Murphy's Law

Here’s a nice example of a company providing its press releases and media information as an RSS Feed.  IDC, the industry research firm has its feed here.

 

Ryan May over at the Minnesota PR blog continues to produce some great PR related links.  He includes two stories on networking.

Given the current economic environment, good networking online and offline has never been as important.

The Star Tribune has a general networking story, while the Business Journal talks a number of individuals on how they are networking, including Paul Maccabee, a local PR pro.

That’s a postive headline by the way.

MediaMap does a good job marketing it’s services (primarily comprehensive media and analyst lists, forward features and some PR tools thrown in). They were the first media database to add bloggers, they provide good content through their ExpertPR newsletter and now are maintaining a blog.

John Pocaro is a marketing guy over at Microsoft who maintains an interesting marketing-related blog. 

He points to an essay by Dave Pollard on “The Blogging Process” which does a good job outlining the various elements of keeping a well written and researched blog updated and promoted.

OK, OK, so the first post of the day was little depressing.  So here’s a positive PR post to balance things out!

The Venture Blog, a blog about all things venture capital, has a well written post from Abigail Johnson of PR firm, Roeder-Johnson, on the importance of PR.

“Notice that this is NOT publicity or hype. Though some of the tools used to accomplish this strategic communications probably include working with the press and analysts, the goal of this kind of effort is a long-term market understanding of a company’s leadership.”

Phil Gomes over at the G2B Group has been one of the early advocates of distributing PR information over RSS. (For more information on RSS here’s a previous post)

Whilst I don’t believe e-mail is dead, certainly RSS feeds offers a useful alternative means of providing corporate and personal information. Journalists can subscribe to your RSS feed and as you push news out, they are automatically updated. This is a powerful means of diseminating information.

Phil has posted a great piece on why RSS is going to be increasingly important to PR professional. He includes a link to an article by Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News that was published in Computerworld:

“The best reason so far to adopt RSS in a big way is its effect on the technology that we all once loved but is now so polluted: e-mail. Sending marketing messages and newsletters via e-mail has become a fool’s errand; the obvious work-around is RSS. I’d much prefer to get public relations materials this way.”

When we undertake marketing or PR programs for a client or employer, one of the first steps is finding out how the organizations’ audiences percieve the client.

This takes many forms but one of the mainstays is the interview.  We talk with journalists, partners and customers to get a better view of the strengths and weaknesses of the organization.

So how is PR faring?

Last week I linked to an article by Loren Pomerantz that attempted to tackle the divide between PR and the media. The response (from the media) has been illuminating and depressing.

It’s best summed up by Mitch Wagner, who among other things works over at Internet Week.

Here’s how Mitch sees PR:

“Here’s what most of the PR people I deal with are like:

• They do not know much about technology.
• They don’t know much about the industry.
• They know hardly anything at all about my publication.
• Their main interest is not in having me write an article about their client. Their main interest is in having me INTERVIEW their client. I have been told that this is because (1) the interview makes more of an impression on the client than the actual article and (2) they can bill the client by the hour for sitting in on the interview.
• In general, most of them are 22-year-olds straight out of  college, with little experience in the technology industry.
• They behave very much like telemarketers. They have a script which they are not authorized to deviate from, or which they are unable to deviate from. And if I say I’m not interested in a story, they will ignore me and keep talking until I get them off the phone.

There are many exceptions to these rules, but these rules do apply to about 95 percent of the PR people who contact me.”

Wow. Now if you got this response from a survey of your clients, you would (rightly) believe that there was a lot of very hard work ahead.

It’s clear that we as a profession are failing on one of the most important aspects of our job.

It’s time to take control of your media relations.  It’s time to make sure that media facing staff, know their clients, know their media, know their publications and know the market.

Now, this all sounds very obvious.  But it’s clearly not being done.  I think this is a useful wake up call. Thanks are due to Mitch for his honesty.

Chris Pirillo, the mastermind behind Lockergnome kindly stopped by yesterday to comment that e-mail is dead.

In the Inc. feature on E-mail marketing he states: “E-mail is a polluted medium… it’s dead.”

Now while I completely agree there is no question that e-mail is polluted, I don’t agree it’s dead.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I’m a big fan of RSS, and while it does solve some of the problems, it’s not a replacement for e-mail, in my ever humble opinion.

Spam is a pain in the ass, as are adverts on television and radio. But that doesn’t change the fact that e-mail is still hugely productive (and I get over three or four hundred spams a day).

While TV may not provide a perfect analogy, it does illustrate the point that we rarely get anything for free. But we do learn how the minimize the disruption.

E-mail still has legs. The response rates we get from commercial and non-commercial e-mail marketing are still high.

I think E-mail is “just resting” albeit in a very congested state.

 Jim Horton points to a Cyberjounalist.net article on sixty ways to improvide your news site.

 Phil Gomes over at the G2Blog  links to a feature in Inc. on how marketers are trying to manage effecitive (legitimate) e-mail marketing amidst the volume and the spam filters.

 On a related topic ClickZ provides a checklist for a B2B E-mail-shot.

Loren Pomerantz, a partner at PR agency Combined Forces, is performing what can only be described as a public PR service.  She’s writing a column over at MediaBistro that addresses some of the myths that surround PR.

In her first column she raises an issue close to my heart, namely why in the majority of PR agencies is media relations merely a stepping stone to senior management?

“The way it works in most agency settings is that the more senior you get the less contact you have with reporters and editors. These higher-level people�the ones with the intelligence and experience�spend most of their time managing staff, clients, budgets, and strategies.”

Now before you start giving out, I know a lot of agencies don’t follow this practice, but in my experience it is the norm.  I myself remember gazing up the organizational structure and longing for when I wouldn’t have to “do” media relations.

Now that I’m older and more boring, I realize I was mistaken.  Good media relations skills are a blessing. It’s not something to be given up for spreadsheets and meetings.  The ability to work closely with journalists serves many purposes, but first and foremost it means you have a connection with the coalface.

Good media relations should be cherished by PR companies, not used as boot camp training. I know this first hand, I went away and came back.  And I found I missed it.