InsidEPR

The Differences in Working with Traditional Media and Bloggers

By Kristin Kiltz

We had the pleasure of having Jon Greer, past journalist, media-training specialist at MediaBridge, and avid blogger at BNET, come to Engage PR for a training session on “How to work with traditional media versus bloggers.” He had us go through an exercise of noting how we work with these two media and what drives them.

Here are some key things to note about traditional media:

• They have limited space to work with
• They have to follow a code of ethics. All data needs to be factually proofed
• It’s important that their stories are objective
• Their audience is well defined

Bloggers operate quite differently:

• They don’t want to be pitched; you must create a dialogue by commenting on their blogs
• There is an opportunity for multiple opinions to be heard
• While people like Tim O’Reilly try to urge bloggers to agree to a Blogging Code of Conduct, it’s not mandated; it’s up to each individual blogger to decide whether to follow the code
• Bloggers want “link love”–other bloggers linking back to their stories

So what do these things tell us? You can’t work with traditional media the same way you work with bloggers. If you do, you will not be successful in getting your message out. As we have always said in PR, know your audience, how they like to work, and what hot buttons to avoid. If you treat everyone the same, you can guarantee you will have no results to deliver to your clients.

Setting Expectations

By Gail Farrell

An article on BNET, “How to Stop the Revolving Door at PR Agencies” by Catching Flack’s Jon Greer, commenting on a survey about employee turnover by StevensGouldPincus, caught my eye recently.  SGP offered some suggestions on how to remedy the situation, and Greer added a few more of his own.  The suggestions are all good, but perhaps didn’t go far enough.  I was stopped in my tracks by Greer’s comment that low-paid staffers are expected to produce media miracles for clients—like get the front page of USA Today’s Life section.

This isn’t the kind of problem that can be solved by increasing lower-level salaries or doing more training.  This is a problem of setting appropriate client expectations.  No one in PR can ever guarantee a client that its story will lead a section, land on the cover, or be front-page news.  No one in PR controls the press. Editors make the final decision as to what to stories to cover (or not to cover) and where to place them, after reviewing the totality of the news and its relative importance to their audience. Yes, we try our best to get the very best coverage, but in the end it’s not our call.

I once worked at an agency whose president, I was told after I left the place in disgust, had promised a large construction company the front page of a national news magazine!  People like this do the PR business no favors.  But clients also may have outsized expectations for their PR programs.  The best PR agencies work with their clients to set realistic expectations about what PR can and can’t do.  A small client introducing a new niche product will not get the coverage of a large competitor introducing a category-breaking product.  But a PR agency can come up with an aggressive PR plan designed to put that small new client on the map.

And the best PR agencies don’t throw inexperienced, low-paid newbies to the wolves, expecting them to score big when they’ve never even spoken to a reporter before.  The best agencies make sure that the person pitching the story has the knowledge of the client, the training, the experience, and the relationships with the press that will help produce the best possible outcome—whether it’s the cover of Time or a positive story in Network World—even if they can’t guarantee that outcome.   

Congratulations Jeannette!

Engage PR named Jeannette Bitz a partner in the company today! You can view further details at the San Jose Mercury News. 

Not Such Great Moments in PR

By Jeannette Bitz

"Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it,”  George Santayana's The Life of Reason

Flash back to 1999-2000 during the height of the tech boom, when PR professionals believed their job was to blanket the media with their clients’ press releases (whether the reporters ever wrote about the client or industry didn’t matter). The PR person would follow up with a call to give the reporter “a heads-up on the release.” It was a very tactical and thoughtless approach. While it sometimes worked, more often than not it irritated reporters, who lashed back with a series of stories about bad PR flacks.

The recession hit in 2001 and weeded out most of the bad PR practitioners from the good. Those PR professionals that remained were humbled by the negative stories about the thoughtless PR flack.

As the economy improved, tech companies once more hired PR firms, which have had to quickly ramp up their staff to meet their clients’ needs. Well here we are again. PR people are taking the same conveyor-belt approach to getting their clients coverage, per Nicholas Carlson’s post on Valley Wag “Great Moments in PR.”  Or should we just see it as “Not a Great Moment in PR.”

Not only did the young PR professional make a terrible mistake, her response to Nicholas just added fuel to the fire. 

I’ve spent most of my tech PR career (first at Gallagher PR and now at Engage PR) working for start-ups that have a new technology or are trying to create a new market. While in general reporters are interested in learning about and covering tech start-ups, we also have to be disciplined in how we think about the client, its story, and our approach with the press. Working with these innovative companies means that we have to be educators and help tie what the client is doing to another familiar technology or trend. This type of thinking has helped in my approach to the media.

While clients hire us to get coverage and visibility, I’m pretty sure that no client would want the type of visibility that Samsung and Asolva received last week from this conveyor-belt pitch. As a PR veteran and senior member of Engage PR, I believe that it’s up to us PR veterans to ensure we’re not making the same mistakes that many did in the late 90s.

Here are some good guidelines that Engage PR follows and takes very seriously.

• Write every pitch fresh. Every company has their own unique value proposition. Every PR document should reflect that unique position.
• Realize that relationships with reporters/editors/bloggers go a long way. If you know the reporter you’re contacting, you’re more likely to understand her/his dislikes and likes.
• Read what reporters are writing and hear they are saying. I get a lot of valuable insight when reporters also blog because I get a sense of what they are passionate about.
• Stop the conveyor belt approach to pitching and to PR in general. Think about what the reporter is writing and if your client is really going to be relevant to his or her beat or interests.
• Be a resource. Look at other resources that will help the reporter do her/his job. It may be your client, but it may also be another company, your client’s customer, or an industry analyst.

These guidelines aren’t rocket science, but basic common sense that goes a long way.

Backward Logic?

By Molly Miller

I was stunned to read last week that telecommunications behemoth AT&T was rescinding teleworking for some employees, with estimates that as many as 12,000 remote workers would be required to now commute to a physical corporate office for the daily grind. 

What could possibly be the logic here? 

Not consistency with their corporate mission.  AT&T’s business is telecommunications, so cutting back on remote access is the wrong example for AT&T to show its corporate customers. 

Not cost savings or productivity.  “AT&T was able to slash its annual real estate costs by $30 million and gained $150 million in extra hours of productive work from teleworkers, the company told Network World in 2005.”

Not political correctness.  AT&T’s decision flies in the face of the global imperative to conserve energy and reduce greenhouse gases.

Not effective personnel management.  If the only way you can get people to be productive is stand over and watch them, those people are not right for the organization.

Definitely not good PR.  Disgruntled employees are already talking about the plans to the media, which is not the kind of publicity AT&T wants.  Some on the blogosphere suggest AT&T made the move to get folks to quit, rather than laying them off with severance pay.  If that’s the case, my guess is the negative publicity could cost the company more than any potential “savings” on severance benefits.