By Kelly McWilliams
Veteran PR professional Diane Lancaster Gibes is eager to join her colleagues at Ticket Summit 2009 Vegas, her first appearance at the annual ticket industry event. The trade show and conference, the largest in the industry, is scheduled for July 15-17 at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino.
Gibes tells TicketNews, “I’m always excited to talk about my field,…and I’m glad that the Summit wanted to have PR folks talk. I’m looking forward to speaking about something I’m passionate about and that I’ve been involved in for so long.”
Gibes, president of the Public Relations Society of America, Las Vegas Chapter will speak on the panel “Building a Public Relations Plan”, scheduled for Thursday, July 16.
She said her involvement with the Summit began when co-presenter Viveca Woods, principal of VMW Public Relations, approached her about participating with Woods on the PR panel, and the two plan to collaborate on a presentation which will explore the many facets of building a successful PR strategy. Gibes discussed some general points she hopes to focus upon during the talk.
“I’m thinking I can provide a little Las Vegas flavor, though I also intend to share some of my public relations strategies – how to prepare a PR plan, going through all of the elements, starting with research.” Gibes emphasizes the importance of research in the planning process, noting that many in the field do not make room in the process to “take a step back, see what’s actually going on in the market place, see what the trends are. Once you have the research necessary to build your PR plan, then you can see how your tactics actually measure up so you can go into a meeting or manager and say, ‘Here’s what we’re basing our plan on and here are some areas of opportunity.’”
She also expects to talk about the next step in the process, strategy implementation. “You [need to think about] what’s the best [PR] strategy. Is it best to utilize social media or more media relations, or an electronic newsletter? There are many different tactics you can use to achieve your marketing and PR goals. Also, you need to look at the landscape, what’s going on in your area of the industry so you can say, ‘Ok, here’s what we need to target for either my client or my company.” Gibes will include a discussion of budgetary concerns throughout the planning and implementation process as well, and she hopes to provide some case studies to illuminate her points.
Gibes, an award-winning PR professional, has more than twenty years in the PR and marketing fields, including twelve years in the high tech environment of TRW as senior manager of corporate communications. In recent years she has made the move to legal marketing and PR, which she has found greatly rewarding. “So many of the tools, tactics and strategies [of PR] are applicable to so many businesses, including the legal field, which has grown [in terms of] having more folks in marketing.”
Gibes currently provides legal marketing and PR services for the Las Vegas offices of Greenberg Traurig, LLC, a large international law firm headquartered in Miami, Florida.