An interview with our new Digital PR Manager: Alexander Jones

We're delighted to welcome Alexander to our growing digital PR team. We've asked him a few questions to gain an insight into his experience, aspirations and interests.

What excites you most about your new role as Digital PR Manager at Yard?

I’m super excited to join a relatively new PR team, which are already picking up some fantastic awards for their great work. I’m looking forward to helping develop the team alongside Lou and continue to build on the team’s success.

How did you first develop an interest in digital PR?

I’ve been in the PR industry for the entirety of my career, having spent over six years working across a mixture of traditional and digital agencies.

What initially drew me to PR was the ability to influence and shape public opinion – it’s this interest that led me to study public relations at university. However, I quickly grew frustrated by the lack of tangible measurement that sat behind my work within traditional PR agencies, which led me to pursue a career within digital PR.

What are the key elements of a successful digital PR strategy?

We’re SEOs first and PR's second – everything that we do needs to align to our clients' goals within search and as such, reporting and measurement is key.

Whilst PR isn’t an exact science, we must always maintain a critical eye over our campaign ideas. We can all be guilty of occasionally being led too much by our day-to-day clients in terms of ideas and campaigns but it’s crucial to stress test all of our campaign ideas; Why would a journalist want to write about this? is this “news”?

How important is it to have an awareness of developing trends in digital PR?

Extremely. Since I first started in the industry, I've seen the practice of reactive PR skyrocket to become one of the most important aspects of a digital PR strategy. The sooner that we can jump on a developing trend or news story, the more chance of success.

What is your favourite digital PR campaign of all time?

‘Where the world wants to go on holiday’ by TravelSupermarket. I think this was the first idea that really opened my eyes to map-based campaigns and using international search data. Not only is the map beautiful and the overarching story of the top destinations worldwide compelling – but having country specific data that can be pitched to publications within each country offers so much opportunity for links.

What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

I like being quite active – I play 5-aside football which I love, and have just started learning how to play golf, which is going terribly.

Otherwise, you can probably find me walking along Brighton beach listening to podcasts or in the pub with my friends.