PR for Events – a Match Made in Heaven?

Sustained communications programs are what make PR firms go around. Matching ongoing needs with opportunities is Touchpoint’s stock in trade.

Over the past 15 years, we’ve developed a reputation for promoting events of all types. From chef-driven takeovers in New York City to pop-up dinners in Charleston; multi-day festivals to tiny influencer dinner parties – when it comes to making the most of an event, we’re all in.

We’ve learned a few things about maximizing the PR value of your event. Next time you’re in planning stages, consider this:

Of course you want media to cover your event ahead of time (to help you generate enthusiasm). But have you asked why they should? What’s in it for their readers or followers?
Can you provide media something sexy or meeting – compelling enough to make them leave their desk? Can they get back stage, or snag hard-to-get interviews with your participants? How can you inspire a hard working journalist to give you their precious attention?
If your event has been done before, what is new this year? Are you reaching a milestone, is someone important participating/attending, are you raising money for a cause? Remember, news is about NEW!

And while we are big proponents of PR for events, we are mindful of the limitations of earned media.

So before you launch your plan, ask this simple question: Will your event be successful if no media cover it?

Are you counting on just PR to sell it? That’s often a recipe for disaster. Make sure you have a marketing budget for sponsored social posts, potential hosted media visits, and ads.

PR at Events – MacGyver Meets The Great Race

Here’s an event IQ quiz:

What happens when the caterer forgets serve ware for a dessert party for 120? You wipe a credit card with vodka and use it as a spatula.
What everyday implement are you carrying that can serve as a knife or scissor? The sharp edge of your car key, of course!
Where to turn when the centerpieces are held up in traffic? Run to the closest bodega or Trader Joe’s and grab what flowers you can find, and turn tumblers into vases.
What office implement can you employ when you have to move large boxes without a dolly? Grab a rolling chair and count the thumbs up as you push that chair down the sidewalks of 5th Avenue.

In addition to promoting events, Touchpoint is often found working events, supplementing planners or stepping in to execute from soup to nuts.

We enjoy the problem-solving aspects. The adrenaline rush you get when things are working cannot be beat. And the sheer terror you feel when they momentarily are not working, well, that we’d be happy to forego, forever.

As you plan events, and secure PR support, think ahead about what you’ll need before – but especially during. Do you need someone to host on-site media? Engage in social posting and listening? Tend to sponsors in your VIP tent? Work the room on your behalf?

Thinking ahead goes a long way toward avoiding problems. And when those arise, just make sure your team is carrying car keys, credit cards – and have more than a few tricks up their sleeves.

How to Get the Perfect Foodstagram with Nothing but Your iPhone

Whether you work in ‘the business’ or not, there comes a moment— out brunching with your girls, splurging on a 5-course meal, or grabbing a much-needed 5 o’clock cocktail after work—where you feel the urge to snap your order. And who can blame you? The phone always eats first. But in today’s social media-oriented world, it takes more than just an Apple product to capture the juiciness of that burger.

We recently attended a photography course at the Ordinary with James Beard-nominated food photographer Jonathan Boncek (Instagram: @boncekimages). Now, before you post that well-earned meal, you can follow these guidelines for Insta-success with a foodstagram.

For reference, this photo has 3 o’clock lighting and 9 o’clock shadows, creating dimension.

Directional Lighting and Composition

We’ve all had our fair share of dinner pictures that just didn’t turn out right. Lighting is the most important part of taking a good photo.

Pretend there’s a round clock surrounding your food or drink, and that the target is at 6 o’clock. Then, make sure the lighting is either coming in at 3 or 9 o’clock. This will add dimension through shadows on one side, and light enhancements on the other half, making the photo look more real and less flat.

Struggling with lighting? Try opening a door or moving your plate to a new angle.

Add Human Elements

People respond well to human elements because they make photos look natural and more in-the-moment. This could be hands holding a cheeseburger or that first big bite of a meal that leaves a noticeable chunk gone.

The green of the menu and flowers brings out the green leaves at the top of the drink.

Tighten up the table Items

Now that you’ve mastered lighting and composition, focus on the space around the food. Position your table items to fill up blank spaces, and pick ones that will bring out the colors of the plate or drink you are photographing, whether because they match perfectly or are a contrasting color.

Improvise

The most interesting backdrop isn’t always the table. Place your food or drink on the floor or add a menu under the plate. Scout the room for the most interesting, perhaps unexpected, spots. Be prepared for others to stare; but hey, haters gonna hate

This meal was shot in a plant.

Simple Editing

Who has time for Photoshop? Use your most convenient resource. The magic wand editing tool on your IPhone improves your photo by just a click of a button (located in the upper-right hand corner of the screen after you click “Edit”).

