As if these statistics were not enough to prove its worth to business, and marketing specifically, consider this – more than four billion searches for individuals are performed each year! When your profile comes up in searches, do you think it is sufficiently impressive?

So how can you, and your company, rise above the noise? Just as a slapdash approach to your website’s content, layout and ease of use can turn a visitor away, never to be seen again, the same can be said of a poor LinkedIn presence.

Put it this way – a poor LinkedIn presence is the equivalent of the “website under construction” pages that used to be surprisingly commonplace a few years ago, also known as “please go elsewhere”!

In order to help guide and educate B2B marketers on the basics of what to do and what not to do with LinkedIn, we have put together an e-Book and made it available to download for free.

It contains information on:

• How to set up personal profiles
• Integrate other social networks
• Create company pages
• How to take advantage of the numerous groups and communities – and even how to successfully create your own.

Click here to download the e-Book, and don’t forget to come back to this blog once you have had a chance to read and digest, and leave your comments below.

But how does PR actually help the sales process in practice? Other than generating coverage to simply encourage interest and familiarity, where else can PR help?

This is a discussion that we have had with clients and prospects on a number of occasions, and so we chose to write an e-Book about it.

In short, there is a very recognisable process in B2B decision-making, that takes a potential customer from mild interest to hot prospect:

1. Realising there is a need
2. Defining a long list of suppliers
3. Whittling the long list down to a short list
4. Choosing a supplier
5. Signing the contract

Our free, 24-page, easy-to-read e-Book shows that PR is an intrinsic tool in taking each prospect from one stage to the next, be that via coverage in the trade and national media, through complementing SEO strategies or by providing sales collateral such as case studies.

Click here to download our e-Book

And once you have downloaded and digested the e-Book, don’t forget to come back to this page and add your remarks and feedback to this blog!

It was my love of all things cereal (Weetabix, Frosties, Corn Flakes, Krave….) that drew my attention to a recent article in Marketing Week talking about Doughnuts for Breakfast (12 April). Doughnuts…? For breakfast…?

But on further reading I realised that the article was actually looking at how brands are tapping into new global markets and the importance of understanding the local cultures in these areas.

Regardless of what type of product you are trying to break into a new region, understanding the local customs and cultures in that market is a key process. However, educating the market also plays a huge role and it is here that our job in PR becomes critical.

There are a variety of ways that this education process can be started, but reaching your target audience through the words and thoughts of an established local voice is very powerful. People will always be more inclined to listen to an independent authority such as a journalist talk about the benefits of a new product rather than the vendor or brand themselves – of course you will say your software is the best, provides the highest ROI and brings the smoothest and easiest implementation you’ll ever experience. But what is the reality?

Working closely with the local media and taking your argument down to the local level to address specific challenges in that individual country, or even area within a country, will help to establish you as a local business expert. Add into the mix a bunch of timely tweets, blogs and comments on local industry news stories and you’ll be well on your way to expanding your local presence and breaking into that new market.

Click here to find out more about itpr’s International PR services.

Posted by Lauren Symons, Senior Account Executive

Social media is now part of everyday life. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are used for various different reasons, with most people arguing that Facebook is personal and LinkedIn is professional. But where does Twitter fall?  As we look to attract more followers and build our social media reputations, it leaves me wondering, “What should we really be tweeting?”

I created my Twitter profile while at University, primarily for research for my dissertation, but as its popularity grew it became more of a personal outlet. I have never been one for regularly updating my Facebook status to divulge my momentary feelings and emotions, and while I didn’t see Twitter as an outlet for this, I did feel more comfortable stating my more trivial observations in a tweet rather than in a Facebook status.

I was beginning to embrace Twitter, using it to communicate with friends and to monitor the tweets from people and organisations that I took a personal interest in.

Now Twitter has started creeping into my professional life. As Twitter becomes a more recognised tool for PR, I am now faced with the question, “Should I create two profiles to keep my professional and personal lives separate?” It is of course natural to create two personas – your work self and your home self. But now with social media, you can actively choose to let people into your life (or should that be ‘lives’?).

As I haven’t yet created two accounts I have built up a number of work-related followers who could be confused if I now try to create a whole new network and move them across. I personally feel that as I am not using my Twitter to rant or post anything obscene there is no harm in having professional contacts following me. It allows me to show those I work with the other sides of me.

There is no doubt that social media is changing the way you present yourself to the world and you need to decide how you want to be perceived and by who before you start using the tool. So I would suggest three key things to think about with regards to your Twitter profile:

1. What do you want to tweet? – Why are you using Twitter, work or play?
2. Who is following you? – If you already have your Twitter profile with several followers, you need to think about who they are and what their expectations will be for your Twitter
3. Who do you want to become followers? You know who is following you, now you need to consider who you want to follow you and how best to attract them.

I think it is becoming more and more important for professionals, especially in the communications industries, to create social media profiles and develop their social media reputations. Within PR in particular, you can’t impress upon your clients the importance of doing these things if you haven’t done it for yourself! But the choice over how much of your personal self you portray will always be, and has to be, up to you.

