Category Archives: Public Relations

What three PR & media takeaways would you share?

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Tomorrow morning I’ll be participating in a panel discussion at Leadership Tech Valley’s Media Day. A collaboration between the Albany-Colonie and Schenectady Chambers of Commerce, Leadership Tech Valley is a year-long professional development program in the region that provides courses and networking to a selected class of participants each year.

Media Day will consist of a panel discussion with journalists and PR professionals, as well as a mock press conference and an introduction to media pitching and coverage. The members of the class are from diverse industries and professions – everything from nuclear engineers to banking to healthcare. Many of them don’t work directly in public relations, but no doubt spending a day learning about how the media works will be helpful to them in terms of leading organizations in the future.

I’ll be sharing the stage with some PR professionals as well as TV, radio and newspaper journalists. Gina Luttrell, the panel moderator, has asked each of us to prepare our three must-have resources for members of the audience – it could be a website, a book, or even just an important tip.

I have a few in mind, but thought it would be an interesting exercise to see what you all think. When talking with a group of professionals who have limited knowledge of the media and how it and PR works, what would you tell them? Where would you send them for more information? What resources do you continue to go back to?

How many conferences are too many?

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I know, I know, quiet around here lately. It’s the same excuse as always: busy, busy. I’ve been on the go for what feels like eternity (and it actually got the better of me last week – hello, flu!). Thus, I haven’t been “musing” much. But here are some random thoughts and observations from my many travels these last months, starting with…

Louisville

I’m sure it’s a great city – it looked like it from the air. Jason Falls invited me to speak at the IABC Kentucky / Social Media Club Louisville’s Content Marketing Summit in September. Thanks to some flight snafus, I ended up flying in and out of Louisville in under 10 hours and seeing nothing beyond the airport and the conference room of the hotel across the street.

In addition to presenting, I got to sit in on the rest of the day’s sessions and hear from Michael Schechter of Honora Pearls, Joe Pulizzi of Junta42, and Chris Baggott of Compendium Blogware. During my presentationI talked about online newsrooms and using press releases as content marketing, sharing some examples form readMedia clients and other savvy organizations who “get it” when it comes to organizing news on the web. My slides on Making Online News in the 21st Century are here.

Then a week later, I was off to…

Boston (technically Cambridge)

It was nice to spend a day at a conference where I was actually only there learning, and not presenting or exhibiting or meeting with clients. As part of Boston’s FutureM week of marketing events, I spent a day at MIT/Microsoft’s NERD Center (it’s actually called that) for Start-up Marketing Bootcamp. It was great to hear from some of the non-mainstream social media and marketing speaker-guru-expert-ninja people and get some “real” stories from entrepreneurs at start-ups who’ve implemented innovative marketing tactics and social media strategies to develop a customer base. There was substantially less talk about Twitter and Facebook and more about things like design, user interface/user experience, marketing analytics and A/B testing, and low-cost tools and resources for marketing at a start-up. Meaty stuff.

I most enjoyed hearing from David Cancel, founder of Compete.com and now with Performable.com, and Ross Kimbarovsky from CrowdSpring.com. The day ended with a panel of CEO-types like Jennifer Hyman of Rent the Runway and Seth Prietbatsch from SCVNGR. Smart, in-the-trenches folks who shared their experiences, good and bad, of life at the helm of a start-up. The day suffered from not having enough interaction among all the attendees there (it would have been great to break into small groups and talk through common issues or share ideas for marketing start-ups), but overall it was a solid event. And, bonus, I managed to grab a long overdue beer with Jay Keith and confirm that we share a brain.

Fast-forward two weeks and I’m in…

Crotonville (it’s in New York, on the Hudson)

All you need to know about Crotonville is encapsulated in this episode of 30 Rock. GE invited several other former GE communicators back to its leadership development campus for a day of networking with other company alumni and current GE communications professionals. It was great to see former colleagues and some of the invited speakers were top-notch. A crisis communications panel included representatives from BP and AIG, and it was fascinating to get an insider’s view on these crises, as well as their lessons learned (Apparently no one in the UK thought Tony Hayward sounded “posh”, and in Britain his accent is actually quite common-sounding. Meanwhile, everyone in America thinks any type of British accent is posh…).

