Month: March 2004

Well RSS gots some well deserved attention during the weekend with an AP story  “Enthusiasts Call Web Feed Next Big Thing“.

The story prompted some lively discussion on Slashdot and PR blogger Greg Brooks bravely got involved.

The story is very upbeat and features practically every major blogger on the Internet…

“Remember when you first starting seeing URLs appear on billboards and at the end of movie trailers?” Zawodny wrote in his blog in December. “It’s going to be like that. One day we’re just going to look around and realize that RSS is popping up all over the place. And a couple years later, we’ll all wonder how we ever got along without it.”

Of course RSS isn’t mainstream, you could argue (in awful 1990’s parlance) it hasn’t even crossed the chasm, but it’s certainly reached the edge.

What does this mean for PR people? Right now it’s still in it’s early stages, but it’s no harm to begin offering corporate news over RSS. You might be surprised with the results.

The job of a Public Relations practitioner can be defined in many ways. One of the better ones is: “Managing the relationship between an organization and its publics.”

In essence, PR is responsible for communications between an organization and its customers, media, staff etc. That’s a nice tight specification eh?

The increasing flood of information, shrinking editorial pages and the rising pressure of our daily lives all contribute to make Public Relations a more stressed occupation. Though as massochists, we obviously still enjoy it.

Rick Bruner has posted a piece which highlights how important it is for PR people to understand the tools at their command and how to best use them.

Rick has berated PR people in the past and we’ve enjoyed some lively back-and-forth. His latest concern surrounds a request from a PR agency for more information on his interests.

His posting raises some interesting issues.

In this day and age, everyone expects to recieve relevant information.  If it’s irrelevant, people consider it as spam. As a result PR agencies need to have an understanding of what areas and issues journalists, analysts and opinion formers are interested in.

That’s simple enough.  But how do you fill in the blanks? Let’s look at Rick’s case.

• The agency in question wants to better understand his interests (good)
• They have sent him four e-mails in six months requesting the information (bad)
• They didn’t acknowledge that he once replied (albeit with a URL of a Google search for him) (bad)
• They state that he “landed in their database” (bad)
• They offer a link to their clients for him to view their market areas (neutral)

The lesson here is that people have less time. As a result anything that isn’t directly related to work is potential waste, this is particularly true for the media. If you want to know more about a journalist for example, use Google, use an online media database and read what they’ve written. That should make it very clear what they need or want.

If none of those techniques work, then it may be worth a quick call.  What you need to avoid is becoming a pest. I think it’s acceptable, if you’ve exhausted other methods, to contact a journalist to find out their interests, but don’t keep doing it a-la Plaxo. If you want to meet a journalist then contact them and say so.

You see, people expect you to be able to use the technology at your fingertips to remove the need for troublesome contact.  Save your media liaison for your clients or serious relationship building. Automated database requests aren’t productive.

Now before anyone gives me grief, I know some journalists welcome an opportunity to meet with PR people for relationship building etc. but there’s a lot of us and we need to make sure we maximize the benefits of our activity.