When words create a thousand pictures

PR’s changed. A hell of a lot.

My first day in the job saw me sending a stream of press releases through the fax machine; stuffing the remainder into envelopes for the last post.

I’m still writing releases but the distribution couldn’t be more different.  I also run a number of social media accounts on behalf of clients – communicating with journalists and wider audiences. I use Twitter to generate media coverage for businesses, as well as develop their brand awareness and engage with online communities.

To help monitor the effectiveness of this, I’ve developed a way of visually representing the type of followers (people and business) my clients attract on Twitter. If you’re in Frome and have a copy of the The List‘s March issue, you’ll see an example of this on the opening page.

A new addition to The List - a word cloud showing what people and businesses in Frome people have been tweeting about

The word cloud shows which words have featured the most in tweets posted by Frome folk over the past month – a fun and fascinating exercise!

Applied to Avalanche Media clients, word clouds provide a number of uses; the depiction of Twitter follower characteristics being a particularly useful one. Here’s an example applied to @bathbusiness (The Bath Business Club), of which I’m a member and soon to become its first lady chairperson don’t you know.

@bathbusiness now has over 1080 followers - as the above shows, very relevant ones.

The above image encapsulates the type of followers Bath Business Club is attracting on Twitter. The word cloud has been formed using words which appear most commonly within the profiles (the short paragraphs describing themselves) of the club’s followers. The stronger and larger the typeface, the more frequently the word appears.

These infographic word clouds represent just one way of monitoring social media effectiveness – and demonstrating how a targeted community can be developed online. They are quite beautiful in my view – and offer an easy-to-interpret visual for clients to understand the value of this marketing activity.  Simple, yet revealing don’t you think?

Avalanche Media’s first video

I thought this was well worth a post as I’m quite proud of my first iMovie effort.

It can be difficult to describe PR to the uninitiated, so I thought it would help to produce a video to better explain what it is I can achieve for businesses.   To help prevent the onset of yawns and flitting to other YouTube offerings, I’ve limited the length to three minutes.   This means that the behind-the-scenes work I need to do isn’t really referred to (check out my press room for more of an insight).  But instead the important bit, the results:  these are what clients want.

Avalanche Media's first YouTube video: The Power of PR

I hope this is useful and would welcome feedback.

After recently becoming yet another Mac convert and iMove addict, I’m hoping to produce more PR-related video offerings.  If you have ideas for any specifics you’d like me to address, please shout.