Public Relations Planning

I have read a lot of articles about engaging your customers, creating a dialogue with them, and then tracking the results.  One area that I seemed to have missed was how often you should reach out to your customer base.  In the online world, it seems like it can range from monthly or weekly to every couple of minutes. 

In setting a strategy, I think it is important to think through the entire year of your PR campaigns.  Ideas can include the regular touch points that your customers expect regarding relevant and interesting topics, any projected product launches, or other important information regarding your business.   These areas can serve as a baseline for the amount of communication you may have with your customers, and then you can fill-in from there.  The benefit of this strategy is that it can help with timing certain notices and setting your tone and frequency with what matches your business model and capabilities.

To help add more communication, if that is deemed worthwhile to your overall digital strategy, you can research the major blogs that are written in your industry to understand what topics are being discussed and how they discuss it.  From here, you can develop your own ideas for your own blog and try to become a thought leader in your respected space.  As was briefly mentioned in class, Technorati is a leading blog search engine that, if your blog is listed on there, will help build your followers. 

These are just some initial thoughts and this article has more ideas on developing a strategy.