialing these new best practices with plans to roll out the strategies that show the most promise for change.

Trusting News is funded by the Reynolds Journalism Institute, the Knight Foundation and Democracy Fund.

  1. What is the mission of the Trusting News project?

Our goal is to rebuild trust between journalists and the public and we do that by working with newsrooms helping them be transparent in their reporting and encouraging engagement with their readers, listeners and viewers.

  1. What is driving the lack of trust in media?

The responsibility is on both sides. Both news media and news consumers have been struggling to adapt to the digital news environment and how it changed the relationship between journalists and the public.

Lynn Walsh Trusting News projectIn the past, consumers of news didn’t really have that many options. They got the newspaper from their doorstep or turned on their TV, and the news was delivered to them. Now, they also discover news digitally when they’re searching online or using social media.

News has also become less of a one-way delivery system. People can now respond to your content.

News organizations didn’t do a good enough job of adapting to the changes created by this new digital format. They continued to deliver the news in the format they always have.

For instance, we didn’t do a good job of labeling the content when we moved it over to the digital space—is this a news article, a blog post or an opinion piece? People have no way of telling what kind of content they are discovering digitally and how to filter it.

The public also does not understand what journalist do, how they do their jobs and how the news media works. That means that people aren’t prepared and equipped to decide whether what they’re seeing is news or someone’s opinion.

  1. What can the media do about that?

I think from my personal experience dealing with members of the public, it’s about having conversations, explaining why we chose to cover a story or interview an individual on a subject matter, why we blurred a photo or didn’t use someone’s name. Explain the decisions we make every day.

Labeling is key here. If you have a story that’s an opinion story, don’t call it an op-ed since people don’t know what that is. Label it as opinion. Be clear about labels and make sure that label follows that story online and when shared on social media. Be clear about labels for the people we as broadcast journalists put on air too—not just calling everyone an expert. For instance, what is an analyst? Are they a reporter or giving an opinion?

We need to be honest with our viewers when we are putting someone on who is just sharing an opinion.

  1. How do you see this trust issue impacting professional communicators like PR people and spokespeople?

Unfortunately, where we really are now and have been for a year or more is that people just don’t trust what they’re hearing and reading. It doesn’t just apply when it’s coming from a news organization. It can be coming from a press release on someone’s website or a blog post. People are questioning everything and searching to find information that can disprove it. So, the trust issue doesn’t just apply to news organizations. It applies to all information.

People don’t trust facts anymore. People think that facts can be debated. It extends beyond news.

  1. How do you see things five years from now? Better or worse?

I really hope that five years from now I’m not having to teach people how to build trust, be transparent and build credibility with their audience. I hope we begin to be open about how we are telling our stories, why we chose this person to talk to and not be hesitant to talk to people who are critical of our reporting. If we didn’t include something in a story, I hope that we’d be comfortable going back and telling that side of the story or incorporating that missing viewpoint.

This is a new kind of storytelling. It’s things we’ve always done but just in a more transparent way.

To get there, we need some of the biggest news organizations to buy in. When you look at 24-hour news organizations, this isn’t happening. We need CNN and Fox News to start labeling stories and their experts and pundits properly. Hopefully, they will do a better job of separating for the public what is news content and what is opinion.

So far, that’s not happening.

 

Public Relations Is a Personas Business

By Julie Wright —President
Twitter: @juliewright

It’s so easy today to get glued to our data, dashboards and digital interfaces as we develop and manage content marketing and other web-based communications strategies. But it’s important to remember that public relations is still a people business—or more accurately, public relations is a personas business.

As you monitor email click-through rates, social media engagement and website referral traffic, remember that behind every data point is a real person.  And to do your job for your client or company, you need to deeply understand your audience and what makes them tick as well as click.

So how can you develop and use personas to guide your communications?

1. Personas Start with Customer Data

Dive into the data you already have. Study your customer database and interview your sales and customer service team to isolate the demographic and psychographic profiles of your customers. Look at gender, age, job title, family status, education, values, hobbies and interests.

Let’s, for the sake of argument, say that there are three primary buckets into which you can generally separate your organization’s customers.