If you want to play around with your photo more, there’s no need for fancy apps. Just look through what the editing software the iPhone already offers—you can change the highlights, shadows, contrast, colors, and much more!

With this handful of tips, you’ll have the perfect. Grab your iPhone today at Happy Hour and start snapping!

It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

One of the reasons our team has been drawn to this Marketing Communications business is that it is ever-changing. Each day brings a new challenge, a new need to serve our clients, and a new opportunity to learn.

That seems particularly true this time of year, when students return to classrooms thirsty for insights and inspiration. We welcome back-to-school season with open arms.

Kerry Welch Michael Stettner Lecture Charleston SC Public Relations Marketing

First of all, one of us frequently serves as an adjunct professor of Marketing at the College of Charleston. So mid-August finds us focused once again on the work we do, why we do it, how, and how best to talk about that with willing listeners.

Funny enough, having one adjunct on the team turns us all into guest lecturers – which becomes a great way to polish our presentation skills.

The launch of a new year is also intern season, a particularly beloved time because we have been fortunate to work with many amazing young talents. They give us a semester of their time, and we give them a pretty healthy dose of reality. (It must be working, since about 80% of them have gone on to careers in this field!)

Emily Nicastro Lecture Charleston SC Public Relations Marketing

And yet another reason we celebrate the start of a new semester is the opportunities we have to mentor others. We do this at the elementary school level through graduate school. It’s exhilarating.

All of this has us thinking about the former NYU professor Neil Postman, who wrote Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

His central thesis is that education should – must – encourage people to “question, doubt or challenge” any part of their society. We agree. It’s something we try to do daily around here.

And truth be told, we love the act of teaching because – at our core – we are each passionate problem solvers and askers of “why?” And if we do all this right, we’re going to infuse others with this need to find answers. And done really right, we’ll inspire some kids to think differently about their own futures. (Maybe even turn a few Accounting majors into marketers!)

What a Wild Ride: 13-Year Old Bikes Across the Country for Water Mission International

Potential clients often ask if they can engage us for project work. And our answer is always “that depends.”

It depends on a shared understanding of goals. For us, project work demands and deserves as much heart as we bring to long-term projects. Maybe more. The simple fact is we are pretty bad at doing anything half way.

We had the tremendous pleasure of spending our summer cheering on a 13-year old boy from Charleston as he pedaled from Santa Monica, CA to Sullivan’s Island, SC to raise money for new wells to bring safe drinking water to other parts of the world.

We’re always happy to lend our powers to others trying to make this world better. And our money’s on Scotty Parker, the young man whose “heart hurt” thinking about other kids who died drinking unsafe water. Thanks to his effort, thousands of people will now count on safe water from new wells.

Project Work: Scotty's Ride For Water Touchpoint Communications Charleston SC After 8 weeks, countless flat tires, and more than a dozen media interviews in towns big and small, Scotty and his team netted more than $580,000 in contributions. And the money continues to roll in.

Scotty’s Ride for Water supported Water Mission International, a global non-profit based here.

This sort of project also reminds us that everybody brings unique gifts to each challenge. Our gifts come in the form of world-class publicists with tenacious, unbending hearts. They spent plenty of days (and evenings, and weekends) pitching, persuading and talking logistics with people all over the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast.

One of our many firm mottos is: “let’s not ask how much we’ll make, but rather, what difference we can make.” Working with people like Scotty Parker inspires us to keep asking that question!

Telling Your Story . . . Digitally

The phrase “tell their story to those who need to hear it” reverberates through our office daily at Touchpoint Communications because stories are at the core of Public Relations. Traditional storytelling is not the only option. A strategy combining traditional and digital storytelling reaches even more of those people who need to hear your story.

Digital storytelling is critically important and goes beyond social media channels. Consider the list below when developing your digital storytelling strategy.

Digital Storytelling - A New Web Standard: HTTPS.

Google is calling for all websites to switch to HTTPS (a secure connection) to ensure they remain safe for transactions like credit card purchases. When a website has a standard HTTP connection, unauthorized parties can observe the conversation between you and the site, i.e., what you are doing or typing while on a website.

Google’s long-term plan is to require an HTTPS for every website, even when users are not sharing sensitive information. This means without an HTTPS address in the future, your website will be marked as “not secure” and will not display your landing page.

Plan ahead and install the right type of SSL certificate to prevent any drop offs or inaccurate analytics tracking for your site.

Digital Storytelling - Mass adoption of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

If a website is taking too long to load, most of us will immediately close the webpage. Google knows this. User experience, such as page load time, is a primary factor in ranking a website in search engine results.

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project provides a way to instantly load mobile optimized content (created once) and published everywhere. This saves digital content creators time while making audiences happy, according to a survey from 9to5Google suggesting users prefer AMPs over regular content.

