Our company recently helped with the grand opening for Atrium Ready-to-Wear, a boutique within a bridal shop offering designer cocktail and evening gowns. The owner of the boutique, Luvi Wheelock, has had much success in her first retail venture so the pressure was on to successfully introduce Houston to her second creation.

When it comes to event planning, no detail is insignificant. From the invitation font and the guest list to the sugar-rimmed cocktails and cupcakes toppers, nothing can be overlooked. Months in advance, The PR Boutique team gathered around our Tiffany blue table to brainstorm and map out a timeline for the grand opening. These are some of my favorite times at the office, where each co-worker’s unique ideas and personalities come out.

In order to garner coverage amongst several areas of media and spread the word to the boutique’s target audience, we decided to apply several strategies.

The first step was to plan a pre-event. We invited a fashion-focused non-profit to preview the boutique before it opened to the public. On the menu for the night were lite bites, cocktails and an exclusive sneak-peak at the soon-to-be open space. Social coverage was maintained by snapping pics of the prominent charity supporters. That night, Atrium established its plan to provide goodwill in the community by offering a percentage back to the charity of items sold.

For the grand opening, we turned Atrium into a must-see social and fashion affair. A personal appearance by renowned celebrity designer Prabal Gurung had the fashion media on alert. A schedule, timed down to the minute, mapped out press interviews with Luvi and the designer. (Note: always plan for flight delays from New York)

Atrium’s clientele is a unique, high-end demographic with an active social life.  To get this target through the door, we sought the support of three event chairs. These ladies were a great help in inviting their friends, generating social press buzz and above all, looked stunning in Prabal’s clothes. A highlight of the opening was seeing the designer give attendees hands-on fashion advice on what to purchase.  Another was seeing guests raise their (sugar-rimmed) glasses and cheers our client to her new business.

The result of all the hard work was an event that gained a plethora of media coverage, new boutique customers, a satisfied client and another pair of perfectly broken-in heels.

- Meredith Wierick

Here are some tips on selecting the perfect photographer to shoot your event.

What is your budget?
Pricing can be a maker or breaker when choosing a photographer. Knowing the budget set for photography by your event planners or committee is key when beginning your research. Understand the levels of each package the photographer offers and the pricing of additional services provided by the company such as editing and processing.

Does their work work?
Liking the work of your photographer is key. Conduct research to make sure the photographer has experience with a similar environment.  For instance, you do not want to hire a photographer for a social event whose expertise is portraits. Determine what your mission of photography is and ask yourself can their general style give me that?

Be in the Picture

An important question to ask your photographer is if he/she takes names of those in the photos. If not, designate a publicist to accompany the photographer and capture the names of those photographed. This will ensure there are no misspellings and make it easier to submit the photos to the media.  Make a list of any must-have shots of the venue or guests and point them out to the photographer at the beginning of the night.

Turnaround Time

If your publicist will be sending your photos to the media, it is important to know submission guidelines and deadlines. Be sure and set a date with your photographer of when you will receive the photos, as to not miss any media opportunities. Ask how long the photographer will take for editing and how you will be receiving the photos-CD, website, flash drive?

After you’ve secured the perfect photographer, you can sit back, relax and enjoy your event knowing that your guests and event elements are being successfully documented.

The first step is easy. Make sure your content is relevant to your area of expertise. You would think that would go without saying. However, that’s not enough. Second, and more importantly, know for whom you are writing. Do this by creating “buyer personas”.

Create “buyer personas” for your target customers

We recommend creating a “buyer persona” for each group in your target market. This means create a detailed composite representative of each customer group you want to reach.

Let’s say you own an upscale women’s boutique. After brainstorming with your team, you break down your customers into three distinct groups: River Oaks Rachel, Newlywed Nicole and Cheerleader Charlotte. However, labels aren’t enough. Get detailed.

Let’s take one of these “buyer personas” as an example. The women’s boutique decides that River Oaks Rachel is 42 years old mother of two, whose kid’s attend St. John’s high school. Her husband is a prestigious Houston neurosurgeon. She drives 2009 BMW X3 and a carries a Luis Vuitton handbag that she just purchased on her annual fall weekend trip to New York she takes with her three best friends from college (SMU). She runs five days a week in Memorial park, eats a vegetarian diet, but loves to drink two glasses of Californian cabernet dinner. Her favorite TV show is Mad Men and she subscribes to Vanity Fair and Vogue.

Get as descriptive as possible so you feel like this person exists (you could actually base this on a real person). For further tips, check out this article on how to create “buyer personas”.

Is it interesting to your customer?

After creating “buyer personas”, now you have a litmus test for posting new content. The women’s boutique owner would ask herself, “Would this interest River Oaks Rachel, Newlywed Nicole or Cheerleader Charlotte?” If not, don’t post it! Is it self-promotional advertising that would annoy someone when they receive it in their Facebook feed? Don’t do it! Are you posting a viral video of a cat doing somersaults just because it’s funny? Stop right there!

