Food & Wine & PR

Hi there! My name is Nadia Persaud and I’m a public relations junior at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. My love for reading and writing is what led me to pursue public relations as a career. For quite some time, I wasn’t entirely sure what specific type of PR I wanted to focus on. I thought about corporate for a while, entertainment and even briefly considered medical PR. However, I’ve now made the connection between my passions for writing and cooking that I should have made so long ago. I love all things food– eating it, buying it and most importantly cooking it. I started cooking and baking when I was just 6 years old and have fallen more and more in love with the two ever since. I like to cook and bake all kinds of things, but my two specialties are rack of lamb with butternut squash soup, asparagus and roasted potatoes, and carrot cake cupcakes with vanilla bean cream cheese frosting. My love for food will always be a part of my life, so I figured why not combine food with public relations and work in the food PR industry? I’d love to do PR work for Food Network, Food & Wine magazine, famous chefs or even Tasty!

I’ve decided to dedicate this blog to food and PR. There is so much potential for food PR, especially with the use of social media. I can think of five food blogs off the top of my head—“Pinch Of Yum” and “Sallys Baking Addiction,” to name a few. Both feature beautiful images and human personas, making the content fun, personable and easy to follow. Needless to say, Instagram is an incredible medium for image-based blogs, which all food blogs ought to be in my opinion. People eat with their eyes before they eat with their mouths. So if you’re trying to sell food and recipes, it’s important that you get the most attractive photos of your dishes to the viewers’ eyes. “Green Smoothie Gourmet” says that one of the most important things you can do to merit faster audience growth is provide great, quality content and captions using tasty recipes, correct information and good camera work. And, as I said before, the best way to show viewers your food is through an image-based blog. Instagram is free and widely-used, so if you’re a startup (and even if you’re already well-known), Instagram is the way to go. It doesn’t have to be your company’s only blog, but it definitely should be one of them.

The most important part about keeping a blog, especially if it’s for your company, is to be strategic. Think strategically, post strategically, hashtag strategically and write strategically. According to “Strategic Writing: Multimedia Writing for Public Relations, Advertising and More,” strategic writing is goal-oriented. If you’re a food company running a food blog, your goals should be to post frequently, post great quality content, create a human persona and respond quickly to commenters. Following these basic goals while writing and posting will attract more followers, according to “Green Smoothie Gourmet.” And using Instagram makes reaching those goals even easier. The user interface allows bloggers to post single images, image decks and longer videos, all which are incredibly essential additions to a food blog.

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