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The importance of feedback in PR from media, to writing to client relationships

Like many around the world, I enjoyed watching the Winter Olympic Games. I love the fanfare of the competition, tracking medal counts and seeing well-known athletes winning gold again. Shaun White is my hero!
Like many around the world, I enjoyed watching the Winter Olympic Games. I love the fanfare of the competition, tracking medal counts and seeing well-known athletes winning gold again. Shaun White is my hero!

One of the other things that I love to see is the camaraderie among the athletes and how they relate to their coaches. I can’t help but wonder about the feedback they receive from their coaches in between each competition. You can do it! Don’t think about the last score, focus on what you do best. Next time go higher, faster, longer. Remember everything we practiced and most importantly have fun. I can only imagine the observations, evaluations, words of wisdom and encouragement that the athletes receive.

It makes me think of the importance of feedback in public relations from the media, regarding writing and most importantly with clients. So what, exactly, is it? The term “feedback” is used to describe the helpful information or criticism about prior action or behavior from an individual, communicated to another individual (or a group) who can use that information to adjust and improve current and future actions and behaviors.

With the media

When a public relations person pitches a story to our editorial contacts, best practices dictate that we have done our research. We know who the audience is for the publication, what topics the editor or reporter likes to cover, and we structure our pitch in a way that should be compelling enough for the editor to want to write the story. But that is not always the case.

Sometimes there is a piece missing to our pitch or an angle that would be more interesting to the editor. Sometimes their focus has changed or it’s just bad timing. Without specific feedback from the editor, we might not know how providing a customer or fresh data to support our pitch would be what is necessary for a compelling article.

PR people like to please and we are aggressively working to get coverage for our clients. We will jump through hoops to get the additional information for an editor to meet the deadline and to get the coverage. Knowing is the key.

Getting the writing right

The same is true with writing. It is such a subjective form of expression. Haven’t you had an experience where you really like someone’s writing style and other experiences where you didn’t? It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t an effective form of communication.

Feedback in writing for public relations is so very important from basic editing and proofreading to ensuring accuracy. When you’ve worked on an article for hours, sometimes a fresh set of eyes is needed to see obvious mistakes that you overlook.

We rely on our clients as experts in their field to make sure what we are communicating about their company, solution and industry segment is correct, especially if it is a new area to us. Feedback in writing will always produce better content.

Building client relationships

The most important feedback of all quite often comes from the relationship with our clients. We are here to work with you as your partner and to provide a service.

For us to be effective, we need ongoing, regular feedback and information. And quite often, it goes both ways. We regularly provide our clients feedback on positioning, making the best use of your marketing communications budgets, and what is newsworthy and what isn’t. Treating us as part of your team makes for the best client relationships and leads to outstanding results.

Toward better feedback

What makes feedback important?

  • It is effective listening. It’s important that the person providing the feedback know that they are being understood and that it provides some value.
  • It can motivate. By asking for feedback, it allows the receiver to perform better.
  • It can improve performance. Feedback should be constructive criticism and is the best at helping to formulate better decisions to improve and increase performance.
  • It is a tool for continued learning. Feedback is important across an entire organization to remain aligned to goals, create strategies, develop service improvements, improve relationships and to continue learning.
  • Feedback should not be uncomfortable. Regular, positive or constructive feedback motivates everyone to perform better from award-winning PR teams to medal-winning athletes.

So, when working with your Amendola PR team, remember the importance of feedback. It makes us all more effective and like our Olympic athletes, we all want to win the gold. Go Team USA!
One of the other things that I love to see is the camaraderie among the athletes and how they relate to their coaches. I can’t help but wonder about the feedback they receive from their coaches in between each competition. You can do it! Don’t think about the last score, focus on what you do best. Next time go higher, faster, longer. Remember everything we practiced and most importantly have fun. I can only imagine the observations, evaluations, words of wisdom and encouragement that the athletes receive.

It makes me think of the importance of feedback in public relations from the media, regarding writing and most importantly with clients. So what, exactly, is it? The term feedback’ is used to describe the helpful information or criticism about prior action or behavior from an individual, communicated to another individual (or a group) who can use that information to adjust and improve current and future actions and behaviors.

With the media

When a public relations person pitches a story to our editorial contacts, best practices dictate that we have done our research. We know who the audience is for the publication, what topics the editor or reporter likes to cover, and we structure our pitch in a way that should be compelling enough for the editor to want to write the story. But that is not always the case.

Sometimes there is a piece missing to our pitch or an angle that would be more interesting to the editor. Sometimes their focus has changed or it’s just bad timing. Without specific feedback from the editor, we might not know how providing a customer or fresh data to support our pitch would be what is necessary for a compelling article.

