Search results matching tag 'Press Releases'

PR moves from push to pull

917990 — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:18:00 GMT

We wrote a press release for a client recently on quite an obscure area of email marketing but it happened to contain some research information which revealed something nobody in email marketing knew about, which was of obvious practical value.

It ran in a couple of well known marketing portals to start with but the ripple effect was quite extraordinary, picked up on so many blogs and related company sites that we literally gave up counting. It was like throwing a heavy stone into a lake and watching the ripples flow out.

The implications for online PR is that story content is progressively king online, especially when you bear in mind that it is very tricky if not impossible to pitch to blogs. Add to that the SEO implications of all those mentions and we should all be looking on our client’s beach for the heaviest stone we can.

Spinning a Googley

917990 — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 10:53:00 GMT

A study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University has suggested that now newswire services can send stories direct to consumers through the proliferating digital channels, traditional newspapers may end up ‘disintermediated’ – a word my spell check can’t deal with which means, I think, cutting out the middle man.

If proved right, this could have seismic repercussions for the quality and tone of received news. If stories at source (e.g. press releases) are not ‘intermediated’ by established gatekeeper journalists, their contents will need to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

On the upside, less intermediated news means less negative spin which would be welcome to many like the man who phoned the BBC yesterday to ask what he should say to his eleven year old daughter who asked him why the news was always so ‘horrible’.

Audi kills the press release

917990 — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:50:00 GMT

With my part time motoring journalist hat on it was with sadness that I read the letter from Audi’s press office this week about the proposed replacement of their printed press packs with email.

Frankly, I’ve marvelled for years that they could still afford to send out all those sumptuous glossy photos on a weekly basis but at the same time I congratulated them for not doing a Mercedes and lazily referring you to a website where you are expected to mine for the information.

And the direct mail approach worked, I used a release only last month for a Christmas round up piece and there’s no denying you felt good towards Audi for investing in you. On the flip side, it’s going to be far more convenient to receive information by email, we’ll no doubt get videos as well as jpegs and the information will be more frequent and relevant – assuming they get their email marketing right.

Audi’s line is that it’s a move to offer optimum efficiency to the UK motoring press, though it doesn’t take a genius to see that the impetus was financial. I fear we may be seeing the last of its kind but whilst the hard copy press release is still an option (by request) I’ll cling on.

Divided by a common language

917990 — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:55:00 GMT

Listening to Barack Obama’s speech yesterday, I was reminded of Shaw’s quote about how different we are in our use of language. Obama’s genuinely inspiring speech, referencing Martin Luther King in his call for supporters “to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day” while magical in a US context, sadly wouldn’t work for our politicians.

If, for example, David Cameron became Prime Minister and started quoting Churchill in the tone of a US politician on the podium, he’d be derided as pompous, possibly crazed and certainly a bit ‘up himself’.

The differences continue in business language. A favourite US phrase at the moment is ‘reach out’ as in, ‘company x is reaching out to its customers’. I quite like the feel of this phrase but put that in front of a British journalist and they’re unlikely to read any further.

The best a PR can do is write the release in the language and style of the publications they are targeting and in the UK this means free of any hyperbole or blatant self promotion. If this is done well, the release may appear verbatim in the target publication – the ultimate accolade for the anonymous PR.

Incidentally, one other thing that doesn’t always translate is abbreviation. Hearing one supporter referring to Obama as BO was a bit of an eyebrow raiser.

PR is dead

917990 — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:22:00 GMT

And so are blogs according to a journalist from US Wired last week - a story that somehow made it into the Telegraph, Times, Sunday Times, Radio 4, Brand Republic in the UK - and those are just the one’s I happened across. What’s interesting about this isn’t the idea 'blogging is dead’ – which is obviously a preposterous notion, but the amount of coverage making such a controversial claim can get you.

With the imminent launch of a UK version of Wired – I detect some non- coincidental PR at work here. Whoever you are, congratulations, you truly hit a media nerve point. I think for my next press release, whatever it is, I shall claim it is dead.

Kaplinski in PR suicide (blog)

917990 — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:29:00 GMT

As little as six years ago the majority of press releases still came by post. On DM Week, we used to have huge piles of them typed up so we could edit them on our trendy orange macs. How archaic that now seems. These days they arrive in unprecedented numbers by email and I’ve often wondered, as an agent now responsible for quite a few of them, how this change in volume and format has affected their impact.

Unable to find any research on the area I recently conducted my own small survey of B2B journalists. The results were surprising – at least to me. They show the average number received to be 35 a day (far less than I’d anticipated) of which 50% were considered irrelevant or poorly targeted (better than I’d thought actually). The main complaint (apart from targeting) turned out to be a lack of clear labelling.

On this basis even if your press releases are relevant and clearly labelled, you’re still competing with around 17 other emails a day for a journalist’s attention. These are not great odds.

Your chances lessen even more if you happen to email the likes of Five News’s editor David Kermode who in the latest issue of PR Week says this:

“One of my biggest bugbears is when an email arrives in my inbox that is obviously PR crap – it gets immediately deleted. One sure-fire way of not getting my attention is a bog-standard email. What irritates me about PR is the blanket nature of it.”

So the effectiveness of emailed press releases seems to lie somewhere between ‘not very’ and ‘suicidal’.

Note to self, best call Natasha direct.