Now we’re to early November and I’m off to…

Troy

Not that far of a trip for me, but I spent a day in the Collar City for the PRSA Northeast District Conference. I was a little surprised at the lack of social media sophistication at this conference. It seems like PR people, of all professions, should be all over social media as tools to help them achieve their goals (and if they’re not ready to jump in with clients, I’d at least expect them to be reading basic social media blogs like Mashable and experimenting with social media personally, to try and get a handle on the technologies available and understand how to fit them into campaigns).

But, there was very little Twitter usage at the conference. People were asking questions during sessions like, “What is RSS?” and “What’s a hashtag?”, which made me worry I had been transported back to 2008. The kicker was that a few days after the conference, the organizers emailed a PDF of the conference survey to attendees and asked people to reply and check off their answers (um, surveymonkey or surveygizmo, anyone?). It frustrates me that so much discussion about social media seems stalled out among certain PR audiences. At some point, you need to stop expecting social media enlightenment to fall from the sky and just roll up your sleeves and start experimenting.

On a good note, I got to meet David Binkowski and hear about some of his work with Price Chopper and Schick (he is seriously tall in real life, btw). I also attended a media panel that featured Mark Mahoney of the Glens Falls Post Star, who is far too humble for a Pulitzer winner.

Three days later I’m on a plane to…

San Diego

I attended the American Marketing Association’s 2010 Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education. San Diego in November sounds great, but I honestly only made it outside of the hotel twice (though once was to meet and have dinner with the lovely Rachel Kay and Jennifer Wilbur). The conference was packed with content, and in addition to meeting with a lot of readMedia’s higher ed clients, I also tried to attend as many sessions as possible. A lot of the conference revolved around big university branding campaigns, like those at American University, Purdue and Michigan State. I shared my impressions of the conference with Seth Odell of HigherEdLive via a video post here.

I’m really enjoying being so involved with the higher ed community through my work with readMedia, and it’s great to be able to learn from them and also share knowledge gleaned from working with our clients. I’ve made great connections with people like Michael Stoner, Rachel Reuben, Fritz McDonald and Charlie Melichar.

Back from San Diego and two days later it’s back to…

Troy (again)

This time, Troy played host to the eighth installment of Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley, with the very cool Revolution Hall as a backdrop. Patrick Boegel was able to entice Guy Gonzalez of Digital Book World to come talk to SMBTV about Audience Development in the Digital Age. With Guy’s poetry and publishing background, it was really interesting to get his take on building communities online. Guy shared his view of how online platforms (Kindle, iPad, eBooks, etc.) are disrupting traditional methods of getting content to audiences. I love that SMBTV has been exploring deeper and more niche-y topics lately. The audience is so sophisticated and asks such great questions, and it’s great to be beyond Twitter/Facebook 101 content. Guy’s shared his recap and slides from SMBTV on his blog.

…Somewhere in there I also flew out to Colorado for my first Dawgs game in six years (we lost), picked up responsibility for sales at readMedia (a big, scary, exhilarating, awesome challenge for me), and managed to squeeze in some fantastic hikes in the Adirondacks and beyond. I suppose that schedule is enough to land just about anyone in bed for two weeks. I’m on the mend now and happy to be off the road for a while. I won’t go so far as to promise I’ll be back to blogging regularly here, but hopefully it’ll be more than once every three months.

What’s new with all of you?

Image via Flickr user kmanohar

Imagining a world without words

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I’ve grown addicted to WNYC’s ‘Radiolab‘ podcast. With all the time I’ve spent in the car this summer, Radiolab has been a savior, making five-hour trips seem like 30 minutes. The show is similar to Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life, but a little less smug and a little more nerdy.

A recent episode on “Words” is nerdtopia for communicators like me. The one-hour show tries to imagine what the world would be like without words, and investigates how language shapes and structures the way we communicate and interpret the world. From looking at turns of phrase coined by Shakespeare, to following a group of deaf children in Nicaragua who created their own language, to studying how babies’ brains make connections between group of words (it happens later than you think) — I was riveted.