Posted by Naomi, Account Executive and the latest proud addition to the itpr fold!

Since joining itpr earlier this year, I have thoroughly enjoyed my transition from inexperienced intern to a fully fledged member of the itpr team.

Leaving University with the ambition to forge a career in PR, I found myself in that all too common and well-publicised position of being a graduate without direct vocational experience.

In order to get my foot on that first rung, I sought out an opportunity to develop my skills and experience PR firsthand in an established and forward-thinking company. I was offered an internship with itpr and jumped at the chance to gain invaluable experience in a company I was eager to eventually work for. Unlike the tales of tea making and letter stuffing, I was given responsibility from the off, working on client accounts and was asked to write a blog for the website on my first day!

Needless to say that the first few weeks ignited my enthusiasm and impressed upon me itpr’s company values of encouraging the development of their employees in a stimulating working environment, and of staying at the forefront in their field. These values are what make itpr exemplary as a business and the reason I wanted to work for them. They have a strong commitment to nurturing talent from within and I was lucky enough to partake in staff training right from the beginning.

I have used every opportunity to learn all I can from a great team who foster a culture of best practise and lead by example. The regular feedback I’ve received has been fundamental in aiding my progress and development, and shortly after commencing my internship, my efforts were rewarded with an offer of full-time employment as an Account Executive.

The whole company couldn’t have been more welcoming and I immediately felt part of this very fun and friendly team! I have been really impressed and inspired by the drive and commitment of everyone here and am excited to be a part of a company with a level of ambition to match my own!

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If you too would like to join itpr’s growing team, please take a look at our Join the Team page for details of our current vacancies.

Bristol-based 5app is a start-up specialising in cross-platform mobile apps and they have contracted ITPR, in a competitive pitch, to provide a full thought leadership-based PR campaign, engaging with business, mobile and software development trade media, along with a dedicated social media campaign and SEO activity. We are really excited about this account and the team is looking forward to bringing yet another interesting start-up to the market.

TeamViewer, based in Germany, is a provider of remote control and online meeting software and is keen to spread its growing profile into the UK, particularly with its new conferencing product set. The team will therefore be providing a product-based media outreach campaign, across a wide range of verticals, centering on reviews, awards and free trials with the press.

ITPR has built, over many years, a specialism in bringing wider recognition to start-ups and also in bringing international B2B technology brands to the UK market from abroad, making these two latest wins particularly pertinent examples of our abilities.

Click here to find out more about our recent product launch campaigns, or here to read about our international pr services.

Last week myself, Rachael, Lolly and Kieran attended a CIPR evening titled “Social Media: Keeping up with the Audience” in the hope of being enlightened about new developments in digital media. The line-up was impressive with Andrew Walker, Co-founder of Tweetminster and ThinMartian, Fergus Bell, Digital Newsgatherer and Senior Producer at The Associated Press, Sam Duncan-Brown, Head of Innovation at A&N Media and Pete Clifton, Executive Producer at MSN UK all scheduled to give their 15 minute take on social media.

The digital age has certainly made life more difficult for established news outlets, but it was good to hear that everyone still has their role to play in the distribution of news. I thought for this week’s blog I’d give a brief rundown of my take on each of the speakers:

Andrew Walker gave a vibrant and engaging speech about the power and uses of Twitter and how we, the average Joe in the street, are now all in one way or another, potential journalists. The information we share about our daily lives through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (the list goes on) is modern journalism, but on a smaller scale. When a major news event occurs, the average person is now able to record content using the device in their pocket and share it with their chosen audience. A powerful tool to have and one that means we are no longer readers of the news; we are the shapers of the news.

Fergus Bell had some interesting uses for social media, whilst he did confess he was more of a social media ‘watcher’ rather than a prolific ‘user’. Hearing his examples of how social media can be harnessed to track breaking news and identify credible sources through a social media footprint was useful, but at the end of the day it came down to using the tools at your disposal. It was reassuring from my perspective to hear that I am using very similar tools to monitor my news in comparison to a bona fide Digital Newsgatherer at the AP.

Sam Duncan-Brown took a slightly analytical approach highlighting the fact that high web traffic to a website doesn’t necessarily translate into high revenue. Driving high numbers to a website is great, but identifying those users and getting them to engage with your website is a different beast entirely. From a B2B perspective this was right up my street and when he started to explain the challenges of monetising a website, I couldn’t help but think of a recent article from one of our clients on the subject of monetising websites such as Pinterest using informed web analytics. Behind every successful website is excellent web analytics and if you’re not using a method of analytics, then you are losing out on potential revenue. It’s that simple.

Pete Clifton concluded with a summary of how MSN UK has improved its journalism in the past 12 months and rather than being a news aggregator, now generates a lot more original content. It was impressive to hear how far they have come in such a short time, but I fear he has a tough job ahead of him to turn MSN UK into a powerful news source.

