Pitching to bloggers
There has been a great deal of discussion recently about how to pitch to bloggers. Many bloggers are adding PR companies to spam filters in order to stop being pestered by pointless press releases.
I’m currently preparing a new media training session for a client and searching for useful resources to give them. I came across this really great discussion on Matt Haughey’s blog about how to pitch to bloggers. Well worth a read.
Does anyone know what the ‘P’ in PR actually stands for?
I’ve heard myself over and over again recently explaining to people that aren’t particularly familiar with the PR industry that the ‘P’ in PR stands for ‘Public’ and not ‘Press’. We are not all simply copy-monkeys churning out press releases and trying to win column inches for our clients or employers. Public Relations is exactly as it says on the tin: managing relationships with publics. The media, or more specifically, journalists, might be just one of those publics – one of many I might add!
So, I’m a little disappointed today that Damien McCrystal’s article in the Guardian – Don’t bite the hand that feeds you – places such emphasis on the media relations role that the PR professional plays. To his credit, he is trying very hard in this article to establish the credibility and the importance of the PR industry in the UK. I applaud him for that and welcome his thoughts and opinion. However, with an industry that has such a poor reputation amongst those that work outside of it, I think we PR professionals should be doing so much more to show the sheer breadth of the work that we do. Yes, relationships with journalists are crucial, but they are not everything. Sadly, to some PR companies and PR Officers they are everything, and their clients and organisations are the worse for it.
I’ve made a new friend recently. He’s an opinionated chap who has moved in with a close friend of mine and thus has joined our social circle. I like him a lot. However, he has made it very clear to me that if we met under any other circumstances than the social circle of which we are part, he would have taken an instant dislike to me. Why? Because I am a ‘PR person’. His staunch dislike of PR people is, in my opinion, purely founded on his misunderstanding of the good works that we ‘PR people’ (or communications professionals, as I prefer to call myself), actually do. We only met a few weeks ago but we’ve already had several good (and good natured, I might add) debates about the sins of the PR professional. Articles in the popular press that simply reinforce that perception of PR people as column-inch hunters, no matter how well they might try to paint the profession, just don’t help us to improve wider perception of our abilities, skills, know-how and contributions to society and industry. We need to do more.
Twitter drives traffic to the PJC website
I keep saying this and I will say it again – I love Twitter. I am a big fan. This week as I was updating the Pickle Jar Communications website, I was twittering about my progress. This was simply done as an update to what we have been upto at PJC – not with the pure intention of driving traffic to the site because I think you have to be very cautious about this kind of approach to micro-blogging. However, I was delighted to take a look at the web stats and see that by simply tweeting about this, I saw the highest ever peak so far in unique visitors to the site. Interesting how something as simple as 140 characters that took 30 seconds at most to publish can make a difference to site traffic.
‘Best Answer’ on LinkedIn
I’m delighted. I’m chuffed to bits. I’m estatic … I’m now an ‘expert’ on PR on LinkedIn!
If you’ve been following my blog this week, you might have spotted my post earlier this week pondering just how many questions one should actually answer on LinkedIn. This is because I’ve began answering questions on LinkedIn in the subject areas that I know best. It’s part of my own committment to a) establishing myself and my company as an ‘expert’ in communications and PR and b) sharing best practice and ideas with other communications and PR professionals, and those engaging with PR, comms and marketing.
So, after answering just a few questions on LinkedIn, I’m somewhat delighted to have had my answer selected as the ‘best answer’ in a recent question. Then when looking at the question page to see what others had said, I spotted against that this answer gets ranked as ‘best answer’ in the Change Management category too. Bonus!
I guess what I’m trying to do in this blog post, therefore, is share with you my own journey of how using a service like LinkedIn can help to raise one’s profile. In itself, it is a PR/marketing tactic with an altruistic edge.
The outcome of my answer to the PR question is that the person answering the question, Justin Foster of The Tricycle, has also now included my answer in his blog post about the question with a link through to the PJC website (the shiny new PJC website I might add!). It’s a great blog post in its own right, so go ahead and take a look.
