When I first learned about Polywork on Twitter, I was instantly intrigued because of the PR and personal branding opportunities I saw for clients.
I am the Founder of an award-winning PR agency, Ruby Media Group, and one of the most challenging aspects of PR is that you can’t always create a new page on WordPress for every new press mention unless you can dedicate the time to creating a piece of content that ranks.
Watch: How to drive organic impact with press content
While anyone can post any press placement on a website with 100-200 words about the mention, this hurts your SEO unless you dedicate substantial time and effort to creating a long form piece of content around the topic of the press and media interview. I recently did a webinar on this topic which you can find on my Polywork profile or at the link below.
Read: PR for SEO Masterclass
Polywork is perfect for PR mentions that you don’t want to write a full blog post on.
From a PR perspective, Polywork is an ideal solution for someone who runs an agency and wants to find a home for press wins that you can’t create a new page of content around but still want to share.
Setting up your Polywork Profile for PR Success:
Turn Your Profile into a PR no code press kit: Polywork can serve as a living, breathing electronic press kit (EPK) but the key is to do it right. Don’t just share that you were featured. Instead, consider sharing key interview highlights and takeaways, interview quotables, sound bites, transcripts and additional resources mentioned in the interview. An old school press kit traditionally focused on follower count, bio, headshots and media mentions. The press kit of the future is not static. It is constantly evolving as you evolve in your career. No-code tools make it easier than ever for people to share their career wins.
Badges: Tag the badges that reflect the subject matter expertise you do PR and media interviews around. Badges should change as you change. Badges should not be static. For example, if you were into NFTs and crypto when you first created a Polywork account but no longer are, your badges should reflect that. If you can’t find badges that reflect your subject matter expertise, create your own.
Tags & Indexing: With Polywork, I don’t have to obsess about keyword ranking and SEO the way I do with every new piece of content I publish on WordPress. That is liberating and enables me to be much more creative with what I post because I am not as focused on word count and length. It rewards shorter content and has indexing ability, which is an added SEO bonus, too. But to make the most of it, remember to index your posts.
Update the opportunities you are open to: Thought leadership marketing is important for every CEO. As an agency, we are focused on leveraging SaaS tools to help Founders raise their media profile. Did you know you can use Polywork to get more media exposure? Not in the traditional media exposure sense- but Polywork can complement your traditional B2B PR strategy booking goals. For example, if you want to get booked on more podcasts, be sure to let users know you are open to speaking on podcasts.
The more you highlight relevant industry experience and correctly categorize what you are open to, the greater chance you have of being featured within the platform.
For example, I recently shared my reporting and TV commentary on NFTs and Crypto Marketing on Cheddar News. This week, I was featured on Polywork as a DAO enthusiast and NFT enthusiast. Even though these aren’t traditional media placements, they increase the likelihood of someone finding you, which can in turn result in one.
Celebrate your PR mini wins: So often in PR, all of the mini wins (outside of the large feature story placements) are forgotten. Polywork gives you a central place to remember everything you have done and to celebrate those wins in a small but meaningful way.
For example, I frequently host Twitter Spaces. While I don’t share all of them on Polywork, I do post some that pertain to SEO/ Content Marketing and Public Relations. This forces me to write up a quick recap of key takeaways from the social audio spaces.
It makes me go back and extract the maximum value of what was said so that readers on Polywork who missed the space can learn from what was said.
I don’t see Polywork as a promotional dumping ground as much as I see it as a place to share what was learned from PR activities, media interviews, podcast interviews or TV interviews.
On LinkedIn, Executives post press mentions and say “look at me” whereas on Polywork, it’s not about the fact that you were featured, but about what the larger community can learn from what you were talking about when you were featured.
That subtle shift is an important one in the PR world and I hope more companies go in that direction.
This is how I Polywork in Public Relations
Webinars: Polywork is also a great place to feature professional webinars you have participated in and blog posts you have written. Too often, we focus on writing the content instead of sharing the content we have written or produced. Polywork is a place to share my creative contributions with a larger audience.
Blog posts: Posting my blog posts on Polywork helps me see the body of work I have created. It also helps me tag and categorize everything I have written. It forces me to stay current with content audits, cadence and search engine optimization to make sure every post I share has been updated recently to reflect any new industry developments. Every entrepreneur who takes content marketing and SEO seriously should be doing this.
Conferences: If you are on the virtual conference circuit, Polywork is a great place to share links to conference assets including promo materials, YouTube links of your slide deck and long form content on the topic you spoke about.
Media appearances: Featured in an article? Don’t forget to update your Polywork profile to reflect that. As I write this, I just realized I forgot to update my profile with the latest TechCrunch interview I was featured in on cryptocurrency PR and marketing strategies. If you contributed source material that was cut, add that to the description to create a longer post.
Op Eds & Contributor Articles: I contributed to Observer for two years as a guest columnist on social media, PR, content marketing and the politics of social media and big tech. Am I going to feature every article I ever wrote on my Polywork profile? Absolutely not. The key here is to use discretion. Feature your best work.
AMAs: Did you host a AMA on Twitter? Share the promo graphics to your profile with snippets and key highlights of what was discussed. Be sure to tag speakers as collaborators. Here is an example of the AMA I hosted on Crypto Taxes in the Twitter Community I created called SaaS Founders.
Final thoughts
You can draw a lot of conclusions about a Polywork user (in a good way) based on the tags they use. For example, I repeatedly use a lot of the same tags:
· “Taught a webinar”
· “Spoke on a podcast”
· “Published an article”
· “Featured in an article”
· “Spoke on TV”
· “Hosted Twitter Spaces”
· “Conference speaker”
Based on my tags, you can see that I like to teach, speak, publish and host. Look at the tag patterns of each individual user from a data analytics perspective. You can draw conclusions about what someone loves to do professionally. This type of data could be tremendously valuable to future employers, clients and recruiters. I believe a lot of this data is currently untapped. These words and tags show much more about someone’s natural inclinations and proclivities than a resume does.
If you are looking to hire someone, this data is invaluable because it tells you what they actually like doing. Anyone can write anything on a resume. You want to look at what people are drawn to sharing outside of their resume.
What wins do they celebrate that they want you to see?
What PR wins did they choose to highlight?
Those are their natural talents and things they truly enjoy.
As a society, we need to reward who someone actually is vs. who they say they are to land their next role.
Polywork is a step in the right direction of doing that if people use this platform honestly and transparently.
ABOUT KRIS RUBY | CEO | RUBY MEDIA GROUP
KRIS RUBY is the CEO of Ruby Media Group, an award-winning public relations and media relations agency in Westchester County, New York. Kris Ruby has more than 15 years of experience in the Media industry. She is a sought-after media relations strategist, content creator and public relations consultant. Kris Ruby is also a national television commentator and political pundit and she has appeared on national TV programs over 200 times covering big tech bias, politics and social media. She is a trusted media source and frequent on-air commentator on social media, tech trends and crisis communications and frequently speaks on FOX News and other TV networks. She has been featured as a published author in OBSERVER, ADWEEK, and countless other industry publications. Her research on brand activism and cancel culture is widely distributed and referenced.