PR people like to please and we are aggressively working to get coverage for our clients. We will jump through hoops to get the additional information for an editor to meet the deadline and to get the coverage. Knowing is the key.

Getting the writing right

The same is true with writing. It is such a subjective form of expression. Haven’t you had an experience where you really like someone’s writing style and other experiences where you didn’t? It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t an effective form of communication.

Feedback in writing for public relations is so very important from basic editing and proofreading to ensuring accuracy. When you’ve worked on an article for hours, sometimes a fresh set of eyes is needed to see obvious mistakes that you overlook.

We rely on our clients as experts in their field to make sure what we are communicating about their company, solution and industry segment is correct, especially if it is a new area to us. Feedback in writing will always produce better content.

Building client relationships

The most important feedback of all quite often comes from the relationship with our clients. We are here to work with you as your partner and to provide a service.

For us to be effective, we need ongoing, regular feedback and information. And quite often, it goes both ways. We regularly provide our clients feedback on positioning, making the best use of your marketing communications budgets, and what is newsworthy and what isn’t. Treating us as part of your team makes for the best client relationships and leads to outstanding results.

Toward better feedback

What makes feedback important?

  • It is effective listening. It’s important that the person providing the feedback know that they are being understood and that it provides some value.
  • It can motivate. By asking for feedback, it allows the receiver to perform better.
  • It can improve performance. Feedback should be constructive criticism and is the best at helping to formulate better decisions to improve and increase performance.
  • It is a tool for continued learning. Feedback is important across an entire organization to remain aligned to goals, create strategies, develop service improvements, improve relationships and to continue learning.
  • Feedback should not be uncomfortable. Regular, positive or constructive feedback motivates everyone to perform better from award-winning PR teams to medal-winning athletes.

So, when working with your Amendola PR team, remember the importance of feedback. It makes us all more effective and like our Olympic athletes, we all want to win the gold. Go Team USA!

Changes around daily newspapers are creating a chill for journalists

The Dog Eat Dog Days of PR in the Internet Age: Part One

Who watches the watchdogs? It’s a phrase that conjures the creation of police commissions or intelligence oversight committees. But if you’re a believer in the sanctity of the Fourth Estate (and God knows we need them now more than ever), then the watchdogs who need watching are journalists. And no one watches or analyzes, or critiques journalists in greater depth and with sharper insight than the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University.

The purpose of the Nieman Lab is to figure out how journalism can adapt to the Internet Age while remaining relevant and profitable. Recently, in “Newsonomics: The 2016 Media Year by the Numbers and a look toward 2017,” the Nieman Lab’s Ken Doctor turned up some fascinating trends that will both bedevil and delight those of us in PR and business who strive daily, with more or less success, to earn the media’s adoration and praise.

Have Your Fake and Eat it Too

The bedeviling side of Nieman Lab’s look back at 2016 is the messy shift from print to digital, a transformation long underway that is weighing ever more heavily on the news media. The industry-rocking trend of 2016, of course, was the rise of “fake news” or rather the rise in awareness of fake news, thanks to the Presidential Election. Doctor takes some easy swipes at Mark Zuckerberg for his much-publicized claim that 99% of Facebook’s content isn’t fake. “Ever heard a publisher proudly proclaim, “We get it right 99 times out of a hundred?” he asks.

But the fake news phenomenon isn’t going to have much impact on the field of technology PR. More significant for the business of Media Relations is the sharp increase in the number of PR “targets” as the Internet continues to make it easier for small, independent content producers to compete with the mainstream media. This democratization of publishing and broadcasting offers both more opportunities and more diluted opportunities for getting the word out about a company, a product, or a thought leader.

The Young and the Restless

Here’s Nieman Lab’s take on one of the biggest online outposts, a not-so-new media that has finally come into its own after a decade of unrealized promise and that is quickly disrupting its Old Media birthplace, radio:

“Podcasting now reshuffles the deck, mixing and matching talent on scheduled airtime and on demand, with unpredictable consequences. The movement of younger talentwithin the emerging podcast economy poses both a great opportunity and threat for public radio as we know it, and is a boon for newer entrants like Gimlet Media, Panoply, This American Life/Serial, and Midroll Media.”

A related trend that accelerated in 2016 and into 2017 is the flight of ad revenue from mainstream publishing as advertisers spread their dollars online in search of eyeballs (and now ears, too).

“The Wall Street Journal lost more than a fifth of its overall advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2016,” Doctor writes. Other blue ribbon outlets suffered similar losses: The New York Times saw print ad revenue decline by 18 percent; McClatchy reported a 17 percent loss; Gannet lost 15 percent; and Tronc (the former Tribune Company) lost 11 percent.

