Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Steve Staedler’s Advice and Teachings

On Monday, October 14, I had the pleasure of learning about B2B PR, Cision Point, and PR strategy with SnapOn from Steve Staedler. 

Steve Staedler is currently the senior account executive/public relations at LePoidevin Marketing.   LePoidevin is a small B2B agency.  Steve handles the public relations side of things with another woman there.  Between the two of them, they create press releases for their clients, upload them to Cision, and get the ‘ink’ their clients are looking for.

Cision Point is an online website that allows one to build media relations and contacts through.  It does require having an account with them that is paid yearly for usually by the company one works for.

Steve uses Cision every day at his job.  He searches several different outlets such as print, broadcast, internet and other groups to find the right outlet for the press release to be sent to.  Cision also allows one to monitor all magazines and releases to tell them who has done what with it within a month timeframe.  

Key points about Cision:
  •  It’s used to dig deep, depending how deep one wants to go.  
  • It’s ideally software that is designed to make a public relations coordinator’s life easier. 
  • It’s an online news room to get news releases out faster.
  • When using Cision, the goal is to get the editor to choose that news release versus others which gives the client their ‘ink’.

      In a small B2B agency, everyone has to be able to work together and with the same clients at the same time.  They have to get along and know it all to be able to help out when needed.  Each person has to document their time in detail of what they worked on and for how long in order to get paid for the correct amount of actual work being done.

      Steve talked a lot about what Cision is, his B2B agency, and an example of a case study he is working on for SnapOn, but he also gave advice and side notes about his job.  He said that 80 percent of his job is writing and you need to know how to write well and enjoy doing it.  He also travels for his job which make it interesting and a change of pace sometimes.

      Listening to Steve speak to us about his job and what he does, gave me an idea of what it would be like to work in a B2B agency.  I honestly never thought about the difference or knew what Cision was.  I thoroughly enjoyed listening and learning from Steve Staedler