Remember two things when trying to engage your audience via social media marketing:

1) Stick to you area of expertise
2) Keep it interesting for your target audience

- CF

“Revolution”

One of the most helpful techniques outlined in the book is called “Revolution”. The core of this concept is to challenge the rules and assumptions associated with the problem you are trying to solve. You first define the rules and assumptions and then you flip them on their head to see if you can come up with something new.

The only way to fully understand “Revolution” is to give it a spin. Let’s take the white ceramic teacup on my desk next to my mouse and see if we can improve on it.

Five Innovations

After completing a quick version of “Revolution”, let’s try to come up with five innovations from the original white ceramic teacup.

1. Teacups for Charity – Teacups hand-painted by a local children’s charity where half of the profits go to the charity.
2. Wine Tumbler w/ Handle – A wine tumbler (stemless wine glass) with a handle to avoid temperature changes caused by the heat from your hand (a reason for the stem in the first place) .
3. Gourd Teacups – Sell gourds as teacups and market them as “green”.
4. Teacup Hand-Warmer – A large thick plastic teacup that has spaces for both hands that serves as both a teacup and hand-warmer
5. Disposable Tea-Ready Cups – Paper teacup with tea and filter in bottom. Just add water.

I’d say that’s not bad for one person brainstorming about a product for 15 minutes. Imagine what your entire team could do for your business in two hours!  The toughest part isn’t the exercise. That’s fun. It’s stopping your daily routine to try something new.

For a more detailed look at ?Whatif!’s “Revolution” exercise and others like it, grab a copy of Sticky Wisdom.

- CF

The two industries are different even though they’re commonly confused as being the same. Advertising can employ over the top techniques to get attention, while successful PR campaigns require more restraint. Here are some clear differences:

• Public Relations is a field concerned with creating good will and keeping a company/product /person in front of the public and top of mind with the media

• Advertising is paid for with the intent to persuade or remind an audience about a product/service/company with the intent of making a sale.

• Public relations campaigns require a nose for news and a comprehensive understanding of the media. PR agencies exercise creativity by crafting captivating, factually correct stories that educate readers about their client.

• Advertising relies heavily on creativity, catchy slogans and eye-catching graphics to attract consumers’ attention.

• With public relations, you have no control over how the media presents the information you send them in the form of a press release or media alert or if they will even use your information at all

• In advertising, you pay for the space, so you have creative control over what you want to say

• With a strong PR campaign, a third-party article written about a product or coverage of an event on TV or in the print media says they’re seeing something you didn’t pay for with ad dollars and view it differently than they do paid advertising which creates credibility in the marketplace

• Consumers know when they’re reading an advertisement they’re trying to be sold a product or service. Unfortunately, the consumer often views an ad cautiously

I can’t tell you how many resumes we receive each week from recent graduates wanting to embark on the glamorous lifestyle of a public relations professional. If you’ve seen the new reality show on MTV, “The Spin Crowd”, you’d think we’re all Hollywood partygoers and fashion divas with cocktails in hand. Wrong. The truth is, a great publicist creates rockstars. They aren’t rockstars. The PR Boutique interns learn quickly that public relations is not just attending high profile restaurant openings or backstage passes to a Jay Z concert.

What is PR, really?

PR is waking up at 4am to oversee a 5am morning show TV segment to promote an evening event that ends at midnight. When you are knee deep in planning a long-term media relations campaign for one client, you’ve got to pitch another to bloggers in the next five minutes.  After the invitations for a launch party are in the mail, your client informs you the event has been pushed back a week. How’s that for being a rockstar?

What makes a good publicist?

Creativity – A good publicist is constantly creating:  creating new media pitches, creating event themes, creating social marketing campaigns, creating clever web site content.  You must create 24-hours a day, whether it’s dreaming of ideas in our sleep or brainstorming at the office.

Confidence – Even in today’s tech savvy environment, a PR professional can’t hide behind their Mac. You must be convincing, not only through email, but also over the phone and in person. Therefore, confidence is vital. Journalists trust public relations professionals to provide them with valuable story ideas.  If you aren’t sure about your ideas, a journalist can see through you in two seconds.

Passion – Passion will make or break a publicist. If you aren’t excited about a product, it’s difficult to tell it’s story. If you aren’t an enthusiastic storyteller, the media will not listen. And without passion, you won’t make it through 16-hour days.

Perseverance – You must have thick skin to be a publicist.  You are behind the scenes and need to make things appear seamless when they can be anything but that.  When working for a PR agency you encounter dozens of personalities daily.  You work with multiple clients, members of the media, vendors and co-workers, all while staying abreast of the latest technological trends.