All in all it was a very interesting evening and good to hear the views of those who have totally immersed themselves in social media. Whilst social media has a definite role to play in how we report on news and shape news agendas in the future, there is still room for traditional ‘long-form’ journalism to provide the context to 140 character headlines.

NOTE – after publication of this blog, the following article and infographic appeared on The Wall

We have submitted our proposed session – “PR for Startups – it’s not about ego, it’s about sales” – and have been shortlisted to present. But the way to get from the shortlist to the final week’s agenda is via the public vote – and this is where you come in!

We need your votes!

So click here to be taken to the Digital Shoreditch site and help out your favourite PR agency! And once you’ve done so, why not join us there?!

The summary of our presentation is copied below:

PR = media coverage = buzz and excitement = curiosity = interest = sales

Quite simple really!

We are a B2B technology PR consultancy – experts in bringing tech start-ups into the public eye.

But why is PR important? As above, PR creates rapid sales interest amongst early adopters and beyond, but it also brings your ideas to the attention of potential investors.

Bob Dearsley, Founder and Chief Exec of ITPR, will host a discussion on promoting tech start-ups in the media, the tangible benefits of such activity and the pitfalls that many ambitious tech start-ups suffer in their PR and marketing strategies.

Questions answered :

• How can I promote my business in the early days, even when I haven’t got any customers yet?
• My idea is really rather technical and complex – can I still get the media interested?
• Which media should I target and with what sort of material?
• How can I get the attention of insanely busy journalists?
• How can I promote my business specifically to attract investor attention?
• I’ve secured a community of early adopter customers, but how do I move my product into the awareness of the mainstream?
• How do I make sure my media coverage actually creates sales opportunities?
• What role does social media play in all this?
• What value is rich content – videos and infographics rather than the written word?

Posted by Sam Turpin and Rachael Myers

(and if, like some of the less Heat-dependent people in the office, you don’t get the significance of the blog title, watch this…)

So perhaps not with the sole intention of buying a Heat magazine, but nevertheless this week saw us two and Will don the sunnies and head into town to meet Steve Ranger, Editor of Silicon and now TechRepublic, to find out more about the recent changes.

Hardcopy magazines have invariably declined over the past year, with most publications opting for an online presence instead. With competition at an all-time high, it is little wonder that magazines are joining forces in a bid to buck the recession and keep readership levels up. This is certainly the case with TechRepublic and Silicon. With Silicon vying to break the States and TechRepublic looking to venture into Europe, it made perfect sense for the two sister sites  to combine.

As the new look site aims to offer the best of both UK and global CIO news, it got me questioning how other publications will up their game to stay ahead of the competition. The latest TechRepublic venture seems to have hit the ground running, so will other magazines follow suit? How many publications will break away from the mould and offer something different to its readers?  And what will they offer? Surely the ever-growing trend for online publications that bring their readers rolling news, which is free and accessible at the click of a mouse, will fend off competition from others who hide behind a pay-wall? In this vein, it will only be the quirkiest and most innovative who survive the online battle for subscribers.

All in all, a very insightful and thought-provoking meeting, rounded off by a Pimm’s in the sunshine – hardly a bad day in the office!

It turns out, according to a new book released this month, that the currently fashionable infographic really isn’t that novel an idea – traced back by Julius Wiedemann to at least the mid-1600s!

Of course, presenting data-heavy information graphically has been a fact of life ever since the invention of, well, the graph! So it’s not a new trend, but why is it capturing so much attention at the moment – to the point that some in the media, marketing and design world are already growing tired of them?!

Unsurprisingly, it comes down to information and the almost unnerving growth in our production of it. The ease with which I can write and publish this blog – and subsequently tweet it and promote it via other social networks – clearly demonstrates this.

There aren’t many people out there who can spend their lives staring at spreadsheets of rows and rows of numbers and absorbing reams of written material, so data needs to be presented in an easily digestable format, hence the historic use of graphs. Instead of trying to read and compare the figures, we can easily appreciate the difference between the big bar on the left of the graph compared to the smaller bar on the right – as the meerkat says, simples!

But our lives at home and at work, as is often reported (yet more information!), are assaulted almost constantly by new, refreshed or regurgitated data, making even the time spent to assess plain graphs and charts a precious commodity. We need to appreciate what the information all means, and quickly, so those wanting us to review their summaries (no doubt with their bias included) need to do so in an engaging and even fun way.

More than ever in the modern world, a format needs to be used that actually makes the digestion of the data a pleasure, not a chore. The colourful, engaging, sequential structure of an infographic, especially in the current fashion, actually lends itself well to this – quick and easy provision of information, summarising a wealth of data and designed to engage and entertain, not to merely inform.

So while many are growing tired of the infographic, they are probably actually more tired of the more cumbersome or contrived examples of the use of the style – where a so-called infographic is actually little more than a collection of normal graphs with brighter colours and less corporate fonts, that doesn’t actually make the absorption of information any easier at all.

After all, as said before, we’ve been happily taking information on board through infographics for literally centuries, so how could it be a tired format?

I’m fairly certain this assumption is right – I just need to wade through all the articles and information to make sure…