What are AMPs? They allow static HTML pages for mobile users to render more quickly. Instead of sites having inconsistent sizing and coding parameters for loading a page in a browser, it will all be streamlined.

Digital Storytelling - Optimize for Voice Search.

Voice search is booming. According to a Google survey in 2014 conducted by Northstar Research, 55 percent of teens and 41 percent of adults are using voice search more than once a day. Recent studies have suggested that the use of voice recognition will double in the next five years.

Voice search in mobile has a higher percentage of featured snippets (the answer boxes that appear beneath the search results). This means any optimizer should start including keywords based on how people search when they speak into their mobile phones.

The growth in popularity of voice search requires us to anticipate our users’ wants and needs to ensure we are answering their questions above the competition.

Written by Michael Stettner

An Internship That Bridged Classroom and Real World

maddy-longenecker-touchpoint-communications-charleston-pr There’s so much more creativity and science behind public relations than I thought.

When I started my internship at Touchpoint Communications, I was aware that public relations involved social media and event planning, but did not know the extent of what Touchpoint does for its clients.

I quickly learned that PR is also about more than events and posts!

Beyond posting Instagram photos and Facebook updates, they manage a company’s entire public image. I helped Michael and Emily reply to customer complaints, repost customer pictures, advertise new menus and promote different events through various media channels.

Figuring out what kind of audience a company hopes to attract and then creating a social media presence that encourages that audience is pretty clever. Being able to help the team work to meet the goals of their clients was a real learning experience.

Meanwhile, PR is often about working with the media. I learned that the creativity and insight required to gain a writer’s interest combines some of the skills I learned in college. It’s interesting to see the blend of interpersonal skills, marketing and writing that goes into pitching the media.

Writing turns out to be a big part of the work here. After writing innumerable essays for college, it was encouraging to see how those skills will come in to play in the workplace!

Studying organizational communication has exposed me to various theories about structure and its impact on the interactions between employees and their bosses. Watching those different theories unfold in real time proved fascinating!

Seeing a group of adults work in a professional setting that is laid-back and amiable is pretty reassuring for a college senior, and makes the “real world” so much more appealing. This team clearly loves what they do and enjoys their work environment.

The lively work atmosphere and the jovial relationship between all of the employees made my first office “job” far more entertaining than expected.

Written by intern Maddy Longenecker

Why We Love Charleston

So today was pretty special: the first flight of the Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner, a miraculous feat of engineering and imagination. We were out at the airfield with colleagues from the Coastal Community Foundation, rubbing elbows with . . . well . . . everybody.

Boeing_Dreamliner_Plane_Charleston Senator Lindsey Graham was there, along with business and nonprofit leaders from all over the community. Fittingly, the biggest group of all was the men and women who built the sleek, new bird. So that’s what we mean when we say “everybody.” It was magical.

Welcoming guests to the celebration, plant executive Joan Berry Robinson warmly noted: “Welcome to Boeing, welcome to your house. All of Charleston made this day possible.”

And that’s what we love about Charleston. It’s a real community. And it’s one we are proud to call ours.

So what’s it like to live in a place that attracts so many? (i.e. this weekend alone we will welcome tens of thousands of out-of-towners for a flower festival, a national 5K across America’s most beautiful bridge, and countless other celebrations.)

Here are our top 5 “Charleston Love” Notes: Colleen_Troy_Boeing_Dreamliner_Charleston

First of all, despite dozens of new residents arriving or being born here DAILY, it still feels like a small town. Live here long enough, and you will inevitably run into friends old and new while walking downtown, running an errand (note: always prepare for a chance encounter, lest you be caught in your Sunday worst), or dining out.

Secondly, with just a bit of effort, you can truly feel a part of this community’s fiber. In Charleston, people welcome others who want to make this place even stronger. As a result, our robust non-profit community benefits from new ideas and energy as volunteers and board members come together in beautiful ways.

Thirdly, it’s pretty on the inside, too. We know Charleston oozes charm. But beyond the beauty of Rainbow Row and moss-cloaked Live Oak trees, we see beauty in the people. Strangers acknowledge one another on the streets with a polite hello or wave. Virtual strangers take our calls in an emergency, and offer help. (Try organizing an event in 24 hours in some other place! We’ve done it here, and it truly takes a village.)

Fourth - We’re a hungry bunch, and this town feeds our many appetites. First, the food is amazing. But there’s also the cerebral nutrition in the form of art festivals, concerts, galleries and more. We are strengthened when we watch amazing athletes, artists and others soar to new heights in the Holy City.

Fifth: it’s home! Our motley crew has migrated to Charleston from Texas, New York and Hawaii. But each of us has found a home right here in the soft loam of the Lowcountry. How do we know this is home? Because pluff mud smells good (to us); because we know how to coexist with noseeums; because we can argue for an hour about where to find the best biscuit in town.

