I have a lot of small businesses that are just becoming aware of the world of the web. Many are B2B businesses that think that Press Releases are the best way to get attention for their services and products. I think that these are dated techniques for “many” businesses, especially if it’s their main avenue for inbound traffic.
What are your thoughts on this?
A few weeks ago, I asked for some requests on what to blog about and I wanted to pull this one out of the queue based upon a brief exchange of Tweets I had on the relevance of PR in a startup world.
PR as communications is essential for the success of any company, large or small. Of course I am biased in this, but my reasoning is a bit more fundamental. Most CEOs and technical founders are smart in a lot of areas. crafting a story generally isn’t one of them. Public relations is an art and we are artists and a company is our medium. We help companies tell their story. The great thing that a company’s leadership provides is passion.
We provide the ability to translate that passion into English.
OK, that being said, let’s get back to the question that was asked: Is a press release the best way to get attention, especially in the B2B space? My simple answer?
No.
There is no magic ingredient when it comes to an outbound communication strategy. Successful public relations is a lot like a well-executed curry. Have you ever tasted turmeric on its own? Not so good. But combined with a myriad of other spices, it’s delicious. The same can be said of a company’s public relations efforts. By combining media relations, digital communications, customer storytelling and other activities, you can create a lot of attention for your company.
If you have a topic you would like for me to ramble incoherently comment on, please submit it here. If you have a comment on this, please tell me below!
Sure, you are your own brand, but how do people view you? Most of us have seen the “three words to describe me” emails/facebook messages, but what matters is how you want to be perceived. Sometimes, the most important story you tell as a PR pro is your own.
I am currently working with the latest group of interns at the office. Some of the brightest young minds in PR (Seriously, I’m intimidated) are jumping face first into the world of PR and digital media. I got to meet with them today and we talked a bit about the importance of how you are perceived by your peers and the influencers you work with.
Brand your personality
Yes, I know, we don’t like the phrase “personal branding.” But it works. We know what it means, so I’m going to use it. If every interaction you have with an influencer is a pitch, how does that affect all future interactions? I think that it is important that a PR pro’s relationship with an influencer, from Kara Swisher to a hyper-local news blog, be symbiotic.
If both parties are benefiting, then the relationship is much more productive. This is especially crucial in direct-to-consumer efforts when you may be working directly with an influencer throughout an event or media tour. Your personality becomes one of the most important aspect of your professional repertoire.
Be yourself
I do my best to be myself around an influencer that I will be working with in the future. But what else can you do to help maintain your place in the wide world of PR? Here’s my ideas:
Walk the walk. Start a blog, learn about SEO, go shopping, become a PR Geek. The point is if you share the passion and excitement of a product you want your influencer to share with his or her audience, it will be far easier to tell that story.
Be seen. Get out and meet the people you want covering your clients. Be part of the community. Be active and engage with them.
Be genuine. Hopefully you end up representing clients you like and getting involved is easy. On the off chance you are stretching yourself daily, I think that sometimes it is OK to admit you are learning the space or learning the products and admit you are not an expert.
Reach out and touch somebody. Once you establish a relationship. Maybe it was a successful placement of a pitch; could have been a cocktail hour. Whatever the start was, it is up to you as the PR pro to continue the relationship. Tweet them, comment on posts and maybe even give a phone call.
Have an opinion. In this industry, it is important to be forward thinking and it’s not OK to put that opinion out there. Start a blog or even ask me (or somebody far more popular) if you can guest post.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the type of persona you think a PR pro should have. Tell me in the comments and let me know!
The way we as a collective society interface with data has fundamentally stayed the same through the generations: We have to search for it. In the past, this has meant opening an encyclopedia, learning the Dewey Decimal system or even running an experiment. But today, we have exabytes of information that a few select outlets have access to: Bing, Google, Ask.com and other niche websites.
As public relations professionals, part of our job is to monitor and influence our clients’ reputation. All one needs to do is set up a news or blog alert for “Insert client name here” sucks. In no time you will see a constant flow of detractors, fanboys of competitors and the occasional piece of valuable feedback. I had the good fortune to spend a day at SMX Advanced, a conference put on by Search Engine Land, which is a top influential outlet in the search space. The conference is focused at SEO/SEM/PPC, but there were some tremendous nuggets for PR as well. Read the rest of this entry »
I read this post that has essentially single-handedly convinced me that the AP Style guide is just that. A guide. You see, while going through journalism school, I treated it like scripture. The grammar, spelling and capitalization guide of the journalists deities.
But since then, I’ve softened my stance. And now I am fully prepared to acknowledge that its email (not e-mail), website (mot Web site) and that I have to type out Washington.
Yes, I am finally entering the modern era. Read on for the post from April that helped push me over the edge…
Sometimes I see something that makes me cringe as a PR person. This is one of those times.
Don't do this.
A new service just getting into Beta called put.io, which is a cloud-based storage service that allows you to stream your media, has this as a splash page if you try to sign up for its closed beta. In an attempt to be Web-developer cute, it took this tone in its image: “Dear friend. You are using Internet Explorer. Please don’t do that.”
You see, this is a great way to alienate an audience. A potentially paying, engaged, promotional audience. In this case it is also alienates more than 63 percent of Internet users, myself included when I’m at work.
