Paul Stallard is a PR professional at Berkeley PR, a technology PR agency based in Reading, where he also contributes to its technology PR blog. Please note that this blog is written in a personal capacity and does not necessarily reflect the views of Berkeley PR….although they all read it.
Following a post the other day about a new tool I found online which offered junior or budding PR professionals the chance to have their media pitches reviewed I set one of my team about trying it out. I felt it was a cool concept but didn’t want to just write about it without trailing it. I had initially said that I would show the results on the Berkeley PR blog but decided in the end to not bother.
Why? Well to put it simply it does exactly what it says on the tin…sucks.
After preparing a pitch, my colleague emailed it to them and waited for his feedback. This arrived in the form of an email saying, thanks for the pitch but we no longer offer this service….but we can review it for a fee.
Cool concept but unfortunately not quite the response I was expecting. So if you are a student or someone thinking about how to pitch the media I wouldn’t bother with this site and would instead recommend that you read some of my meet the media interviews. The personal touch always goes a lot further and if have listened to a journalist and know what they are looking for writing a pitch is always that bit easier.
I often talk to my clients about how the letters page represents a great opportunity to get some coverage in a target magazine or newspaper. This is often one of the best read pages and provides a great platform to respond to an article which you saw the previous day, week or months.
That said, I suddenly realised that I very rarely actually practice what I preach for myself so decided to pen a letter to Marketing magazine after reading an article on brands using Twitter while sat on the train the other day and the evidence can be seen in this week’s issue. It was certainly an ego boost (sorry wife the head is getting bigger) and a nice way to start the day this morning.
After a few days away in Cornwall visiting my brother I was checking my emails this afternoon. This blog has managed to get my email address on some press release distribution lists and I routinely receive announcements.
One that caught my attention was a press release announcing that The Co-operative Bank has decided to thank its customers for the recent Which? Award for being Best Financial Services Provider by singing them a ‘thank you’ song. At the end of the release it explains that the viral is available on You Tube and it’s own blog.
Firstly. This is a blog about PR so I’m not really sure why I received this release and secondly the “viral” is dreadful. It also got me thinking about what makes a good viral video?
Visitors to this blog will also know that I love well executed viral videos. Recently Evian’s “Roller Babies” commercial yielded millions of hits in less than a month in line with its Live Young campaign. This is a great example of a campaign which has been executed in line with proper planning, marketing and development to create a viral sensation.
My colleague Jo Jamieson also pointed out a viral video the other week which is proof that they can have a devastating affect to a brand. Dave Carroll had his guitar broken by United Airlines and wrote a song which he performed on a video. Apparently within four days he had over a million views on You Tube and many thousands of blog mentions.
These two are good examples of what makes a viral video and the different effects they can have on a brand. How do you make a good viral video? Ben Terrett has written a great post about what makes a good viral and is worth checking out. Please note that it is quite old but still relevant today.
Personally, the thing which made the Co-operative Bank’s effort so bad was the fact that just because they had created a video they presumed it would be viral. I understand it was just a bit of fun but when a press release was distributed promoting the viral it also opened itself up for ridicule.
I have a simple question for you. If you had to choose which communication device you had to lose between the phone or email what would it be? When I was discussing such a scenario with one of my colleagues I was surprised to see that we both had different answers.
Previously, to me this was a no brainer, because I have always believed that communicating by telephone is by far and away my preferred form of communication. It allows you to build relationships with people, loses the chance of being misunderstood and is obviously conducted in real time whereas email can be fired off and forgotten. At this point I decided to ask a few followers on Twitter who work in the PR industry in the UK “Phone or email. If you had to lose one what would it be?” and was shocked to see how diverse the answers were. Was I wrong to be so pig headed with my response?
Comments like this from my good friend Josie at Phiness PR made me start to think about how this wasn’t as simple an answer as I had first thought “I’d lose the phone. Email provides a written record, so you can always track back through your conversations.” Helen Farrier at Samsung also provided another angle “I’d have to say I could live without my phone for work, email is vital for a global company.”
She wasn’t alone. Eventually I received a few more answers and before I knew it I had 100 responses. Over one third (35) of the PR professionals who replied to the poll said that they would rather lose their phone than email – a lot higher than I thought it would be.
On the anti-email side, one PRO (they asked not to be named) explained “I’d lose email – an evil tool geared towards structuring work so that it’s reactive rather than proactive. Can you arrange it?” Ste Davies continued “I’d lose email purely because I’m not too keen on it as a means of communication. Wastes a lot of time” and Mat Morrison explained his answer “email would go. Am assuming that I can keep Twitter, SMS, Facebook, LinkedIn, IM?”
My colleague Emma Sinclair also made a great point also, “This is really difficult – email is vital for sending documents and confirming details, but I really couldn’t replace the phone in terms of relationship building and honing the art of persuasion, so could I say ‘phone’ but I’ll keep a mobile in my pocket and use it when no one is looking… “
I particularly liked this answer. The art of persuasion or the ability to explain why a story is interesting / why a client should embark on a particular campaign is something that is difficult to do over email as at every stage people inevitably have questions and you are relying on them to have time to write them down articulately and send them over.
Anyway, without meaning to I may have caused a little ripple of debate between PROs around the country, but one thing is for sure, I was amazed by the generosity of the PR professionals who answered so fast and with such enthusiasm. A special thanks goes to @lauraslade who went around her entire team and recruited answers from them all to email back to me.
