Five TED Talks Public Relation Professionals Should Watch

Public Relations can be tough. You can be slogging your hearts out for three whole months just for a one-day event, or you would have to spend an all-nighter to do some crisis control for something that went out of proportion. Sometimes, you fret about your campaigns, like your target audience, your media strategy, and your objectives. And sometimes, you don’t even know where to begin. Fret not! The following 5 Ted Talks will kickstart your brainstorming session.

A Recipe For PR Success

Jerry Seilfwer talks about choosing your audience wisely, and to reach out for the correct target group. Rather than targeting a new group of people who haven’t heard of the brand, it is much easier to target existing customers so that they can spread the name of your brand via word-of-mouth.

In March this year, Circles.Life discontinued their 20GB for $20 plan and upgraded their customers to unlimited data for $20 the next day. We can see that as Circles.Life targeted their existing customers on the release of their new add-on through emails, these existing customers spread the news via word-of-mouth by telling their friends or sharing it on social media. In return, more people learned about their new add-on, and some would in turn switch to Circles.Life from their current mobile network operator.

Why Social Media Is Reimagining Our Future?

Bryan Kramer highlights the power of sharing in this TED talk. You are selling to a human being, and not a machine or a robot, hence the main form of interaction would be from human-to-human. He realises how it would make an impact, especially in social media.

This leads me to think about how companies and organisations should caption their posts. To sell their brand or products, companies should not sell for the sake of selling. But rather, sell to other humans, like what Kramer mentioned. Likewise, for captions, they should evoke emotions towards the audience, and not make the audience feel like you are trying to sell something to them.

How To Start A Movement

In this TED talk, we see how a movement started in 3 minutes. Derek Sivers defines a leader as the person who stands out when nobody did. As we can see in the example he gave, the first follower of the movement is the one that makes the person who starts the movement a leader. Without the first follower, the person who started is not a leader.

Take for example, after Circles.Life published an open letter to its competitors in several newspapers. One of its competitors, Zero Mobile, followed suit the next day and did the same, by calling out to Circles.Life in response to the prior open letter.

With Zero Mobile’s addition to the open letter, it makes Circles.Life a leader for playing with its competitors using such publicity stunts. It also generates buzz amongst Singaporeans as such marketing has never been seen, creating a topic for discussion.

How To Make A Splash In Social Media

Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, a social networking site that allows users to upvote or downvote contents, has his take on issues that have gone viral when they are not meant to.

In his TED talk, he gave an example of how a choice in a poll by Greenpeace to choose a name for a humpback whale was placed for the sake of fun, but ended up going viral and became the name of the whale. It tells us that even if things take an unexpected turn, we should just stride through it and have fun.

What Adults Can Learn From Kids

Adora Svitak, who is a child herself, gave a talk about how we should not limit our dreams as adults. We should dream like a child, and not be too realistic, as it would, in turn, draw us away from achieving our dreams.

Have you ever thought that you would be receiving money for FREE? A child could probably dream of that, but as an adult, we would probably think that “Nah, it will never happen.” But it did. Remember when there is a big hoo-ha going on at Raffles Place whereby a vending machine would give you $50 when you pay $3? This is not a scam! It did happen, people did receive their 50 bucks, and this is all thanks to a PR stunt done by none other than Circles.Life! As long as we don’t limit our dreams, we can strive to achieve it.

This list was comipiled by Li Wen Tan, Junior Client Executive at PRecious Communications.