Tag: pitching tips

Top Ten Influencers Covering iPad Apps

 

 
 

iPad Spock
Pitching iPad Apps Would Be Logical
 
Here’s a list of the Top Ten Most Influential Writers Covering iPad Apps: 
 

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

 

If you’re doing media relations for an iPad app or just following the developments, this list is a great place to start! These influencers were uncovered using MatchPoint on 3/22/2010.

 

 

5 Bizarre Ways PR Can Kill You Suddenly

 

(Thanks to guest blogger Thomas Scott for his insights on navigating the dangers of PR)
 
Can PR kill you suddenly? Death by PR
 
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 Most Engaging Part of MatchPoint That You Haven’t Used…Yet

 
Using MatchPoint searches to uncover influencers who are writing stories similar to yours is just part of the power of the MatchPoint application.
  
Many MatchPoint users are finding time efficiencies and increased pitching success by using the ENGAGE button attached to each journalist, writer, or influencer.
  

Engaging in MatchPoint
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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Top Journalists Covering Olympic Sponsorships

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

Dan Sewell Associated Press
Bruce Constantineau Vancouver Sun
Katie Thomas New York Times
David Holthaus Cincinnati Enquirer
Janet McFarland Globe and Mail

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

Tackling PR Spam in the UK

Cheers to RealWire in the UK for putting together this fantastic video outlining the dangers of PR Spam: http://inconvenientprtruth.com/animation/.

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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Pitching Tips – MatchPoint Users

 
This is the first of our best practices posts to help MatchPoint users maximize their results and find more journalists and bloggers to engage one-on-one. 
   
 
1. What should I do if my brand / product / client is extremely niche-focused?
 
Some MatchPoint users are working with products or clients about which no reporter has recently written at all. One such MatchPoint client was promoting a very specialized household appliance. The press release draft with which she was searching the “Point” box was very specific to this niche industry. And guess what? Not one of the 200,000 journalists in MatchPoint has written about this product in the past six months. She then searched keywords about similar products and broader industry terms to find journalists who would be interested. These included home repair, home improvement, holiday gifts for dad, etc. The Matching results showed dozens of reporters for whom her news was relevant. Remember, the objective isn’t to find people who have already written about your specific product, but to find those who are likely to write about you now!
 
 
2. Should I include my company boilerplate in the “Point” search?
 
In general, the answer is “no”. But we recommend experimenting both ways and see how your boilerplate affects your results. If your boilerplate contains many generic words and phrases like “excellent customer service with a mission to create synergies…,” our Matching system may produce results that have nothing to do with your main subject matter. However, if your boilerplate contains specific terms for your topic like “ice cream, snack foods, and easy to make meals for busy families” you may want to include the boilerplate to help find even more relevant articles and journalists.
 
 
3. My release includes many high-tech terms – will this hurt my results?
 
The inclusion of technical jargon and specs should not hurt your search results. But be sure that your release includes general terms and phrases relating the subject – MP3 players, laptops, video cameras, monitors, smart phone apps, etc – and MatchPoint will find reporters and bloggers who write about such devices.

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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New PR Tool: Pitch with Me

  
A new free online tool was added to your PR Workbench this month: Pitch with Me.

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.

Death of PR Spam

PR Spam took a few more hits last week. First, blogger Gina Trapani created a new wiki of PR agencies who have spammed her via press release. 
 
Secondly, MatchPoint rolled out a new version: MatchPoint v1.5. The anti-PR Spam tool will keep users off of Gina’s list!
 
 PR Spam
 
PR Spammers (and the over-priced PR vendors who enable them!) typically build lists of journalists (based on beats) who may or may not have ever written an article or blog related to the Spammers’ blast press release.
  
MatchPoint allows PR pros to identify the most appropriate reporters and bloggers based on what they have recently written, not by outdated information like beat or title.
 
The true PR Spam killer is this: after finding an appropriate journalist, users can engage them one-on-one directly through MatchPoint. The personalized, custom message can range from a simple pitch note to a full multi-media press package.
 
Other new enhancements include the ability for PR pros to monitor specific journalists, create notes on follow up activity, and evaluate success of campaigns with detailed tracking reports.
 
MatchPoint is now giving journalists the ability to evaluate the usefulness of story pitches and rank the sender. This new system was designed to weed out PR Spammers and open a dialogue between professional PR practitioners and journalists.
 
PR professionals can get a free ten-day trial at this link. PR Spammers should ignore this link!

Local Media Tips – Guest Blog by Hope Salley

 
This week, my friend Hope Salley of eNR Services is providing a recap local media pitching tips from a PRSA event in Connecticut. The event was hosted by the PRSA -Westchester County and Fairfield County Chapter. The guest speakers were Allan Drury, business reporter/editor with the Journal News (Gannett-Westchester and Rockland Counties), and Jim Zebora, business editor with Hearst CT Newspapers (Connecticut Post, Advocate). Thanks for the tips Hope! – Jack

 

 

First and foremost, Allan Drury said that the most important thing a person pitching to the media should do is – do their homework! As quoted by Drury, “Know your reporter. Look at the past six months to see what kind of articles that reporter likes covering. Don’t look at just the past week.” This solidifies why the MatchPoint application is so important to our clients. Drury said it is very important to target the right media.

 

Below are a few dos and don’ts explained both by Allan Drury and Jim Zebora:

 

Dos

  • Keep headlines short and concise. Reporters want to see what the news is right away.
  • The best time of day to reach a reporter is in the morning or anytime between noon and 2 p.m. The afternoon hours are usually a “sprint to the finish” time for most reporters and editors.
  • The best way to reach most reporters is via email.
  • After sending a press release, follow up with a phone call to the reporter a few days later.

 

Don’ts

  • Don’t harass reporters. Continuing to call them or emailing them is a sure turn-off.
  • Don’t send irrelevant stories. Only pitch stories that have merit and offer legitimate news.  

Drury said it is important to include statistical information and research in press releases that offer substantiality to the story. This data backs up the focus of the release, and makes it a lot easier for the journalist (less work they have to do). Drury said press releases without data tend to be “fluffy features.” When it comes to business stories, Zebora conveyed that the reporters at the Hearst CT Newspapers look at mom-and-pop businesses the same as national businesses, meaning small businesses have pertinent, legitimate news just as much as larger corporations. In fact, it is the local businesses – affecting the local community – that journalists are more interested in covering.

 

 

Fundamental Change at Media Outlets

  

Here is a very interesting trend pointed out by the development team at MatchPoint:

 

 

PR pros should be aware of a fundamental change in the media. In the current economic debacle, fewer and fewer journalists are employed be a specific media outlet.
 
It appears that the media have responded to the current business conditions, in part, by outsourcing editorial functions. The overwhelming minority of bylined journalists in MatchPoint are staff journalists. Most content is now produced by freelancers and syndicators.
 
For example, an analysis of MatchPoint’s Benton Evening News content, circulation approximately 4,000, produced the following results during a recent sample month:
 

  • 301 bylined articles.
  • 171 unique bylined journalists
  • 30 journalists produced > 5 articles

 
However, the Benton Evening News maintains a staff of only 2!
 
“Contributors,” including both freelancers and syndicators, are rapidly becoming the new mainstream.

 

 

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