The world of public relations has undergone a major facelift in the last ten years. 

With social media and digital marketing forever on the rise, traditional forms of media have been under scrunity.

Bloggers, social media moguls, and online news stories have been the preferred mediums as of late.

Garden Media Group breathes garden and public relations trends; it's our job.

To make your job easier, we're dissecting traditional forms of media and outlining the public relations trends of 2013. 

Presenting new ideas, whether it's to your in-house team, your board, or a green audience at a conference, is your time to shine.

This is your moment to tell a captive audience just exactly why your product or business is the bee's knees.

Yes, public speaking is terrifying, which also means it's exhilarating. 

One of the quickest ways to flourish (or flunk) a presentation is to use visual aides. The next time you're presenting, mesmerize your audience with one of these hip, modern presentation tools. 

In the realm of social media, we're still learning how to best measure our business sucess. The medium is still new, so the best way to see how we're doing hasn't been fully established yet. But, we are learning!

Each social media platform is different, so you need to measure its success in a different way.

As far as Twitter goes, one of the best indicators of success is how many times your tweets are retweeted.

Retweets matter because they show how often your followers are engaging with your material. If a follower retweets you, it means they love your material enough to share it as their own!

We've got three types of tweets that are you want to avoid because they're almost never retweeted, and a new, hot way to measure your business's best formula for retweets.

Branding is a compilation of the choices your business makes. There's no magic formula to crafting an impeccable brand.

In order to build your business's brand, you've first got to establish three words that really encapsulates who your brand is. How are you different than the million of other garden businesses out there?

Once you've established a solid, branding foundation, then it's time to build your brand!

Best way to build your green, garden brand? Read and use these tips below to make your brand UNFORGETTABLE. 

Facebook has been the dominant social media site since 2005. 

For eight years, Facebook has crushed any other social media platform in size, daily usage, and reach.

But, we all know even gold can tarnish. Facebook Fatigue is officially setting in. People are just getting worn-out with Facebook.

Find out all the details of Facebook Fatigue below, and learn how your small business should react accordingly!

Today, images are preferred over text, especially in the realm of social media.

All day, every day we as consumers are inundated by constant text. And, when we log onto our social media accounts, we're bombarded with even more words.

While our eyes and brains have adjusted, most of the time we simply scroll right past that boring old black and white text.

Bring your text to life on Twitter by illustrating and visualizing your text. Watch your social engagement grow off the charts!

No longer are businesses just allowed to focus on making more and more money.

Consumers want to know that the businesses they support are, in turn, supporting and helping the world around us. In fact, often-sought after millenial crowd (18-29 year olds) prefer cause-marketing more than other generations.

We are in the age of corporate responsibility and citizenship.

But, the line gets a little fuzzy somewhere between donating to a universal cause and helping a more controversial issue.

Learn the differences between halo marketing and brand activism while discovering how to support both sides best!

I was recently asked to speak to a group of landscape designers on alternatives to social media that still remain effective. 

You know what I found out, traditional forms of marketing still work.

The same strategies such as direct mail, newsletters and gasp, face-to-face meetings, can be reliable ways of keeping your business in the public eye and generating new business without breaking the bank.

They keys to success in traditional marketing are the same in internet marketing.  You need to send the right message to the right people, and have a compelling offer. 

I wanted to share a few things from my talk, and the first is a guide to creating targeted, compelling newsletters.  And these tips can apply to e-newsletters, too, if you so desire! 

As baseball season starts in full-swing, I've been amazed by the similarities between the world of 95 mph pitches and pitches within the world of public relations.

When it comes right down to it, we're both trying to make the perfect pitch. Baseball pitchers want to strike out their opponent, show off their talents and win!

As public relations pros, we too are trying to score- local, national, and digital press coverage.

Here at Garden Media we are always striving for perfect. While we know that there will always be good, bad, and better pitches, we've created the Pitch Perfect Test to make your next public relations pitch a step closer to perfection!

Part 2:

As promised, we are back with part 2 of our blog post “10 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a PR Firm”. We left half of the very important questions unanswered, and thankfully, they’re answered here. It is important that all of these questions and answers are read so businesses understand how a PR firm operates and how to make sure that they understand the services being offered. After all, as you’ll find out below, PR isn’t necessarily cheap and it is essential to make sure your hard earned dollars go towards an effective cause.

It is great if you can create some of your own questions as well so that you can tailor them to your PR needs. But if you need some ideas for questions to ask a PR firm before you hire them, take a look at part 2 below.