News

Kicking off the first in a season of search marketing conferences this year was Brighton SEO, which brought some of the top experts and speakers in the field down to the coast for another great event. This is one of the largest free SEO events and has continued to grow each year, with word on the door being that 1500 people were on the waiting list for the 2015 event!

It was exciting to watch the talks on topics from a varied range of digital marketing and social content trades. The most exciting part of the day was to watch our very own Digital Account Manager Rebecca Lee speak about, ‘A Supercharged Approach to PR SEO Success’.

To make sure the rest of the team back at Dynamo HQ could enjoy the talks, our co-founder Peter Bowles live-streamed the sessions from the audience using the new Periscope app.

Rebecca’s talk highlighted the importance of implementing public relations activity for SEO benefit. Focusing on how news jumps, strong journalist rapport, creative brainstorms and great story making can contribute to online coverage and building safe links to a client’s website.

Her talk received high praise from members of the audience on Twitter:

Identifying a healthy balance and functional interaction between these two core practices of PR and SEO is essential to what we do at Dynamo and it was great to see other talks at Brighton SEO 2015 highlight this.  One of the best was presented by Samuel Scott, who offered one of the most engaging talks of the day entitled, “Stop Thinking About Links And Start Thinking About Publicity.”

The day of talks, roundtables and speeches closed with Brighton SEO’s founder Kelvin Newman having a “fireside chat” with Apprentice winner and Internet marketing specialist at ClimbOnline, Mark Wright. Wright revealed anecdotes of his time on the Apprentice show, company life after his win, as well as the mix of criticism and support in the SEO world since his victory.

Once 6’oclock came around and Kelvin Newman officially closed the conference, most dashed to the main dome bar to exchange drink tokens for wine and beer for a couple of hours, discussing the day’s events, networking as well as enjoying the last few hours of the sun in Brighton town.

All in all it was a highly informative and productive day at Brighton SEO for our team, and a big congratulations from everyone at Dynamo to Rebecca for her inspiring talk at the event!

On November 6th, Dynamo PR’s Head of Consumer Technology and Kickstarter, Heather Delaney, will give a crowdfunding PR masterclass for mobile brands in Bern, Switzerland.

Attendees will benefit from Heather’s experience gained from leading some of the world’s most successful crowdfunding campaigns, which have helped Dynamo’s clients raise $8,988,078 in funding during the last 18 months.

Heather will go through common errors that often result in the failure of funding campaigns on platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and share tips on what you should focus efforts on to maximise media interest, and drive backers to commit funds. You can buy tickets here.

Heather’s masterclass takes place at the annual Mobicamp event in Bern, Switzerland, a one day of plenaries and workshops where speakers share their knowledge and experience on everything from telecoms and software, the ever changing mobile ecosystems and app economy, to the entry of wearable technology from some of the world’s leading brands.

Mobicamp has been running since 2011 and sells out each year, although Early Bird tickets for this year’s event have sold out you can still buy one of the last remaining tickets here.

Dynamo PR is a sponsor of the event, other sponsors include SwissCom and CTI Invest.

After lots of planning and preparation, Dynamo held its inaugural Graduate Boot Camp last week for the training of the company’s newest employees – myself being one of them. During the course of the week, sessions were held on everything from effective pitching to being in the mind of a client. Sadly the only thing missing from our boot camp was an actual crawl tunnel!

Things kicked off on Monday with a surprise “school trip” to the British Library (handily close to our office) for a training session on creative writing, courtesy of Peter. In very Apprentice-like fashion, we were given a number of tasks to complete around the Library. Our final task consisted of writing a press release in 30 minutes for the release of Furbies! Even though my rather brief press release is unlikely to go out to anyone, it was a very helpful exercise for what to focus on in future.

One of the most revealing sessions came on Thursday and was based on what journalists think of PRs. For this, we were lucky enough to have Stuart Miles, founder of Pocket-lint, head up the discussion. Stuart was able to provide us with a very balanced point of view – largely thanks to his background in both journalism and PR. Before Stuart started Pocket-lint he actually spent a year as an Account Manager working on Olympus cameras. Following his talk, I thought it would be good to share some of the insights and tips that he gave to us:

1. “I’m a story-teller” is how Stuart explained his job to his 8-year-old daughter. How about PR’s? Well their job is to tell the best bits of the story.
2. Adapt your pitch to each publication. You not only have to think about which journalist is best to take your story to but also about who that publication’s audience is. A pitch that does this will look markedly different to one that does not.
3. If you really want your email to be read over the 4,000 other emails in a journo’s inbox, you’ll need to add a personal spin to a press release. Give it something extra, something you know the journalist will love. Tailor your pitch like you would tailor your CV to each prospective company.
4. From time to time something amazing that you send might slip through the net, but 9 out of 10 times a journalist hasn’t responded because they’re simply not interested. If you want to gauge someone’s interest Stuart suggested trying: “it might be a bit left-field, but could I grab you for two minutes to see if this is something of interest to you?”
5. Make full and frequent use of freelancers. They are integral to the success of both PRs and publications and often aren’t used enough.
6. If you are going to pitch on the phone, it is crucial that you fully understand your product before you pick up the phone. You need to know your subject, your competition, the weaknesses of the competition, the USP of your product that the competitor doesn’t have. Succinctly, you need to know more than what is on the press release.
7. As a successful career in PR is largely dependent on the relationships you forge with journalists, don’t just email them when you want something. The best relationships are the ones where you talk about different things on a semi-regular basis. Think about how you can best help each other out.

For a perfect, fully packaged tweet, Stuart finished up by saying: “pitching a journo is like trying to chat up a girl… both come with mixed results.”