Carve out an hour of your day and take a listen here.

Also check out this cool video produced to accompany the episode. It took me until the second watch to “get it”, but it’s clever and beautifully done:

Michael Sebastian reveals how ‘PR Daily’ gets to your inbox

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PR Daily

If you work in PR, you’re likely among the 50,000+ subscribe to Ragan.com’s PR Daily e-mail newsletter (and if you aren’t, you should be). Editor Michael Sebastian and his team put together the best links to PR-related articles and blog posts from around the web each day — with plenty of fun and snarky commentary added, free of charge. I’ve often wondered how he does it, and Michael agreed to give me the inside scoop on how PR Daily happens:

Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got involved in PR.

Michael Sebastian

I worked in journalism—newspapers, magazines, book research—and took a job with Ragan in January 2007 to be part of its maiden Web editorial staff. So, I started covering the corporate communications industry—PR, marketing, internal comms, speechwriting, and the emerging world of social media. (I wrote a weekly column for Ragan about the corporate blogosphere called Blog Dogger—not my choice for the name. I wanted to call it Bloggy Style, but the powers-that-be nixed it.)

I digress.

At nearly the same time, we launched MyRagan.com, which at the time was pretty groundbreaking. It was the first social network for the industry. I was—and continue to be—the managing editor of the site.

In 2008, I started writing Ragan’s PR Junkie blog and the success of that spawned PR Daily, which we began developing in December 2008. It launched in March 2009. The audience is a mix of PR professionals—corporate, agency (big and small), and independent or freelance pros—marketing pros, internal communicators, members of the media professionals, and social media enthusiasts. It’s grown, steadily. We also saw a spike in traffic when we incorporated the share buttons below each item.

How do you go about curating articles for inclusion in PR Daily?

I wouldn’t say it’s a process, more like controlled chaos!

Currently, the site is updated twice daily—at midnight Central Time (when the page turns over from the previous day) and around 9 or 10 a.m. CT. The stuff that goes live at midnight is the previous day’s late breaking news and the evergreen how-to items. The morning update is meant to reflect what’s in the morning papers.

Of course, this news is directly or indirectly related to the PR industry. So, first thing I do each morning is check my e-mail, and I go right for the dozen or so e-mail newsletters I receive. These e-newsletters cover PR and advertising, general news, and gossip. Then I see what the PR Daily contributors have sent. That’s where I start. From there I check The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, then I head over to Twitter to see what’s going on.

The e-mail alerts, the write-ups and heads-ups (is that the plural of “heads-up”? Sounds weird.) from the PR Daily contributors, and what’s in the NYT, WSJ, and on Twitter give me a pretty good feeling for what’s going on. After that I’ll visit some blogs to see their take on things and check if there’s under-the-radar stuff I’ve missed.

As a side note, people often ask if I subscribe to RSS feeds. I do, but I hardly use them. In fact, I’d be hard-pressed to remember my RSS passwords. Do they even take passwords? See, that’s how removed I am from RSS. Twitter is my new RSS reader.

What do you look for when determining whether or not an article/post should be included in PR Daily?

The items must have some connection to PR. Of course, one could argue that almost everything has to do with PR—and it’s a valid argument—but if you subscribe to that too closely—as an editor, at least—then next thing you know you’re just scraping the top headlines from the Times and giving it a little topspin. PR Daily readers don’t want that.

In addition to being PR-related, stories should be useful (and by that I’m mainly referring to tip sheets and how-tos), interesting (survey results fit this bill), sexy (company X gets into a PR mess—that kind of thing), or just bizarre—a plum, as we call them—such as, “11 notes written to thieves.” True, that has nothing to do with PR, but damn that one was funny.

You’ve been adding team members recently. What are their roles and how do you manage this growing team?

They [the team] are all remote, so they send me stuff throughout the day, though usually the stuff comes in late at night or early in the morning. If it’s timely, I make sure it runs that day; if they send an evergreen item—you know, 10 tips for Facebook, or something—then I might hold it if things are getting tight that morning.