One category might be described as female public relations agency owners who live and work in California, have four or more years of university education, have teenage or college-age children, are interested in social causes, struggle to balance their demanding work schedule with family and personal needs, desire a more active and healthy lifestyle and love Champagne and elephants. (This would be me.) You might name this persona “Julie.”

You would do the same for the other two customer categories and explore their basic demographic similarities as well as their shared goals and challenges, values and fears. Let’s say the next persona is freelancers who work from home while looking after toddlers and school-age kids. We’ll dub this persona “Mark.” The third is professional women who are now empty-nesters who we’ll refer to as “Lisa.”

Once you’ve painted a data-driven picture of these three fictitious personas, you need to think about how you would speak to each of them so that they are attracted to your content and ultimately your product or solution.

The first rule of good communications has always been to know thy audience. Knowing them through this analysis of your existing customer data will help ensure that your content marketing pieces will better resonate with people like them.

2. What Problems Do You Solve for Your Personas?

How does what you do or provide in the marketplace speak to each persona’s fears and values or help them achieve their goals or overcome their challenges?

We know that “Julie” is juggling work-life challenges and has a goal of a more active lifestyle.

What kind of content might resonate to engage her?

How about humorous memes taking aim at the illusion that work-life balance is even attainable for a woman business owner? Or a more inspirational message to help her keep her mojo?

Or perhaps you’d develop longer pieces of content with advice and exercises to improve mindfulness, time management or ideas to help her take five throughout the day?

It’s not the content marketer’s job to convince each persona of what they need. It’s their job to figure out what the persona’s needs are and then speak to them with their content and present their product or solution as the ultimate solution.

3. Validate Your Internal Research with Outside Sources

From social listening on platforms like Twitter, to in-house customer interviews and third-party market research surveys and focus groups, you should invest additional budget and energy into validating your own internal research and hunches while expanding your understanding of each persona.

A custom-designed professional telephone and online survey of your persona audiences may seem a considerable expense, but it’s really a direct investment in ensuring you have nailed your personas so you can hit your KPIs and generate ROI sooner.

If budget is tight, work with your research partner who can create shorter questionnaires that will be more economical and still give you insights that your own digital data lacks. Insights you might gain from surveys are the purchase decision criteria (i.e. innovation, safety, convenience, prestige, speed?) that your personas weight before they buy. Or you can use an omnibus survey and tack on questions that help you understand what the size and distribution of your personas are in your market territory.

You could also design your own Survey Monkey survey using its recommended questions and structures.

For qualitative insights, match a handful of your customers with your personas and then conduct interviews to explore and understand their customer journey and motivations (goals, challenges, fears, and values). These one-on-one interviews might validate or challenge your assumptions and help you uncover new high-octane insights to improve your messaging and targeting. You could also approach this exercise as a focus group.

Once you’ve researched, developed and validated a clear picture of your target personas, for a little more inspiration, get creative with more descriptive names and a composite image for each. Julie, Mark and Lisa should become your team’s besties. Julie becomes “Julie the Juggler.”

You can also make her and your other personas more real and relatable with a composite.

Your research will also help you become more aware of seasonal considerations that also impact your personas’ needs and interests. Julie’s January juggling act, for instance, might include Champagne, New Year’s Resolutions for getting her fitness plan back on track and plans for attending and earning media coverage for a client’s product launch at the Consumer Electronics Show.

With research, you will get these deeper insights into your personas’ worlds so your content can be laser focused to attract their interest and drive action.

4. Go Where Your Personas Are

Imagine Julie’s customer journey starting with a discovery phase. How might you position your content to be discovered on the web, via social media, in news reports, at a conference, in digital ads or via skywriting? You get the point. Understanding Julie’s persona allows you to match her media behaviors with your message placement.

What terms or hashtags might Julie be searching? Make sure that your web content is optimized for those search terms and your social media posts for those hashtags. Focus on her interests and search behaviors versus your product’s features and benefits. You might look at your Instagram data to see which hashtags have driven the most views to your content. Instagram business profiles provide more granular data from which you can derive such new insights.

If you don’t know what social platforms Julie uses, check your Google Analytics data to see which refer the most traffic to your website. You might find that Pinterest is providing as much traffic as Facebook. In that case, make sure you’re creating pinnable content on your site so that it continues to drive Julie from Pinterest to your site. Your branded work-life memes for social media need to be given a home on your website (most likely your blog), in order to have backlinks once they’re shared to Pinterest. That way, they’ll drive web traffic for you as well as social media engagement.

