Pitching iPad Apps Would Be Logical

Christina Warren - Mashable
Yukari Kane - Wall Street Journal
Roman Loyola - MacWorld
Eric Zeman - Information Week
Jay Yarow -  Mashable
Nick Mokey - Digital Trends
Paul Krill - CIO Magazine
Brian X. Chen -  Wired: Gadget Lab
Jared Newman - Network World
Erica Ogg  - CNet News

(Thanks to guest blogger Thomas Scott for his insights on navigating the dangers of PR)
 
Can PR kill you suddenly?
 
Probably not.
 
Can PR be hazardous to the health and well being of your company?
 
Absolutely. It can kill it in one fell swoop. Suddenly.
 

Public Relations practices are changing and the PR industry is in the middle of its most major culture shift in the past fifty years. We’re talking major paradigm shift here; the kind that happened when the iPod changed people’s music buying habits and Domino’s Pizza changed people’s pizza buying habits.

What’s the shift?

Journalists and bloggers, the individuals any successful PR campaign must target, have the lowest trust level of public relations companies, individuals and traditional PR content that they’ve ever had. We spent the entire last decade getting connected and wired to the internet and now we are suffering from overload. People want to have conversations where they trade tips and referrals and in order to have good conversations, you need interesting content.

Here are my 5 ways PR can suddenly kill your business – bizarre because they are counter-intuitive for those of us who have worked in the industry for lengthy amounts of time:

1. Write public relations and news releases in the traditional format. Trust me on this one – journalists have a keen awareness of ‘interesting’ and ‘not interesting.’ Those are the only two categories your content falls into. Period. Tell your story the way a journalist would tell it so it is really a story and not a release. Use traditional journalism methods to hook readers so they chose to know more. Forget to do this and your message will go right in the trash.
 
2. Write poorly thought of headlines. Headlines are called headlines because they serve a very important purpose: you are reading this blog post because I ‘gotcha’ with my headline. Admit it – it’s true! Take the time to write a catchy headline that people will flock to. Search Engine Optimization Experts understand this; it is at the root of the entire link baiting industry. Don’t know what that is? Google it – it applies more to PR than you realize!
 
3. Write content that is meaningless. As a journalist or blogger, I don’t care about your 59 cent taco. I care that your 59 cent taco kept the entire staff of a California farm employed in the down market or how a lowly 59 cent taco can decrease PMS levels in women suffering from a lack of iron (if that is true, please contact me). Be clear on what your story is and avoid stories that are not – well – stories. Journalists are professionally trained to seek out stories. No amount of calling on your part will convince them otherwise!
 
4. Call journalists to follow up. I know this is what real PR firms bill as a valuable service. I also know that as a journalist myself at a major market US daily, calling me to ‘follow up’ was a guaranteed way to get yourself and the company you represent blacklisted. Write better content and tell better, more compelling stories that people would want to talk about. Do that and you won’t have to call.
 
5. Forget about the longevity of a release. Creating content for a PR release is a lot more than sending to journalists. Current thinking among my unscientific group of 4 PR and social media friends is that if a content piece is really good, it is valuable. Keep your content and releases in your bank deposit vault – your company blog – so people can find it long afterwards and click on the link to your website. Every release you write should be on its own webpage, optimized with search engine tools and should have the ability for readers to both click through to your website and share on their social media networks. Forget that and all you’ll get is a whimper, not a bang.

Good luck! 

Thomas Scott

VP Marketing for Showhomes, a nationally franchised home staging company: http://www.showhomesfranchise.com

Thomas is recovering journalist and a new media and content specialist.

The Engage Button in MatchPoint

The engage button will open an email pitch note from you to the selected writer. You may also include any previously saved campaign elements embedded into the body of this html email. These elements can include:

• Links to videos
• Photos
• A Press Release
• Attributable Quotes
• Bulleted News Facts
• Boilerplate

 
Journalists have raved about receiving these embedded elements as opposed to attachments which often get filtered, ignored, or deleted.
 
When sending your pitch note through MatchPoint instead of via traditional email, you can also track who has opened your pitch!

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This index was compiled using MatchPoint based on several factors contributing to level of influence.

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Got a good tip for using MatchPoint? Please comment below or email to me for inclusion on the next list at jmonson@enr-corp.com
 
Free a trial of MatchPoint for readers of this blog, click here.

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We have seen many new media relations tools and apps launched this year claiming to be more useful than the rest. Most of these are just more of the same: new ways to blast out PR Spam, SEO “experts” who think they know more about Google than you do, and Social Media monitoring tools that actually do nothing but look cool. 

Pitch With Me rises above this PR app jam not with a glitzier app, but with a new concept in media relations. Or rather, a time-tested and proven concept put into an online form.

The idea of teaming up two or more clients for a story pitch has worked inside large agencies for decades. Agencies not only created a more attractive package, but also created efficiencies with resources and time.  But smaller firms and independent practitioners often saw an industry peer as a competitor rather than a symbiotic friend.

Journalists will use what they need and toss the rest anyway, so why not offer more to potentially use? And you never know when your partner’s a story may be what grabs someone’s attention.

Kudos to Heather Whaling for creating this online bullpen of potential collaborators! You can check out co-pitching opportunities on the site or by following @pitchwithme. If anyone has used Pitch With Me already, please share your comments here.