I’ll also say that when contributors join the PR Daily roster they often grow into more than just writers for the website. For instance, Jackson Wightman—the first PR Daily contributor, and a very funny French Canadian (don’t hold it against him)—just took part in a webinar for PR Daily and he’ll be doing more in the future.

Susan Young, a veteran reporter and PR pro in Dallas, is developing a super-top-secret project for Ragan. Matthew Royse, a man bursting with knowledge and enthusiasm about PR and social media (seriously, this guy loves talking about social media), has worked with Ragan on other projects, too. Recently, we just added Claire Celsi, a PR pro in Des Moines, Iowa, to the roster. She’s a great writer—and prolific, knowledgeable, talented.

Clearly, I’m a fan of the contributors.

The fulltime editorial staff at Ragan is wonderful, too. Roula Amire, the managing editor of Ragan.com, is my rock; Rob Reinalda, the executive editor at Ragan, is my guru; Jessica Levco, Ragan’s healthcare editor, is my comic relief.

All great people to work with.

There are several PR-related daily newsletters (PRSA, SmartBrief on Social Media, etc.). How do you differentiate PR Daily and make it valuable to your audience?

My boss, Mark Ragan, gave me carte blanche to create PR Daily. He trusted my vision and my voice for the project, and he’s supported me in that ever since.

I look at PR Daily as the bastard child of Gawker and Open Forum. News, advice, oddities, trends, humor, and most of all, VOICE. Beside the content, PR Daily has voice.

Reading industry publications—online or off—is important, but it can also feel tedious, like it’s part of your job, like you’d much rather be reading that US Weekly, Elle, or Esquire, but you have to read this industry pub first.

I know PR Daily will never compete with a mainstream pub or gossip blog in terms of peoples’ attentions, but I also want them to look forward to PR—to learn something useful and interesting, laugh, and share it with their friends or network. I also hope it attracts people to an industry publication who may have never read one in the past.

And really, what I’m doing is an extension of the Ragan brand; it’s been approaching industry publications in this manner since the company launched in 1969.

The future is all about growth! We’re expanding to Europe; we’re going to continue to grow staff; we’re going to increase the frequency of the updates on the site; and we’re developing Smartphone and iPad apps.

What big changes do you see on the horizon for PR practitioners in 2010? What is the biggest challenge they will face?

Content. Creation.

This is something my boss, Mark Ragan, was talking about years ago and you’re really seeing it happen now, particularly at larger agencies. The gaping hole left by newsroom cuts–and the new ethos of online journalism (key words, gossip, et cetera)–has given companies a chance to produce news and content.

If the reporters covering an industry are getting laid off–or getting shuffled to other parts of the newsroom–then companies should create their own content. And I don’t mean in press release form. I mean in the same way you’d see an article appear on The Huffington Post, with art, video maybe, and, most of all, voice—and not the stuffy corporate kind. If the content is good, people will visit, say, General Electric’s sponsored news page to read news and opinion. It creates another point of contact with consumers.

And don’t get me wrong, I know critics might toss around the word Orwellian. That’s a valid concern. Last thing we want is for companies to report on news without an independent media validating that stuff. I suppose I see it more in the way professional sports teams kick out content. Head over to any professional team’s website and you’ll find a professional writer/reporter–usually a very talented one–writing articles and curating content about the team.

Anyway, someone’s going to need fill that gap for companies and brands. Why not PR?

Where’s the love for local public relations?

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I’ve been thinking a lot about differences between national and local media lately. The topic has been the subject of my last two posts over on Newsworthy, the readMedia blog, and I’ve been listening intently at the PR conferences I’ve been attending when journalists take the stage for panel discussions. Some have been representing national media outlets, like Slate.com, USA Today, and The New York Times. Others are local reporters for TV networks, metro daily newspapers or hyperlocal web sites. The differences in what these journalists expect from PR people are stark. But more on that later.

