Smart PR professionals know that garnering news coverage for a client is about pitching their story to the right people at the right publication at the right time. Enter editorial calendars, the wonderful guides for creating inroads and becoming a valuable resource to reporters.

You wrote a great pitch, sprinkled in some quality data and sent it to a handful of laser-targeted reporters covering the topic; while you hope they’ll jump at the chance to talk to your client, your pitch gets met with silence instead. Now what?

Social marketing has gathered steam in recent years and positively impacts other marketing channels when properly aligned. The latest to the social sharing party are anonymous applications Secret and Whisper, which enable users to anonymously share thoughts to a public network

Real-time marketing, a golden opportunity for brands to capitalize on what the collective world has eyes on, is effective when done well, but embarrassing when it’s not. With the ability to quickly reach a huge number of people comes the double-edged sword of blunders going viral for all the wrong reasons.

Public relations professionals come in all shapes and sizes, with unique personalities and quirks; but however different each PR professional might be, there are a few key qualities the most successful among us share.

Dating is just like public relations. Before you laugh, ask yourself: What’s the first association you make when it comes to PR? If you said relationship management, you’re on my wavelength.

Writing’s tough; we know it. Constantly brainstorming ideas, finding your voice and establishing a flow can be enough to exhaust even the most enthusiastic wordsmith, and this is all before making sure you don’t distribute that press release containing a glaring grammatical error.

Remember when the “#” was just another annoying step to check your voicemail? OK, it still is. But for public relations and marketing teams, integrating the use of the hashtag across marketing campaigns can make a huge impact in the social world of 2014.

Consumer engagement and timeliness go hand-in-hand, and when the makers of mobile applications Vine and Snapchat were designing, they may have taken that premise quite literally.