Tenet Healthcare hospitals in Palm Beach County received widespread TV coverage for their assistance to the Haitian people following the devastating earthquake in January 2010. Boardroom Communications stayed in constant contact with the newsrooms of network affiliates to supply information on incoming patients and doctors who traveled to the island nation to provide emergency care.

Three doctors from Delray Medical Center quickly mobilized and traveled to Haiti to treat the injured. Doctors from Good Samaritan Medical Center in West Palm Beach and West Boca Medical Center in southern Palm Beach County also went to help with recovery efforts. Delray Medical Center and St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach received injured Haitians who were flown for treatment.

In all, there were more than a dozen news reports and newspaper media placements in two languages on local ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC newscasts, as well local print media, during a three-week period. Boardroom generated a majority of the stories, keeping the news flowing to reporters and assignment desk editors. Here’s a rundown on the news reports:

• On Jan. 14, WPBF (ABC-Channel 25) aired a story on preparations at Delray Medical Center for an influx of Haitian medical refugees.
• On Jan. 18, WPEC (CBS-Channel 12) aired a report about three Haitian patients being treated at St. Mary’s Medical Center in which doctors were interviewed.
• On Jan. 27, WPEC and WPTV (NBC-Channel 5) aired a report about Dr. Anthony Dardano, Dr. Louis DeLuca and Dr. Lloyd Zucker of Delray Medical Center leaving for a medical mission to Haiti. Dardano and DeLuca are plastic surgeons; Zucker is a neurosurgeon.
• On Jan 31, WPTV aired a Spanish-language news program, “Con la Communidad,” that featured a report on Drs. Dardano, Zucker and DeLuca’s mission to Haiti.
• Also on Jan. 31, WPTV reported that Good Samaritan Medical Center’s Dr. Jean Monice was headed to Haiti on a medical mission.
• On Feb. 2 WFLX (Fox-Channel 29) ran a story on the return from Haiti of doctors from Delray Medical Center.
• Also on Feb. 2, WPEC aired a live shot on its noon news in front of St. Mary’s Medical Center as part of a report on new Haitian patients that arrived for treatment.
• And on Feb. 2, WPTV led its 11 p.m. newscast with a report on injured Haitians arriving at Palm Beach International Airport and being taken to hospitals including Delray and St. Mary’s medical centers. WFLX also had a late news report.
  
• On Feb. 2, WPTV aired an interview with a Haitian patient at Delray Medical Center and the center’s trauma director, Michelle Sutton-Epps.
• On Feb. 3, WPBF aired a report on the return from Haiti of the doctors from Delray Medical Center, as did WFLX.
• And WPBF reported on the return of Dr. Kenneth Jeffers of West Boca Medical Center from a second trip to Haiti to provide emergency treatment.
  

As for local print media, the Palm Beach Post ran several stories on the hospital’s involvement with treating Haitian victims, collecting supplies, as well as doctors and nurses traveling to provide medical care:

• Palm Beach Post, Jan. 18, “Local employers lend support to Haitian workers”
• Palm Beach Post, Jan. 18, “PBC hospitals treating at least 6 Haitian quake victims”
• Palm Beach Post, Jan. 31, “Florida hospitals handling hundreds of Haiti victims”
• Palm Beach Post, Jan. 31, “Haiti in relief: a reporter’s notebook”
• South Florida Hospital News, Feb issue, “St. Mary’s Medical Center treats 3 victims from Haiti Earthquake”

As a leading South Florida public relations and marketing agency, Boardroom Communications, knows that it’s important to provide its clients with digital media and web marketing services in addition to more traditional PR.

Recently, Boardroom Communications’ Executive VP Todd Templin gave web marketing advice to Native Gardens, a vegan chocolate truffle business. Native Gardens’ founders had been struggling to keep their business in the black in the midst of an economic recession that’s taking a toll on many small businesses.

To get Native Gardens’ sales moving back in the right direction, Templin recommended the company focus on getting a better online presence to start attracting more Internet customers. To find out how Native Gardens is planning to implement this strategy, read the complete article from the Miami Herald.

Public relations is the practice of systematically reaching out to the press in hopes of generating favorable publicity or media coverage for a person, product, company or concept.

Search engine marketing is the practice of researching and using words highly searched by online consumers in hopes of increasing the visibility of a website or brand online.

Formal P.R. traces its roots back 100 years. SEO is only as old as the Web’s commercial applications.

Yet by effectively combining these two marketing disciplines, a marketer can improve the power of the press release or a media outreach campaign by ensuring it more effectively reaches its target audience across the universe of search-generated outreach. (more…)

In that place where public relations and search engine marketing converge, practitioners have a long-standing understanding of the process: Infuse every press release, opinion and op-ed, advertisement, passage on the website, and other written text with keywords.

Keywords are the words and short phrases that not only define what your firm or client does, but what prospective clients or customers likely will be using in their searches.

For marketing communications pros from South Florida to New York City, the process is the same. Every document we write or Website we create for our clients is stacked with keywords, including those seen on the screen – and unseen in the back-end where only programmers go.

But has the process changed? A provocative new perspective has emerged from none other than the SEO Team at Google.

Metatags are a waste of time.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

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