To compensate for those huge loses, publishers are seeking revenue directly from readers in the form of digital subscriptions and add-ons. That requires high-quality content and attractive digital platforms something that “only the national/global dailies have been able to achieve,” according to Doctor. How will the rest of the nation’s dailies fare amid this historic transformation? Judging by the number of journalists losing their jobs, not so well. Nielsen Lab counted just 27,300 journalists working for U.S. dailies in 2016, 4,000 of whom work for the four national titles. The size of the local press has declined by half, according to Doctor.

Heads Up to PR customers

What does that mean for PR? The math is pretty simple. With an ever smaller number of traditional publications managing to keep the lights on, the competition for coverage among the dailies is becoming downright cutthroat. The days of guaranteeing that a successful company in a hot market will be covered by The New York Times or Wall Street Journal are over.

So what’s the answer? How can companies in search of media coverage adjust to this fast-evolving environment?

You can read the answer in Part Two of this post. In the meantime, a few hints: Traditional PR is dead. The press release as many people think of it is a goner. Thought leadership will be a key PR budget priority. Content is (roll your eyes if you must) king.

But in the end, it’s still all about relationships.

Clarify Health Solutions Selects Amendola Communications for Public Relations and Content Creation

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., February 14, 2017 Amendola Communications, a nationally recognized, award-winning healthcare and healthcare IT public relations and marketing agency, is pleased to announce that it has been selected as the agency of record for Clarify Health Solutions. Amendola will utilize a broad range of public relations and content services to promote Clarify Health’s belief that real-time care guidance powered by predictive analytics can orchestrate the far better healthcare journeys that we all deserve.

“Clarify Health’s mission is to improve healthcare and make a meaningful impact through our unique real-time care traffic control system,” said Jean Drouin, MD, CEO and co-founder of Clarify Health. “We searched for an agency that would serve as a partner and foster broad awareness and industry connections. Amendola shares our ambitions and has the knowledge and experience to help us reach our goals as we grow.”

Clarify Health has built a breakthrough digital care guidance system that seamlessly integrates powerful analytics, artificial intelligence, real-time patient navigation and smart workflows. Its analytics platform currently processes over 200 million records to illuminate the care and practices of over three million patients and a million physicians. Using AI to surface actionable insights and identify issues before they occur, Clarify supports clinicians and hospitals in delivering more precise and personalized care that is also more affordable. Clarify Health brings together committed and passionate colleagues with backgrounds in big data and AI engineering from financial services together with extensive clinical operations expertise.

Amendola will work with Clarify Health to increase brand awareness and thought leadership by delivering its core value proposition to target audiences, drawing on its deep industry knowledge and significant media relationships in healthcare IT. Amendola will also be responsible for delivering a range of content demonstrating the thought leadership and expertise of Clarify Health’s subject matter experts.

“Value-based care has broad implications for the healthcare industry and creates opportunities for companies that can execute on a vision to improve healthcare delivery,” said Jodi Amendola, CEO of Amendola Communications. “Our knowledge of the healthcare IT space and proven track record of elevating clients will be instrumental in helping Clarify Health reach its PR objectives. We are excited to work with their team.”

About Clarify Health
Clarify Health Solutions believes that patients and those who care for them deserve far better care. Clarify Health works to improve the lives of patients and their caregivers by delivering an innovative real-time care guidance platform that enables more satisfying, better outcome, higher value healthcare. The Clarify Health digital platform seamlessly integrates powerful analytics, artificial intelligence, real-time patient navigation and smart workflows to proactively guide patients and their caregivers through personalized care journeys. Providers and payers receive faster, more actionable insights to deliver more delightful care. Clarify Health brings together committed and passionate colleagues with backgrounds in big data and AI engineering from financial services together with extensive clinical operations expertise. For more information, please visit http://www.clarifyhealth.com.
About Amendola Communications
Amendola Communications is an award-winning national public relations, marketing communications, social media and content marketing firm. Named one of the best information technology (IT) PR firms in the nation four times by PRSourceCode, Amendola represents some of the best-known brands and groundbreaking startups in the healthcare and HIT industries. Amendola’s seasoned team of PR and marketing pros delivers strategic guidance and effective solutions to help organizations boost their reputation and drive market share. For more information about the PR industry’s “A Team,” visit www.acmarketingpr.com, and follow Amendola on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Media Contact | Marcia Rhodes | Ph: 480.664.8412, ext. 15 | mrhodes@ACMarketingPR.com