First, let’s talk about why solid, locally focused PR gets very little attention among the PR blogosphere/trade press/twitterati. When’s the last time you’ve seen PR Week highlight a kickass local PR success story? Of course, it’s sexier to talk about big brands with big budgets like Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble or Intel. Their PR and social media campaigns try to reach as broad a consumer audience as possible, sometimes within a vertical, but usually regardless of geography.

With location-based networking (Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla) all the rage and talk of hyperlocal journalism reaching a fever pitch, it surprises me that more attention isn’t being paid to local PR. Why is it that the primary discussions in and about our industry are focused on behemoth national or global brands, or even on smaller brands who are deemed “successful” at public relations by virtue of landing stories in national outlets? Do they have a monopoly on newsworthy content?

Hardly. There are thousands of small businesses and non-profits across the country that are doing a bang up job of telling their stories — to the audience that matters to them! If you’re a local organization focused on recruiting volunteers, publicizing events and providing services to a particular county or town, your public relations strategy had better focus on reaching local audiences. That means pitching local media, reaching out to local bloggers and developing a social media presence that local constituents can find and interact with. A hit in The New York Times is great, but you’re far likelier to move the needle on organizational goals if you focus on the channels that your local audiences use to get information.

In many cases, that still means the local newspaper and TV stations. Social media and alternative media have yet to supplant these traditional outlets locally as a primary source of information (according to Pew). Often new media (like local blogs and citizen journalists) take their cues from what mainstream media is writing about, and much of the information that’s shared in social networks originates in traditional media (Pew estimates over 90 percent).

So, reaching local media is key if geography matters to your organization. And fortunately, local journalists want to get your news. This was the main difference that came up over and over again in the journalist panels I’ve been listening to over the last few weeks. Here’s how it would go:

Well-known journalist from renowned national media outlet: “I hate being bothered. I get 955 emails a day. I probably don’t care about your story. I will never cover your groundbreaking or charity event. If you’re going to pitch me, you should read and research everything I’ve written for the last six months. You should tailor your pitch directly to me, and it had better be the absolute perfect story for my readers, and you’d better be able to convey the entire pitch to me in one or two sentences. Don’t send me press releases. Don’t send me any photos or videos or attachments unless I ask for them. And don’t keep bothering me to see if I got your email, because I probably don’t care.”

Small-town journalist from local TV news station: “I want to know about everything happening in this town, and especially how it affects the people who live and work here. I absolutely will cover a groundbreaking or charity event if it’s local and has an impact on residents. When you send me press releases, make sure they’re well-written and have all the information I need. Extras like photos and other documentation can be helpful. Make sure the title of the email and press release convey the key information I need to know. Be responsive when I call for follow-up information or interviews.”

Slight hyperbole, but that was essentially the gist. National reporters are busy and over-pitched, and they get a lot of bad pitches so they don’t trust press releases. They don’t have time for long pitches. They don’t do reportorial journalism, because they don’t have to. They get so many story ideas pitched to them that they rarely have a hard time filling the “news hole” each day.

On the local side, these journalists are also busy, but they rely on local organizations to help them develop content. They are all about reportorial journalism – the who, what, when, where, why of what’s happening in their town. They rely on press releases and PR people to help them find out what’s interesting and important. They are the 75 percent of journalists who say that receiving high-quality, targeted emailed press releases is helpful! And they don’t want “New! Whiter, brighter toothpaste!” press releases, they want to know about local students who complete a peer education program at an area nonprofit, or about a new program of study being added at a local college.

As much as industry outsiders (and the PR industry itself) love to bash on PR and declare that press releases are dead, it’s simply not true when it comes to local public relations. I see so many readMedia clients send solid, relevant, newsworthy press releases every day to local media, and these releases get picked up and their information ends up in front of their target audience. Shel Holtz said it best: “The role of media relations professionals is to inform journalists of their organizations’ news.”

You can talk about revolutions or evolutions or solutions for public relations in the digital age, and trump up fancy PR campaigns from big brands and continue to chase down national media hits. But let’s not forget that a lot of basic, fundamental media relations tactics are still very effective at the local level. If you’re a local organization, isn’t that where you want to be successful?