With all of your content, your purpose is to attract, engage, differentiate and drive people to take an action. The ultimate action is purchase, of course, but that’s a big ask. So, create multiple smaller opportunities for your persona to get comfortable with you and your brand before you expect a purchase commitment. Examples of small decisions for Julie, Mark and Lisa might include signing up for an email offer, responding to a contest or incentive, registering to download information or attending a webinar.

Other data sources can give you insights into your personas too so you can track their customer journeys. Google Analytics can show you all referral traffic sources and data to help you understand which websites are driving the most visits to your site and the behaviors people are taking once they land on your site.  Google Analytics can also unlock additional demographic information including interests.

This can provide additional clues to Julie’s, Mark’s and Lisa’s interests and needs but also show where gaps may be opening up in their website experience. Where in the journey are you losing them and what can you do about it?

Your paid digital and social media ads can also be driving Julie and her persona pals to your website. How does the paid traffic compare to the referral traffic coming from media hits, influencer mentions and social media? Often the former can produce more traffic but of lower quality, whereas well-targeted press hits, influencer campaigns and social media campaigns can produce a smaller proportion of overall website visits but with a longer duration of visit, more pages visited and a higher conversion rate.

And isn’t that what you want from your personas?

CONCLUSION: Public Relations is Really Persona Relations

The digital universe has created so many opportunities to serve our messages to more people without ever leaving our desks.

That’s a blessing from a convenience and scale standpoint but also a curse if you spend copious hours developing off-base content that isn’t seen by your ideal customers or doesn’t speak to their needs.

Public relations has always been considered a people business. And that’s what PR brings to the content marketing equation: an emphasis on building relationships over time and not simply a transactional view of each interaction. So, don’t lose sight of the real people behind each click, and think of every interaction that a person—or persona—has with your content as another step in a long-term, ongoing and mutually beneficial relationship.

 

Immersive Storytelling is the Future of Public Relations

future of journalism talk by Robert Hernandez


By Julie Wright —President
Twitter: @juliewright

The future of public relations and journalism are two sides of the same coin, and both are experiencing powerful technological advances that are reshaping how the media and professional communicators tell and distribute stories. While these changes have disrupted old business models and best practices, they’ve also benefited people by making it easier to access and consume the news and content they want, whenever and wherever they want.

The next wave of innovation is immersive storytelling and it’s poised to take content producers and consumers well beyond the two-dimensional experience of today’s news reports or public relations’ white papers, case studies, press releases and b-roll.

What Does the Future Look Like for Journalism?

There are already more mobile phones on the planet than toothbrushes or working toilets. USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism Associate Professor Robert Hernandez shared this insight to provide context during his opening remarks April 28 to the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2018 regional conference hosted by the Greater Los Angeles SPJ chapter.

The annual conference attracted hundreds of journalists from across the southwest to the Universal City Hilton, and (W)right On Communications was proud to sponsor Hernandez’s presentation, “What Does the Future Look Like for Journalism?”

Well regarded in media circles as an academic and as a veteran of web journalism, Hernandez urged journalists to become early adopters of new technologies and embrace it for storytelling. It’s a message that holds true for PR pros, content marketers and brand journalists concerned about the future of public relations.

Hernandez pointed out that TV took 38 years and radio 14 years to reach 50 million users but the web took only four, the iPod three and Facebook two to reach the same milestone. Technology is changing how we communicate and doing so at a breakneck pace.

On May 1, Facebook announced that it is introducing augmented reality into its Messenger platform. Soon, Facebook advertisers will be able to provide filters in Messenger that potential customers can apply to experience their product—like a new lip color, furniture or fashion—before buying.

On April 30, NBCUniversal and Google announced that they’ll be partnering to produce original virtual reality content for the NBC, Bravo and Syfy networks including NBC’s Saturday Night Live and Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules, which already has some 360 video available on YouTube. Will virtual reality content for NBC News be close behind?

My guess is that Hernandez would hope so. He urged news media to jump on these new technologies—including immersive 360-degree video, augmented reality and virtual reality platforms—and begin using them as storytelling platforms.

