Last week we shared with you our firm’s “Top Line News Summary” which included highlights from three sectors including banking, markets, and HR/management.

With coffee and newspapers in hand, a group of our top media relations professionals scanned the headlines again this morning to see what’s happening in the worlds of our top practice areas. We now share highlights from three different sectors: real estate, healthcare, and bankruptcy.

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As PR professionals, we’re charged with helping our clients implement social media strategies that complement our on-going traditional media relations work. But in highly regulated industries – i.e. financial services – we often run up against legal and compliance issues that can derail even the most brilliant social media strategies.

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News junkies at heart – and out of public relations best practice – everyone in our firm reads, watches and clicks through the top national business news each morning. As PR practitioners, it is our job to identify rapidly emerging trends for our clients, and to get them involved in the public dialogue by introducing them to reporters as knowledgeable and dependable sources.

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Is the ink still fresh? Is it the biggest lease, the largest transaction, the best location? Deal coverage dominates media interest in the commercial real estate sector. But thanks to the credit crunch, there’s a dearth of transactions in most subsectors and geographies. Bigger hasn’t been better since the subprime crash of 2007, which means that for many beat reporters, there are precious few new transactions to write about.

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Issue Ownership. It’s a great marketing objective for a company – or for any largish organization — that wants to build a reputation that’s bigger than the products or services it offers. As I defined in the last post Thought Leader Versus Issue Owner – What’s the Difference? an issue owner has made a commitment to a particular field/issue/topic and has dedicated significant resources to advance it.

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I recently shared 6 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started My B2B Public Relations Career. But I wanted to take a closer look at my (sometimes painful) discoveries about media relations. Why? Simply put, nothing interests a client or galvanizes an account team more than plain old results.

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Is your B2B public relations strategy global, local or someplace in between? An investment banking client once told me, “If a company doesn’t have a ‘China strategy’ then it has a going out of business strategy.” While I don’t think the same thing necessarily applies to all companies’ PR strategy, the logic got me thinking. The world is getting smaller and a company’s customer base, regardless of industry, most likely can be global. Which means, no matter the size of the company, their PR strategy should have global appeal.

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20 years ago, I (like most entry level pros) learned the 5 Ps of Marketing: Product, Price, Place, Promotion and People. These, I was told, were the five marketing levers that satisfy customers and build market share.

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Is there a difference between a thought leader and an issue owner?

I think so. Here’s my hypothesis: a thought leader makes a meaningful contribution in the discussion, analysis and furthering of an idea or topic in the world of public discourse. A thought leader is someone whose experience has led to knowledge, and knowledge to wisdom – and who has the confidence required to go out on a limb and state a case. Given our many years of work in B2B public relations, in most large firms only 5 or 10 percent of the professional staff has ability to become a thought leader – and yet these people are the firm’s make-or-break assets.

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Modern professional services marketing did not really begin until 1977. Up to that time, “marketing” was what the male-dominated professions did on the golf course. But when an Arizona court decision allowed lawyers to advertise in 1977, it ushered a new era, which also coincided with the rapid growth of female professionals.

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