Still want to be PR Rockstar?

Are you are passionate, hard working, and love fast-paced and ever-changing environment? If so, then go for it! We wouldn’t change our jobs for the world.

“A Technique for Producing Ideas” is a 64-page booklet written by the advertising executive James Webb Young in 1965. The unassuming book has stood the test of time by concisely outlining Young’s simple, yet effective method for generating ideas.

Young’s 5 Steps for Producing Ideas

1. Gather Information
Young discusses two types of information that must be collected: specific and general. Specific information relates to the particular problem you are trying to solve. So if you are new hair salon trying to come up with a brand, this means studying your competition, interviewing potential customers and staying on top of the latest trends on industry blogs.

General information, on the other hand, requires a continuous browsing of disparate topics. When talking about the creative person, Young says “there is no subject under the sun in which he could not become easily interested”. For the hair salon owner, this means reading the headlines about Nascar in the Chronicle sports section, visiting the Rothko Chapel and taking the Metro bus to work when you normally drive. You never know when this information will come in handy.

2. Chew On It
Young believed an idea is nothing but a “new combination of old elements.” With this in mind, he suggests taking all of the information gathered and trying to piece it together like a puzzle. Brainstorm. Think up wild questions and write down the craziest ideas that come to mind. If my hair salon were a car, what car would it be? How would Rothko paint my logo? Would the color scheme of the bus drivers hat work for my hair salon? Push this as long as you can until you run out of steam.

3. Leave It
After you’ve chewed on the information until you’ve had enough, forget about it.

4. Eureka!
Once you’ve completed the first three steps, while you are running around Memorial Park or cooking some pasta at home, it will hit you. As Henry Ford said, “You only have to know what you want, then forget it, and go about your business. Suddenly, the idea will come through.”

5. Get Feedback
Young warns against keeping your idea to yourself. Ask for the opinions of those you respect. With the critique of others, your idea will take on a new life and become further refined.

So that’s Young’s process in a nutshell. Grab a copy and let us know how it helps. Next comes the fun part: execution. Unfortunately, Young did not leave us with what would certainly be the Holy Grail of business: “A Technique for Executing an Idea.”

- CF

What is a title tag?

The title tag is the line of text at the top of your web browser above the web address.

Why is the title tag important?

The title tag communicates the topic of a particular web page to search engines. The title tag is also the exact same information shown in the first line of search results. So you can essentially control how you want Google to view your page as well as how a user views your web page in search results.

How do you create a good title tag?

• No longer than 70 characters long (including spaces)
• Incorporate the most relevant keywords and phrases for the specific web page
• Identify your company (if you are not well known company, we recommend at the end)

Let’s take the imaginary company Italian Live, an online language school that teaches Italian language classes over the internet to students across the globe. A good title tag for its home page might be:

Online Italian Lessons | Learn Italian Online | Italian Live

• 60 characters long
• Two keyword phrases at the beginning
• Name of company last

What is an example of a bad title tag?

A painful thing to see is a beautifully designed website with poor title tags. It happens all the time. After all, writing keyword-rich title tags is not always of utmost importance to designers, whose primary concern is aesthetic. Here are some examples of common, but poor, title tags that do not incorporate keywords:

• Home
• Index (another name for “Home Page”
• Welcome
• Company Name (Unless you are Coke or Google, just your company name is not sufficient)

I’ve written my title tags, how do I place them on my site?

If you have a content management system (CMS system like WordPress or Joomla), ask your web master to show you how to place them into your site. However, if you don’t have a CMS and are not familiar with HTML code, send the title tags for each web page to your web master and he or she should be able to pop them in for you with ease.

Don’t forget all your web pages

Now you’ve got the tools to create excellent title tags and increase your visibility with search engines like Google. But, don’t forget to create separate title tags for each web page on your site. Every web page has distinct content, so make sure you let search engines know how this content differs from other pages on your site.

- CF

1)   Connections

By creating close ties with a non-profit that is near and dear to your heart, you have the opportunity to meet dozens of like-minded individuals. That means potential customers all in one place with a captive ear, ready to hear about your growing business.

2)   Feel Good

Everyone knows the importance of giving back to the community on a personal level, but in the business world, that “feel good” feeling can sometimes be lost in translation in the midst of number crunching and tax exemption forms. This newfound relationship with a community organization can help spread goodwill about your business. Potential customers are more likely to visit a business that gives back to the community knowing that you have a generous heart.

3)  The Obvious

Giving back can result in tax exemptions for your business, and that is always good thing for your bottom line. But there are other ways to partner with a non-profit that can include donating your facilities, volunteering your time and donating merchandise for silent auctions and charity events.

The next time your business decides that they want a surefire way to drum up new business contacts and improve goodwill towards their organization, think about partnering with a non-profit organization.