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This Week in PR: February 19, 2016

How does psychology play into effective campaigns? Need to make your stories more interactive and engaging? Find out what you missed this week in PR.

How does psychology play into effective marketing campaigns? Need to make your stories more interactive and engaging? How will Twitter’s poor performance affect you? Check out the Hoffman team’s favorite PR blog posts and articles from this week:

  1. A solid foundation in psychology isn’t just for therapists anymore. Communications professionals can stand to learn a thing or two about how the human brain works before starting a campaign. PR Daily listed nine principles of psychology for powerful marketing campaigns that you should know. Simple choices such as adding the right color to appeal to emotion or promoting the exclusivity of an offer can help push your audience over the edge and make the purchase. And there’s more to learn than we currently know now, so make sure to continually upgrade your knowledge about psychological marketing tactics.
  1. Storytellers are always trying to engage their audiences on a deeper level. One way to accomplish this is through new methods of interactive storytelling such as microsites, clickable graphics, mobile apps, etc. The Meltwater PR blog explains how interactive storytelling can fit into your 2016 content strategy. Stories that can be told in chapters, have strong visual components, core characters, and a strong story progression are all great candidates for interactive storytelling. If you’re looking for some inspiration, take a peek at The New York Times’ T-Brand Studio that gives the reader a number of ways to digest the information on the page in an entertaining way that builds up the brand.
  1. Just because Twitter has failed to grow its user base doesn’t necessarily mean the finish for this social media giant just yet. However, PR pros should be aware of how these poor numbers might affect how they should use the platform. The Cision PR blog rounded up five things you should know about Twitter in its current economic climate. One of the most important things PR pros should be on the lookout for is how Twitter will change some of its features to appeal to more people. Longer tweets, different @reply features and filtering tweets on newsfeeds all will change the strategy of brand social media users.
  1. Everywhere you turn, you’ll see that mobile use is up. From a walk down the street to the latest communication studies, all of the data suggests that mobile is here to stay. PR pros need to adapt to the new mobile trends or lose out to brands that do. Shift Communications put together a blog post on how mobile is changing the brandscape. Making the most of push notifications, localized marketing and in-app messaging is more important than ever, with 80 percent of the world’s population expected to have a smartphone by 2020.
  1. Patience is not something that every public relations practitioner can afford to have at all times, but it is required to play the media relations game effectively. Bulldog Reporter compares relationship building with journalists to dating to explain how you can be more effective. Know that creating credibility and trust with a journalist may take months and even years if your client doesn’t have major news. But gaining that trust can make the difference between making the front page and not getting a second glance.

Check back every Friday for our This Week in PR roundup to discover more PR industry trends and news.

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