Following on from my last post Nick Booth has stepped up again with a classic Response Source. As a number of PRs on Twitter have said this afternoon….Nick Booth you are King of Response Source! Below is his latest effort in full. Very funny…oh and if you can help Nick drop him a line, I’m sure he would be happy to hear from you.
Two years ago, Ann Robinson turned up to an awards do with a permanently surprised expression, as if someone had goosed her in a wind tunnel. All the newspapers turned downy my story idea – Ann Robinson’s had a facelift – but three days later, they all ran a piece about her announcement. The BBC has a story today about Spinvox, that I was pitching two years ago! Damn! So: I’m warning you there’s no guarantee this feature I’m proposing will definitely run. But here goes: Are ‘green’ products a total con? Can we bench test them? Which work and which don’t?
Here’s money I’ve personally wasted on ’saving the planet’.
Solar car battery charger (£20)
Solar mobile phone charger (freebie, worth 49 quid)
Wind up radio
Solar radio
Wind up phone charger
All useless. None of them could generate enough power to torture a midge. Not to mention the wormery (it just filled up with old food) and a compost heap that attracted mice. Has anyone else invested in a green/wind/solar product that was a dud? How much did you spend? How useless was it? Do any solar products actually work? Anyone got a wind turbine that actually generates power? Can anyone give me a demo of a product that works?
I will happily wire my goolies to a wind turbine, confident that it won’t deliver a fatal electric shock – if anyone wants to arrange that. (It could be a good photo op) (Press release: South American fascist torturers are lowering their carbon footprint, with wind turbine driven electric shock torture racks….) I’m hoping to benchmark the reliability, or otherwise, of green products, and sell the story.
But don’t ask me when the deadline is. I don’t know yet.
This is an interesting question. I have lost count of the amount of times I have said in a new business pitch or spoken to a client about how surveys are a great way to get into the media. But why are they? The main reason is because journalists love stats. Stats bring a story to life, they can add the essential elements of a story – bad news, human interest and relevancy.
That said, surveys can be expensive and time consuming, so if you are going to encourage a client to part with some of their marketing budget for a survey you need to be certain it will generate the required results. This can be easier said than done.
I believe the secret to a successful survey is to know what headlines you want to achieve at the very start. Below are my 10 tips to help with the successful production of a survey. Read the rest of this entry »
This time next week I should be in Barcelona for the latest instalment of Mobile World Congress, or as I and many people will always know it – 3GSM. The event is a major date in the telecommunications diary and for a number of exhibitors a central focus for their PR campaigns.
Exhibitions are an opportunity to for clients to meet current and potential customers, journalists and analysts together in one place. It is also easy to be one of the many exhibitors overlooked. This can be because of announcements made by major players or simply because you haven’t planned your PR strategy around the event very well.
If you are making a sizable investment in attending an event and have a date in the diary it is essential that you build it into your PR campaign.
I believe that the most important time for PR surrounding an exhibition is in the activity before hand rather than what actually takes place at the event. Below are five points which will help you get the most out of your investment in PR around exhibitions: Read the rest of this entry »
Webitpr the online news and press release distribution service, which offers a variety of distribution, monitoring & reporting options has re-launched as realwire. To co-incide with this it has produced a video looking at the online media and how it works. Worth a look, as it has put together a video which quite clearly shows how a story can be found online.
It’s rare today for decisions to be reached without reference to the Internet. Whether browsing websites or search engines, visiting blogs or social media sites, we are constantly forming opinions based on the information we find.
I am sure this isn’t the first time it has been used in this way but it was the first time it caught my attention. A Response Source came in this afternoon from Cliff Saran at Computer Weekly which unlike most, wasn’t asking for information, an interview or dare I say it, something free to take on holiday. Instead Cliff had already written his piece and was actually using Response Source to request comments on his blog.
A novel approach and I might click through in a couple of days to see if he had much success. In an age when most online publications are looking to drive people to their online stories I wonder if this approach will generate a greater communication with vendors and end users?
For those of you interested Cliff was asking what people thought was the greatest IT innovation – he chose the mouse.
As more and more apps come out to help your prioritise, filter and get the most out of Twitter it is fast becoming invaluable to all in our office. One of my favourite is Twilert which has just launched and works on the same premises as Google alerts. You simply register and enter your keywords and the following day your email alerts start arriving showing who and what is being said about your specified keywords.
This is particularly interesting for those of us in the PR world who want to monitor the buzz about our clients. For example if you saw one of your clients products was being bad mouthed on Twitter, how cool would it be to be able respond to said person online and resolve it. I am sure they would be impressed that the client is tracking discussions and would be left with a good feeling towards the brand (if it is resolved).
The one thing about the app which did grab my attention was the proof that anything you put on the internet is there forever and can be read by anyone. I had set up an alert for one of my clients and saw an entry from my goodself come up after their yearly bash which I had posted a good few months back. Just because it is out of sight doesn’t mean it is gone forever. Something I would like is the ability to see the date / time beside the entry without having to actually click through, but you can’t have everything.
Aside from that, I have to say I like it and strongly recommend that if you are interested in knowing what is being discussed about you, your client or your competitors on Twitter start using Twilert.
