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!

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?

And people have written miles of books, blog posts and even tweets about best practices and what matters on Twitter. One of the biggest things that is almost universally agreed upon is to be genuine. So how do we as public relations professionals remain genuine when we’re asked to tweet about a client?

The precedent

Fundamentally you are free to talk about whatever the hell you want with your Twitter stream. It’s your content. It’s your copyright. It’s your reputation.

Your reputation? Yeah, your reputation. You put it on the line each and every time you post something to the public domain. When I hit publish on this post, I was subjecting myself to the judgment of past, present and future employers. It’s the same thing with Twitter.

If your precedent is to include links to client announcements or blog posts, then that’s fine. You’ve willingly shared that information. After all, without clients we wouldn’t be able to pay the electric bill so we could tweet, right? There is a conception that all posts in a social network should be neutral and objective. If you have a relationship, some feel it should be disclosed either up front or by using hash tags or other microsyntax. For example, James Governor from the analyst firm Redmonk uses “$client” to denote posts to his Twitter stream about his paying clients.

And that’s a judgement call you will have to make.

But what about when your employer says you must tweet on a client’s behalf?

Mandated tweeting

I see a potential for conflict when an employer mandates that an employee tweet on its behalf. Making a choice to share the announcement of a project you’ve worked on or a blog post from a co-worker is one thing.

Being told what to tweet and when to tweet it is another beast. The argument is that it’s not genuine. If you don’t want to post it, then why should you be obligated to? I’m all for being a team player. But sometimes you need to protect the community and precedent you have created. I don’t know what the right answer is. So, I’m asking you.

How would you respond to being given a pre-written tweet and being asked to post it? Would you? Why or why not?

A journalist brings life to factual occurrences. Presents actual, recorded history with zero subjectiveness. And yes, they act with an absence of malice.

Can a person be both? Of course. But not at the same time. In my opinion, blogger and journalist are mutually exclusive and any attempt to blur that line only results in that person losing the “journalist” label in favor of the “blogger” label.

On blogging

I’ve been sitting on this for a bit and every time I see a blogger such as Michael Arrington or Marshall Kirkpatrick referred to as a “journalist,” my journalism degree loses a comma. But I watched as Chris Brogan (and, by association eMoms, 1938Media and others) get raked over the coals because he took a payment in the form of a gift card to put up a post whereby he, wait for it, gave away a gift card.

So, what is a blog? This is a blog. I make no attempt or representation that anything I produce is a fact. In all honesty, if I’m not writing pure opinion or heresay, then there’s no fun in that. My only “facts” are links to others who generally agree with my opinion and that is questionable at best.

A blog is a place where people share their experiences, opinions, dreams and failures. Sure, people can report on things and cover breaking “news.” But they are still blogs. They provide a second layer, which is analysis and opinion. This removes any chance of the label of “journalism” being applied.

On journalism

Journalists and reporters do a great service to our society. I have worked as a reporter and have a BA in journalism, so you can guess where my bias leans.

Newspapers stay in business through advertising and that is the traditional source of income for bloggers as well. So, can online journalists survive this way as well? Of course. Google AdSense and other advertising platforms can provide an income (and let’s be honest, journalists make next to nothing. Full disclosure: my first reporting gig paid me <$19,000 per year. I got laid off after three months) and eliminate the need to participate in pay per post programs and paid reviews.

It is possible to be an online-only journalist.  The posts follow journalistic ethics and attributes information and even includes quotes. But by inserting a subjective opinion, the writer eliminates the assumption of objectiveness. And this does everyone a disservice. But one thing is important to note, here — Journalists are real people. They have a brain, they know a ton of information and when they do share an opinion, a lot of respect and weight is behind it. Sometimes real people can’t contain their opinions and they leak out. Such is the danger with objective practices.

Journalism is an art, talent and skill. And I think that true journalism is fading away as more and more people move into content creation and blogging. I am all for people getting online and sharing their thoughts, opinions and distributing them. But do it under the auspices of blogging and not journalism. Please?

Thoughts?

So, I want to offer my perspective on pitching. I used to be a reporter and, while I wasn’t on an TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb scale, I did have a lot of other work to do and the pitches would frustrate me. That being said, I’ve come up with my Three S’s of Pitching: sincere, succinct and scalable.

Sincere

I talked about being genuine recently and sincerity goes hand in hand with that. You are asking a busy reporter to take the time to talk to/cover/link to your client. Provide that person some legitimate reason why you believe this is important. This is about believing in the brands/clients/products you represent. Here are some tips on sincerity:

• Avoid hype language. If you claim to be a leader, attribute the source.
• Be humble. Acknowledge the blogger’s position and that you appreciate any time they might be able to give.
• Be newsworthy. In journalism, it’s called the news hook. What is different or unique or special about this news or pitch that makes it newsworthy?
• Diction. The words you choose carry great weight. Only one product can be unique. It is not fairly unique.
• Show don’t tell. Remember that old axiom? It’s so applicable when pitching. Give details to support your claim and make sure they’re accurate.

Succinct

By keeping your messages short and to the point, you’ll endear yourself to, well, anybody really. When I was in college, I invented a word — “concisification.” A verb exists as well — “concisify.” The general premise is to take what you’ve written and rewrite it in half the space.

Simple enough, right? But to quote Mark Twain, “If I had more time, I’d write a shorter letter.” And it’s true. So how do you concisify something?

• Active, not passive. Avoid passive voice like the plague. That is all.
• Dead construction. This is a tricky one. Phrases such as “There is…” or “There are…” rob you of space. Instead of “There is new features…” Simply state “New features…”
• Be assertive. Phrases such as “This product could very well be the next big thing” shows weakness and is not compelling. “This product is the next big thing.” Is tighter, more active and easier to read.
• Avoid excessive similes and metaphors. Overusing these literary tools is like using a jack hammer to remove a tooth. Sure, it may work, but it can be quite painful.

Scalable

Let’s face it, we’re busy too. The expectation is that every pitch sent is a perfect, unique display of your PR prowess. But how realistic is this? The product pitch is essential and needs to be deployed at the ready.

So, a good pitch is scalable and can be sent out to different contacts but still be effective. I think that really, this is as simple as having a Word or Google Doc with the generic text in it. But deploy it from there. Don’t copy/paste from an email or use the forward feature. Mistakes can happen. Other tips on making your pitch scalable:

• Micro pitch it. Use social media to spread the word.
• Force it viral. Have your client send out a brief email to its contact base and ask colleagues/partners to post to Twitter and other networks.
• Incorporate the sincerity and succinctness described above.

So, there you have the three S’s of pitching. What methods do you use? What are some successful tactics you’ve used in the past?