I’ve been working on a research project for the past few weeks regarding the pitching of bloggers. I’m reaching out to thousands of bloggers on behalf of the MatchPoint application for PR pros to gauge their interest in receiving pitches, news, notes, and social media news releases from MatchPoint’s clients.

The team that developed MatchPoint decided (thankfully!) to make it an Opt-In service and ask bloggers’ permission to provide the bloggers’ email addresses to MatchPoint’s clients. Many bloggers have been rightfully outing PR people for spamming when they use old school databases that mass-blast PR Spam from their media lists.

 
Of those bloggers with whom I spoke:

•12% expressed not wanting to have their email address visible to PR people nor wanted to receive pitches via email

•52% said they would be open to emails from PR, BUT ONLY if the pitch was exactly on point, relevant to their blog, or from a PR person who has obviously read their blog posts

•36% said they would opt in to receive PR emails and in fact rarely get any PR pitches
 
I think that last point is most significant. There are many bloggers who have a huge appetite for your news content! It’s notable that this is not an obscure group of bloggers; all were in the top 100,000 blogs by traffic. Most likely, that last group of bloggers is not in most PR Spam databases.

So go get ‘em! Just be sure you know each blogger’s preferred method of receiving pitches whether it’s email, via their blog, DM, or carrier pigeon. Also make sure your content is relevant to what they typically write.

First of all, I appreciate the massive time Valeria Maltoni devoted to reading hundreds of website pages and blogs in order to make decisions.  

I am very pleased and honored to be a part of this collective. I won’t feign false humility or act like I’m too cool to be excited about this – I’m thrilled!

I’m excited about the new followers and friends with whom I have  conversed since  this list was published. I’m even more excited to find 99 others with the same or greater passion for our industry. Here’s a link to the full list. 

And here’s a convenient link Neville Hobson created so you can easily follow the Tweeps on the list: TweepML.

This week’s PR Workbench post is by guest bloggers Brad Snyder and Maddie Forrester of Perception Metrics. Perception Metrics delivers data-driven media insight quickly and cost effectively to brand managers, public relations professionals, and their clients.

Looking at what’s being said, not just who is saying it (how many times)

When people talk about media analysis, they’re normally discussing results measurement – figuring out what impact they’ve have had and proving it to their clients.

But considering the amount of time and resources that go into creating a brand identity, there is surprisingly little listening done in advance, before brand books are signed, sealed and delivered. 

Imagine, for example, that you are at your local pub and you overhear people talking about your company and its competitors. Without a doubt, you’d be most interested in what was being said, not just who was doing the talking or how many times they mentioned each product or competitor. You might also notice their overall tone, of course, or how much of the conversation was focused on which company, but you (and your boss) probably want to know how, in this conversation, each brand is described.

The same principle should be applied to media analysis. So much of our industry focuses on “how good” the conversation is, overall, or “how much” of it there is. But media analysis can also delve into what, exactly, is being said. That can help you clarify errors, affirm and repeat positives, and share your perspective. You can also compare the ways that your company’s perception (what people think it is) is different from its projection (what you are saying it is)…and hopefully, you would use this information to make decisions about how your organization should act next.

When the conversation you’re “overhearing” is actually the sum total of newspapers, blogs, message boards, Twitter, and the TV – well, you have to boil it down quite a bit to understand what’s going on.

One way to do that is to look at which messages are unique to each company, and which are shared.  Check out this graph – and if it gives you flashbacks to middle school, I’m really sorry. It’s a Venn diagram that looks at the unique and shared positive messages in a media collection describing three retail clothing stores (names have been changed).
 

You can see right away that the conversations are really quite different. In this conversation, “Heritage Apparel” was the least unique; it has the most generic of the brand identities.  But it also means that “Heritage Apparel’s” identity is similar to the overall competitive landscape.

On the other hand, “Retrofitters” owns the most unique messages. It has a fairly strong brand identity in this conversation. And some of its messages – it was the only one described as “cute,” for example – are really nice to own.

“New Vintage’s” image is different. People are using words like “inspired,” “famous” and “attractive” to describe it. It also is more often described as “favorite,” “popular” and “trendy” than Retrofitters.

 
Here’s another example – one with a more political application.  This Venn shows how different media groups describe controversial Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.  Rather than comparing him to his competitors (seeing as how he’s president-for-life), it compares the conversations happening in different parts of the world. These are only the negative messages:

The coverage we get can vary wildly, depending on the perspective of the publication. Hugo Chavez very much embodies this. The entire community agrees on the facts – the study was done in November of 2007 when Chavez advocated for a referendum to allow him to run for president indefinitely, froze diplomatic relations with Columbia, and accused the CIA of orchestrating a coup. 

The Venezuelan media focused on the events in the country.  They acknowledged “criticism,” the “conflict” between Venezuela and Columbia, and a “clash” between pro- and anti- Chavez protestors.  US media used significantly stronger language, with messages like “dictator,” fear” and “suffer.” The non-US International media was considerably more cordial, describing Chavez as “controversial” and saying he was going “too far,” “too fast.” 

When you look at what’s being said (rather than how much is being said) you can position your brand image in a way that is unique and relevant.  Join the discussion: how would you use this data? What would you do if you were each of the clothing retailers? How would you advise Hugo Chavez?