By Linda Forrest
“You’re doing it wrong” can be an irritated admonishment of your practices or a helpful push in the direction of improvement. It’s all a matter of how you see the world, whether you’re a glass half full or a glass half empty kind of person.
In the longstanding symbiotic relationship between PR professionals and reporters, there have been tomes written on how one side thinks the other side is failing and flailing.
Inspired by National Post tech reporter Matt Hartley‘s thoughtful blog post on why we hate your press release, this round-up shares the words of a few technology reporters as they point out the areas for improvement in the modern PR professional’s approaches.
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By Linda Forrest
In honour of Halloween, this post is a round-up of the frightful ways that PR can scare away prospects and editors and how bad PR haunts those who neglect to adhere to best practices. Boo!
Frightfully bad PR practices
Last month, I wrote a whole post about bad publicity, but it’s worth scaring you silly again with the key points. At this very moment, there are PR practitioners who can’t write, can’t pitch, who are selling short your opportunity to tell your story, offering all strategy with no implementation or implementing a spray-and-pray program without any strategy to back it up. Frightening, isn’t it?
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By Linda Forrest
Earlier this week, TechCrunch readers were given a rare treat – the chance to engage in a public forum with a technology icon: Sean Parker. One of the founders of Napster, founder at Plaxo, a former advisor to and the first president of Facebook (who bears little physical resemblance to Justin Timberlake who played an, according to Parker, historically-inaccurate, party animal version of him in last year’s Oscar-nominated film, The Social Network), and now director at Spotify. In short, Sean Parker has been an architect of many of the “large-scale societal shifts” of the last 15 years.
So, it was with great interest that I clicked on (and subsequently retweeted) the following Tweet:
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By Linda Forrest
Back when I was doing publicity in the music industry, working largely for independent artists, I’d often discuss with my colleagues what it would be like to be the publicist for a major, in-demand, household-name artist, how different the job would be. Rather than spending the majority of my time on outreach, I rather imagined that the role would be relegated largely to that of gatekeeper, traffic cop and reputation manager.
When it comes to media relations for technology companies, the same discrepancies apply – there are some distinct differences between doing media relations for a small- to medium-sized business and doing the same for a multinational conglomerate. But there are some best practices that hold true regardless of whether the company you’re promoting with its media marketplace consists of two employees or two thousand.
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By Linda Forrest
If real estate is summed up by the expression, “There are three things that matter in property: location, location, location,” PR could easily misappropriate a slight variation of that: “there are three things that matter in public relations: timing, timing, timing.”
This post is just a sampling of the many ways that timing matters in PR.
To every news release, there is a season.
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