PRMR Inc. Blogs

My name is Jaliyah Webb, and I’m 16 years old. I recently completed an internship at PRMR Inc. Public Relations Consultants from August 6 to August 30, which was an insightful experience. Here's a look back at my journey and what I've learned along the way.

As a public relations agency we are regularly contacted by charitable organizations that need help to raise funds or to promote their cause but are cash strapped having very limited funds to hire a communications professional. Most times the organizations have volunteers assigned to the role of public relations officer that lack the necessary skill set to do the job. If you find yourself in this position, here are eight strategies you can adopt, using both traditional and social media tactics, to help gain exposure for your cause.

I had the privilege of participating in a crisis masterclass in February. The one-week “Rapid Response Communication in a New Age” course targeted undergraduates in public relations at the University of Florida, but department chair, Dr. Marcia DiStaso, invited graduate students to attend. I am not going to tell you about the class itself (it was awesome). Instead I will tell you about the five things I learned from Linda Rutherford, Southwest’s chief of communications who flew all the way from Dallas to conduct the one-day crisis simulation, that are important to be successful as a public relations practitioner.

I was doing my daily dose of reading this morning of news, current affairs and general topics of interest when suddenly a realization hit me – how short all the stories that I was reading were and the fact that most of them were laid out in point form. Of course, me being a thinker, I immediately started musing of what had accounted for this and the word that kept on recurring was the Internet.  

Advocacy is commonplace. There is a gazillion causes, all of which are important - from the rainforest, water conservation, saving the planet, hunger, AIDS, cancer, stray dogs, to saving the turtles and whales. As many causes as there are out there, there are as many opinions about them.  

There was a time when a press release was a press release, and advertising was advertising. The difference was clear.

In April this year PRMR Inc. launched its new website to the world. In monitoring the web traffic we recognized that we were experiencing a decline in the number of visitors to the site. Also, when searching for public relations firms in Barbados our website was buried under page 4 or 5 in the Google search rankings.