The PRWeek Awards winners will be announced tomorrow in New York including PR Innovation of the Year. 
I have been working on the development of MatchPoint for the past year and want to congratulate everyone on the team for the nomination.  

  
All Nominees for PR Innovation of the Year:

Edelman and American Thoracic Society The TB Advocacy Toolkit  

Ketchum The Ketchum Media Optimizer: Adding Discipline to the PR Discipline  

Ketchum Virtual Meeting Mashups – Reinventing Online Events
 
Waggener Edstrom Worldwide What’s on Your Mind? Now Anyone Can Decipher Twitter Discussion with the Help of twendz!  

eNR Services, Inc. and MatchPoint MatchPoint for PR  
 

Best of luck to everyone and I look forward to speaking with you at the Awards!

 This list was developed using MatchPoint based on writers’ level of influence and relevance of content as of 3/8/10.

(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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I’ve had a blast over the past few months working on a new application. It’s called engage121 and it launches today!

The application empowers you to:

1. Listen – monitor Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and many other channels.

2. Speak – engage anyone via social media channels one-to-one.

Think of it as TweetDeck, Ning, HootSuite, your Facebook pages, your LinkedIn profile and about a few dozen more tools rolled into one. Oh, and it’s totally free.

Readers of this blog are invited to be beta testers and use engage121 for free via this link: www.engage121.com.

For more information about engage121, check out The Facebook Fan Page, The engage121 Community Blog, or follow engage on Twitter: @engage121.

Lastly, if you write one or multiple blogs, you can post to them all directly from engage. In fact, I posted this blog entry directly from engage121 this morning…

As discussed previously on this blog, a good carpenter does not call himself a Hammer Guru. Being knowledgeable in your tools of the trade is important, but you should focus on the job, not the tools.

And that’s what social media is: a medium, a channel, or a tool with which you may engage. Saying you’re an expert with the tools is saying nothing.

Too many PR people are riding the wave of corporate ignorance about social media and promoting themselves as Social Media Experts. As of today, here are the numbers of those whose Twitter profiles identify themselves as being the following:
  
Social Media Expert      382

Social Media Guru         218

Social Media Maven      163

Social Media Strategist  460

Strategist?!? There is no Social Media Strategy! You need a business strategy or a communications strategy and apply tactics – including the use of social media – to it.
 
I won’t go as far as Foursquare and give out Social Media D******** badges, but I’m getting close.
 

Another group of self-proclaimed experts, gurus, kings, queens, and mavens is the PR Measurement crowd. About 99% of the discussion at PR conferences, on blogs, and via Twitter is about WHY you should measurement PR activities and results. Rarely do any of these “experts” tell anyone HOW to measure. Maybe that’s the secret sauce that I haven’t paid for. Or the snake oil…

Don’t get me wrong – there are lots of smart PR folks who know measurement. But a PR person saying they are “into” in social media or measurement is like a politician saying he’s against waste. Wait, who is FOR waste? Again you’re not saying anything.  

A better long term reputation-builder is to show your skills in creating the messages and content and starting the conversations that will help your clients achieve their real goals.

So, I ask you – what are the best ways for PR prosfessionals to promote themselves as being great communicators without resorting to telling the world they’re Hammer Gurus?

Here’s a list of the top five most influential journalists covering endorsement deals and sponsorships for the 2010 Winter Games: 

This list was created using MatchPoint. Let the games begin!

My fellow developers and users of MatchPoint agree that the old way of sending out PR Spam via media directory is not only harmful to a PR practitioner’s reputation, but also is an ineffective way to pitch!

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In anticipation of the next big Apple media event this Wednesday, everyone is guessing that the big announcement is the launch of Apple’s Tablet.

Well, it’s no longer really guessing due to Apple’s well-planned PR “leaks”. Check out the latest on Mashable.  So, surely the Tablets are on the agenda. But I’m hoping for these two announcements:

 
1. Ending of exclusivity with AT&T

2. Change of name for the iPhone. Seriously! Is anyone using the phone anymore?!?

My suggested new name is the “iText-iSearch-iUseApps”. No? Yeah, too clunky.  Okay, let’s stick with iPhone.

I’m hoping there is a Verizon or other carrier deal announcement coming soon. Because with AT&T’s coverage in several places I need to go, it’s an iPaperweight.

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