What may be cute in Silicon Valley is not cute in corporate America or in most households that are connected to the Internet. My initial reaction was surprise.I was surprised that somebody allowed that to go public. I was surprised that somebody didn’t do the market research. I was surprised somebody was not thinking about a business model.
Please do this
I am an admitted Mac user at home. I run Firefox and at times Safari. But at work, I am on my PC. Running Internet Explorer. Like 63.27 percent of the country.
The lesson to this is to make sure the message you are curating is one that supports your core business model. Having a corporate personality is an essential part of today’s digital media landscape. But don’t do it at the expense of potential revenue.
I know that Internet Explorer has compatibility issues with some technologies and it does not have the robust external developer ecosystem that Firefox and Chrome enjoy. But insulting the user for the choice in technology they’ve made seems asinine.
This is an instance where a solid PR counsel would have raised this issue and helped this young company along its path to success. By offering guidance around messaging, market perception and helping to craft the language used, PR could have helped this company have at least one more customer.
UPDATE: It was just pointed out to me that the percentage of people who would be looking to try this app that run IE might be quite low. Maybe this is a case of “Know your audience” and I’m just being overly sensitive.
What do you think about this messaging and tactic?
With blogging, when you post content is almost as essential as what content you post. Being timely is important. It gives readers fresh perspectives on issues that are “in the now.”
But when things are busy, it’s hard to be timely. So, I want to run a little experiment. I want you to tell me what to write. Yup, simply fill out the form with something PR related that you would like to see my perspective on. I’m not a big name, but I’m honest.
In the business world, thinking outside the box is the unofficial motto. In public relations, we’re tasked with being creative thinkers. Our clients want us to find different ways to get in front of influencers and, ultimately, customers.
But we are so quick to focus on what’s next, sometimes we do it at the expense of what’s current.
ADOS
Peter Shankman says he suffers from ADOS: Attention Deficit … ooooh shiny! And I think that as PR people we’re guilty of it too. Our clients sometimes push back on us with the charge to be “more creative.” But what is the cost of creativity?
It comes down to a simple ROI calculation. If clients value a mention in a metro print publication more than 50 tweets, perhaps your creative thinking time is best spent taking the metro writer out for coffee or trying to line up a desk-side meeting. If the time you spend trying to be “creative” outweighs the rewards of the action, then it is not worth it.
Defining creativity
I’ve embraced this newfangled “Internet” thing. I know how to hand-code a blog entry, complete with some SEO tricks and I know about metrics in the social media space. But I also know how to dial a phone, send an email or go to an event to connect.
My point is that depending on your goals, news or message you’re trying to send, each of those tactics could be called creative. What some of us consider a de facto tactic in any PR campaign, others would consider it experimental and risky. Again, it all comes down to knowing your client and its goals.
In order to define creativity, you need to be aligned with your client and its goals. Pretty simple stuff, right?
The creativity plateau
I think we might be in a creativity plateau. Hosting a blogger dinner is no longer innovative. A campaign to comment on influencers’ blogs is not cutting edge. SEO for public relations (see what I did there?) is an established industry.
I think we’ve hit a temporary plateau. And that’s OK. It is OK to use established and effective tactics to generate reliable results. It is not imperative that every PR campaign feature a door-to-door singing telegram for every reporter in New York. Actually, maybe that’s not a bad idea…
The new wave of social media punidtry has shifted from “engage” to “measure.” As part of that, tons of people have weighed in on how to select a social media firm/consultant, offering various tips and tricks. Well, here’s mine.
How active and enthusiastic is the person’s spouse?
You see, a lot of us have spouses that are nurses, builders or some other non-tethered profession. I think this is our way of finding balance. My wife is a pretty solid reality check usually.
So if we can get our spouse fired up about social media, we must be pretty good, right?
UPDATE: Yes, I know that not everybody has a spouse. That’s Ok, this can apply to moms, siblings or pets as well
We deal with them every day. We spend hours crafting pitches, preparing background documents and making sure they’re happy. But how do we decide who is and isn’t an influencer?
I was fortunate to be able to attend the Social Fresh conference in Portland (for some other takeaways, you can read them here) recently and I wanted to know how some of the attendees defined who they considered an influencer.
As you can see, the definitions covered the spectrum. In a world where everybody is a publisher, we need to be wary of who we call an influencer. As PR practitioners, we are trying to maintain gold standards while making sure we are getting our clients the best results possible.
Time management
The biggest challenge on PR pros in a world where “influencer” is a fluid term is managing our time asks. Sometimes it’s the smallest of outlets that take the most time.
So how do we decide where to spend our time? In my opinion, we can look at some simple metrics to determine how we allocate our most precious resource.
Impact: This isn’t about eyeballs. This is about action. When this person publishes an article, do people listen and act? Do they generate traffic, signups or sales? Spend some time with them.
Engaged: If they seem to genuinely care about the announcement, chances are they can become a champion for you. Spend some time with them.
Audience: There are two parts to this: Passion and interaction. If the person’s readers are commenting and a conversation generally happens around each post, this helps the “long tail” of an announcement. Spend some time with them.
So, who should you not spend some time with? Quite simply, anybody who can’t help you define your goals.
Now it’s your turn: How do you define an influencer? What effects your perception of a potential pitch recipient? What causes you to say no?