“If you think this is the final form, you’re fooling yourself,” said Hernandez of today’s mobile phones, mobile cameras and social media platforms.

The Future of Public Relations is Tied to New Storytelling Tech Too

Public relations professionals—particularly content marketers—should also be experimenting with these platforms and preparing for the near future of public relations where immersive storytelling becomes mainstream. We have the opportunity to adopt and adapt immersive platforms to communicate not just key messages but key experiences. Imagine how much more persuasive such tools would be in motivating a belief or behavior from your target audience.

And imagine how media outlets would appreciate content like 360 video or interactive augmented reality graphics to support a press announcement or event coverage.

With so much content competing to engage consumers and B2B customers today, it only makes sense that communicators adopt the most engaging and breakthrough new technologies to raise their content and messages above the din.

As Hernandez noted, for cash-strapped newsrooms, this technology doesn’t have to be expensive. He shared a VR tip sheet that includes apps to convert your mobile phone to a virtual reality recording device, several 360 video cameras and VR headsets at varying price points.

Hernandez heads up a VR journalism program at the Annenberg School, creatively named JOVRNALISM. He and his students have produced 360 video reports from places like Friendship Park at the border between San Diego and Tijuana and Korea’s demilitarized zone.

In this video, you can use your tablet or smart phone screen to explore a 360-degree view of the DMZ and listen while South Korea’s loudspeakers blast Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello” across the border.

Media outlets on the forefront of augmented reality include The New York Times. Hernandez cited their AR piece on David Bowie, which documents his costumes and style through the ages. Open The New York Times mobile app or navigate to their mobile website and search “augmented reality” on your iPhone or Android device to see and experience and be inspired by these incredible AR features.

Hernandez described AR as a “new type of journalism.” Here’s how The New York Times described it in their AR guide for readers:

“If photography freed journalists to visually capture important moments, and video allowed us to record sight, sound and motion, then our augmented reality feature goes a step further, making flat images three-dimensional. AR brings our report to you in a way that makes it more immediate than ever before. Imagine if journalists applied this technology to stories on the homeless and other topics where immersive technology can bring an experience to life.”

            – Your Guide to Augmented Reality in The Times

Imagine what content marketers can do when they deliver an immersive case study experience for their targets rather than another six-page white paper.

It’s not difficult to see how immersive storytelling could more effectively drive behavior change or swell a nonprofits’ donor rolls with an immersive public service campaign. Imagine using virtual reality to put your target audience in the passenger seat next to a distracted or drunk driver, in a homeless shelter, in an animal shelter or in a wilderness refuge being threatened by deforestation or climate change.

With augmented reality, imagine that for every donation of $100 to a wildlife cause, an app creates a 360 video of you surrounded by elephants at a watering hole or sitting with a panda bear in a tree and gives you the option to share it on your social networks. On the other end of the spectrum, picture an immersive corporate annual report that takes shareholders into the boardroom, onto the factory floor and into the field.

A new frontier is opening up that incorporates sensors with immersive technologies, says Hernandez. He has tried on a virtual glove that allows you to feel things in a 3D world—from a spider running across your hand to a cup of hot coffee. While this technology is still in the lab, it’s what’s coming next.

Hernandez didn’t omit the ethical questions that these immersive storytelling technologies prompt. In the immediate future, these technologies will be used to manipulate reality for “fake news” and misinformation where virtual reality cannot be distinguished from truth or actual reality. This is a scary downside, given how susceptible to fake news and conspiracy theories the public has shown itself to be.

Just like data privacy, cybersecurity breaches and social media bots; manipulation of virtual reality is another threat that communicators, journalists and society will need to navigate, but the sooner we adopt and become proficient in these technologies, the sooner we can put them to use for better storytelling experiences and the future of public relations and journalism.

“Content is king. This is still holding true. It doesn’t matter what technology we use. It’s how we use it to tell stories. It’s your attitude as a journalist and how you view that technology that determines the future of journalism.”

           – Robert Hernandez, USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism

If your attitude as a communicator is one of curiosity and comfort with change (and I hope it is!), then immersive storytelling technologies should excite you about the future of public relations and the new frontiers they will open for our craft.