PR Is A Chocolate Cake

It is my belief that too many PR campaigns center around social media. I think of a campaign as a delicious chocolate cake and social media as the delicious buttercream frosting that finishes the cake & keeps it moist.

To make a cake:

1. You find the best recipe: ( RESEARCH! Too many PR practitioners jump to the tactics before researching not only the client, but the target audience) After all when baking a chocolate cake, you want to find the best recipe instead of just jumping to the first cake recipe you come across.

2. You measure out the ingredients: (Evaluate your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and see how you can use all of these to your advantage and which problems may arise while creating your campaign)

3. Take out your baking utensils and preheat the oven:(Survey you audience and test out the market to see how well your target responds to your potential campaign)

4. Mix the ingredients in a bowl and whisk: (Evaluate which tactics worked and mix those tactics together to create a campaign: key messages, event plans, press releases, newsletters, website.. etc)

5. Put the cake in the oven and mix the frosting:(Social media is the frosting of the cake. Only after the meat (cake) of your campaign is built, you want to reach out to the audience in their medium which nowadays is social media. Only after your key messages and overall message of your campaign is certain, should you communicate those messages over Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest... the list goes on)

6. Frost your cake and serve! This is important. Watch for the reactions of the people digesting your cake: (EVALUATE! Now that you have cooked up a delicious campaign measure the success and evaluate your tactics. Did you reach your goal?)

When all is said and done, everyone loves the frosting on the cake. Social media is important and relevant in todays society. However, we cannot forget to bake the cake first so that we have something to frost!