Creating good podcasts
I love reading updates from Mashable – the social networking blog – and their posts often provide content for my own blog posts for all the right reasons. Sadly, though, today they’re forming a blog post for all the wrong reasons. I decided while grabbing a quick bite to eat this lunchtime to delve into their post ‘For the Love of Podcasting‘ and listen to a few of their podcasts. I was really disappointed. I can see they’re aiming for a certain style and tone to these podcasts, but the attention to the quality of production is poor. The introduction is rushed, the sound quality is very bad, they don’t tell you (from what I can see) how long each podcast is, and the presenter doesn’t sound particularly well prepared. This is such a pity because the content should actually be quite good, and is certainly appealing, but the quality really put me off of listening beyond the first 30 seconds or so of each one that I launched.
So, while podcasts are a form of communications that you can produce yourselves, there are a few basic tricks really worth following in order to make them just that little bit more friendly on your listeners’ ears:
- be prepared for your podcast. Have a plan (this doesn’t have to be a script – in fact, it’s sometimes better if it isn’t scripted) of what you are going to say and what you might ask the person you are interviewing
- check correct pronounciations of names, and check job titles of the interviewee before you begin recording
- always log the length of the podcast for your listeners to know just how much time they need to put aside to listening to this
- slow down your speech just a little so that what you are saying is clear
- wherever possible, conduct interviews face-to-face. Using a telephone line isn’t ideal but it can be okay if face-to-face or ISDN interviews just aren’t possible
- invest in decent recording equipment
- edit your podcast. It’s well worth spending just a little time cutting out some of those ums and ahs or even full questions and answers that just haven’t quite worked to make the podcast flow better
- CIPR members should also check out Karen Ainley’s guide to podcasting for PR in the member area of the CIPR website (under PR guides).
Multimedia PR flying high
Scott Berinato’s post, Delta-Northwest Create the Press Release of the Future, on the Harvard Conversation Starter blog highlights an exemplary use of a micro-site for PR purposes. In my mind this is a great example of a multimedia release. Clear thought has been given to the stakeholders and communicating direct with key groups (staff, customers, communities), but this is also coupled with an excellent news centre with extensive quotes, web videos available for use, broadcast-quality video clips available to access, audio clips for download, and a great selection of images too. This is a great example of best practice for such issues, and one that really isn’t difficult to replicate by other organisations with a bit of foresight and a modest budget – it really need not cost a lot of money, and I expect many organisations would see significant return for investing in a site like this for certain issues.
A del.icio.us solution!
Really useful blog post here on how the Missouri University of Science and Technology are using del.icio.us to help them evaluate online coverage of their brand.
Be Patient
Do ‘patients’ exist any more in the UK health and social care sector? I’ve been out of the office for most of this week working on a video project for the health, social and child care sector and not one of the people working in health care were allowed to refer to the people that they work with (or on behalf of) as ‘patients’. Instead, they are referred to as ’service users’, ‘clients’ and ‘customers’. Yes, I appreciate that the NHS wants to foster a culture of ‘customer service’, and rightly so too, but what’s so wrong with the word ‘patient’?
What a clog!
Julia Finch reports in today’s Guardian of yesterday’s drop in share prices at Tesco being largely the consequence of a little too much information provided in Simon Uwins’ ‘Fresh & Easy’ blog. According to Finch, traders blamed yesterday’s drop in share price by 11.25p on Uwins’ blog post of 26 March, Pausing for Breath at Fresh & Easy. Tricky one from a communications point of view. Uwins is suggesting in his post that the reason they are slowing down the new openings of new stores (or ‘taking a break’) is to allow them time to listen to customer feedback and respond or make the relevant changes. Good PR practice on the one hand. In fact, excellent PR practice following the correct 2-way communications, feedback, revision, rollout cycle. Perhaps not such good PR practice from a business point of view though if his post genuinely did assist in the fall of the share price. What a lovely case study for a PR student somewhere to take a look at! Hint: there might be something slightly amiss at stage 3 of Cutlip, Center and Brooms’ PR planning cycle in this case study.
Digital Media for Business
As part of the work we’ve been doing for Ideas for Life TV, we were recently involved in a conference on digital media for business hosted at Alton Towers (18 March). Working with Ember Regis, we interviewed the key speakers from the event. Two of them were specifically speaking about how digital media can be used to communicate science and can be used by business. Both videos are available below. The first features Magic Lantern Chief Executive, Anthony Lilley, while the second is an interview with Adam Rutherford, online editor for Nature.