And we know this is home because when that gorgeous plane took off today, our hearts soared.

It’s Festival Season at Touchpoint!

“Is this work? It can’t be. Nobody should be allowed to have this much fun.”

That’s the text a Touchpointer sent on day 3 of a 4-day triathlon otherwise known as Charleston Wine & Food. That annual celebration of culinary arts brings amazing chefs, wine experts and others to Charleston, and focuses on the homegrown talent we marinade in daily.

For the PR folks who work with those talents, Wine & Food is an exciting, action packed festival marked less by eating or drinking, and more by connecting, pitching and charming. (Ironically, many of our ilk work so hard during the Festival, we scarcely eat and end up at McDonald’s drive-thrus late at night. Don’t judge!)

And it’s all in hopes that we help our clients (seven of whom were showcased at this year’s festival) make lasting love connections with media, influencers and icons. The results can be immediate or long-term. They are always exhilarating, as witnessed in that exuberant, opening text from a publicist on the trail of a hot lead.

That festival weekend falls just 10 days before Charleston Fashion Week, another marathon that finds our Touchpointers going all-in and all out to make great things happen.

For 2017, we’ll be helping bloggers, traditional media and social influencers get up close and personal with established designers like Rachel Roy and Bibu Mohapatra, and a host of talents who may soon dominate the world’s runways.

We enjoy bringing the festival to the attention of local fashionistas and those from “off.” We’re also proud to have snagged the American Marketing Association’s award for Best PR 2016 for our work on behalf Charleston Fashion Week.

Next month, we’ll be shuttling writers and influencers to Lake City, S.C., to witness the amazing transformation art can have on a small town. We’re excited to be promoting the fifth annual ArtFields, which recently snagged South Carolina Tourism’s coveted Bundy Award for tourism marketing.

Bedazzled by 400 original works of art, Lake City will likely be home to more galleries per capita than any other U.S. city, thanks to the fact that barber shops, mattress stores and libraries give themselves over to display art for 9 days (April 21 – 29).

So, if you’ve discerned from this post that Touchpoint loves festivals, you’re right. But we don’t love them because they’re fun. Rather, they put us to the test in real, immediate and tangible ways. We thrive on the hunt. We embrace the strategy that drives success. And we are pretty addicted to the rewards – enduring connections between our clients and their publics.

Is this work? Yep. And lucky for us, we get to do it!

Speak Up!

Yesterday, we had a group visiting our office, borrowing a conference room for a planning meeting.

You know how it is at home, when you have guests? You suddenly notice the dust bunny in the corner or the scuffed paint?

Well, we felt the same exact thing yesterday, with this extended guest visit. As they met in the room behind me, I noticed something I often don’t: we Touchpointers are pretty vocal people! And I started to worry about our productivity. Did we seem unserious to others?

I’m not saying we were hosting a party in the office. We weren’t telling raunchy jokes (not this time!) nor reciting long lists of rules. We were chattering amongst ourselves. If somebody had diagrammed our conversations yesterday afternoon, they’d have revealed a nearly constant, zig zagged pattern of speech ricocheting from one desk to the other and on and on.

And then I focused on the most interesting thing: we were working hard the whole time.

It got me thinking about professional kitchens and effective sports teams. In both of those cases, teammates communicate with one another constantly. In fact, there’s all sorts of evidence to support that high performing teams get that way by communicating. A lot.

Our friends at LeadStar recently wrote Spark, How to Lead Yourself and Others to Greater Success (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). It’s a great read: so great, everybody here is book clubbing it, and we’re sharing it with anyone who wants to join our Word Nerd Party!

One constant theme in this great book is the importance of accountability among all team members (and, guess what: all team members can and should be leaders!). Chief among the proven paths to success is communication: being honest about one’s own failings, willing to correct others’ actions, and striving to spur change through overt expectation setting.

When I think back to yesterday, I marvel at how much of that was happening naturally. Colleagues jumped to help one another with that perfect word, an appropriate response to a challenging question. They were taking ownership in the moment, and for the long-term.

That’s not to say we’ve nailed this leadership, thing. But it is to say that around here, speaking up is key to success.

Does that sound like the place you work?

It’s 2017. Time to Get Busy

We write this on January 2nd, a day that somehow was named a holiday for every company but ours.

We’re back at our desks after a week of telecommuting from places as far as Texas, Virginia and NY, and near as the Isle of Palms. During our time away, we had plenty of opportunity to muse about loss (RIP Princess Leia, George Michael and way too many others); love (we love our clients and legitimately missed them!) and low-down dirty crimes (see: Mariah Carey’s rockin’ NYE).

And so what do we conclude from each of these disparate things? Let’s just say we determined a few rules for the road ahead. If we do this coming year right, we’ll look in the rear view mirror and see that in 2017 we collectively: