Steve Staedler, Cision, and B2B

On October 14^th 2013, I had the opportunity to meet Steve Staedler as shared his knowledge in my public relations tactics two course at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater. Mr. Staedler graduated from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee with a bachelor’s of art in mass communication. Mr. Staedler works at LePoidevin Marketing as the senior account executive and before working at LePoidevin, he worked at Bellwether Communications as an account executive. He also worked as a reporter at Community Newspaper Inc., and CNI Newspaper. Mr. Staedler is also currently working public affairs for the U.S. Air Force Reserves. He has Mr. Staedler shared his knowledge about Cision and public relations involving business to business (B2B).When Mr. Staedler shared his knowledge about Cision, he logged into his account to let us see more of what Cision is. The most I have ever seen and used involving Cision or something similar to Cision is the hard copy book. He also shared with us that another service like Cision was Vocus. The purpose of Cision is to build media lists and be like an online news room. Cision can also monitor magazines, blogs, etc. about products or service a company wishes to keep track of. Another service he touched on about was Google Alerts, where it will let the user set up a profile and track the information wanted to be viewed. Mr. Staedler later in his presentation shared public relations involving business to business, which I didn’t know much about. He showed the class current and pass projects that he worked on with other companies. One example was tethered tools, where he showed us an article that got published for the tools. He also shared a box that was created for representatives would take to technical schools to share information about a program that they want to promote. The box had information for what they wanted to promote. After the box, we worked on a case study that involved the technical program that wanted to promote. We had to break into groups in class and think about how we would target audiences, build strategies and what tactics we would use for a way to promote a technical education program. After we discussed what we would do with the whole class, Mr. Staedler told us other opportunities we could use. One example was media tours, where the company pays to fly media journalists to see the program in hopes they will write about it for press. He said this is helpful to build relations with the trade press. Overall, I learned a lot for Mr. Staedler and he shared some advice which was to get more involved in writing outside of class. He suggested one way to get outside writing experience from school is freelancing or getting an internship.