By Linda Forrest
It’s clear that we’re bad summertime bloggers. Sorry about that.
Occasionally there have been topics that have crossed my path in the last month and a bit that I thought could be ruminated on in a blog post, but when the spirit struck, it was usually when I was unplugged completely for a week-plus (No phone, no internet, no email, no television … heavenly!) or too swamped with client commitments to dedicate the time required to write it up. As I recently Tweeted, I haven’t blogged in so long that I suffered a brief case of performance anxiety about picking up the virtual pen once again.
I’m over it now.
I’ve been doing significant outreach in the UK for one of our clients and I’m noticing that journalists over there are far more eager to have a phone conversation with me than many of their North American counterparts. At outlets big and small, I’ve been greeted with enthusiasm, courtesy and appreciation for the information I’m providing, rather than being avoiding altogether, relegated to voicemail hell or, at worst, berated or abused because I deigned to call. All this latter negative experience has been all-too-common with some North American journalists I’ve dealt with in my decade plus as a PR practitioner. This has been a lovely experience and has resulted in some tangible and impactful coverage for my client.
Many of these same editors and reporters weren’t at all responsive to my emails, a distinct change from my experience in North America where calls and voicemails predominantly go unanswered and unresponded to, but emails fare far better. It was refreshing to have so many productive phone calls that resulted in good things for my clients.
I’d posit that the phone calls themselves went so well because we pride ourselves on building out a media list of pertinent, relevant and interested media targets so that we know all of the angles and all of the data points that are likely to result in coverage of our client. Or perhaps I just seemed exotic with my North American accent and that’s why they were so nice to me, eh?
Having had such a good string of calls, I was particularly interested about the articles I read this week about the death of the phone call. At least that’s the snazzy spin that’s put on the article, but the content rather suggests a more integrated communications approach – using the multiple channels available to us to best communicate with one another. The latter resonates strongly with my daily experience, while the former is hyperbolic and not at all what’s truly going on.
In my recent UK experience, I had indeed sent emails to the folks I later spoke with on the phone. For some, they’d read my email and highlighted as something to follow up at some nebulous point in the future, while others fully admitted that they hadn’t read it. That they had it in their mail and could call it up as we were speaking was very useful as they were provided with more information than I could succinctly deliver on the phone.
The rumours of the telephone call’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Telephone calls still play an important role in the PR practitioner’s day-to-day practice; I will agree that their ranking in the grand scheme of all of the tools available may have slipped, but make no mistake – there’s nothing quite like speaking to someone to get your point across. Whether it’s through Skype or an old rotary dial or anything in between, don’t count the phone call out just yet.
As an aside, there’s an interesting corollary to this phenomenon in the world of popular music. When I was growing up, there were scads of popular songs that highlighted the importance of the phone call – from Blondie’s “Call Me”, Phil Collins’ “Don’t Lose My Number”, and Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309.” The only popular song of late that references the telephone (at least the only one that’s coming to mind at the moment) is Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” with the repeated chorus of “stop calling, stop calling, I don’t want to talk anymore.” Pop music’s just reflecting our shared experience and indicating that the honeymoon’s over when it comes to our love affair with the telephone.
By Linda Forrest
Many moons ago, we wrote a post that gave a general overview of how awards fit into an integrated PR program. All of this information still rings true. Awards can be a worthwhile part of your communications program, but make sure that the ROI is worth it if it’s something you have to pay steep fees to enter. The best kind of award is the one where entry isn’t even necessary, where you’re singled out by experts in your field for being the best at what you do. You can’t buy that kind of third-party validation from reputable sources and it may cause prospects and competitors to both sit up and take notice of you.
Since many of our clients have had the good fortune lately of winning some prestigious awards and being singled out as some of the best at what they do, and since I’m working on a report for a new client that maps out appropriate awards opportunities for the year ahead, safe to say that I’ve got awards on the brain.
I’d like to publicly congratulate several of our clients for recent distinctions bestowed upon them:
UNIT4 Business Software, a top-six provider of ERP software worldwide, was named Employer of the Year at last week’s VIATeC Awards, which honour Vancouver Island technology companies. We like working for them; they must also be a pretty good place at which to work.
PerspecSys, whose hybrid cloud platform that mitigates the data privacy, residency and security concerns inherent to using SaaS applications in the public cloud, was both feted as one of Gartner Group’s “Cool Vendor in Cloud Security Services 2010” and named as finalist in the Global Cloud Security Challenge 2010. We’ll be telling the world a lot more about PerspecSys starting tomorrow.
Touch Bionics, the company behind cutting edge bionic technology like the i-LIMB Hand and ProDigits, was recently awarded the Queen’s Award for innovation, the most prestigious award in the UK for business performance. It’s another nice nod for a client that, it is safe to say, is the most decorated of any we’ve ever worked with.
Keep up the great work!
By Linda Forrest
In this round-up, I’d like to highlight where to find examples of good PR campaigns, as well as cautionary tales on what not to do.
The Good
Bulldog Reporter has a feature called Winning PR Campaigns that highlights recent successful campaigns.
PRWeek highlights successful campaigns every week, like this recent Seventh Generation feature (subscription required).
Sadly, it seems an attempt to launch a Good Pitch Blog was unsuccessful. The “cobbler’s kids who have no shoes” anecdote rings true – we’re too busy getting good publicity for our clients to promote the good work we’re doing, to highlight our own successes.
The Bad
As any savvy PR person knows, the BadPitchBlog is one place where you don’t want your work to show up. It’s entertaining, to be sure, but also terrifying that these practitioners are sullying our industry’s reputation in this fashion.
PRdisasters.com operates under a similar mandate.
Another PR firm has been collecting what it sees as the biggest 15 corporate PR mistakes of the last decade. There are some doozies.
And here’s some advice on what to do if a PR disaster strikes.
By Linda Forrest
I had a long and interesting chat with the publisher of a specialized trade publication this morning, the results of which turned my thoughts to the importance of getting a return on investment in PR. I mean this in two ways: first, getting the most value for your dollars spent with a PR practitioner or agency and second, getting the most eyeballs on your coverage.
With regards to the first, this was the particular scenario that I was discussing with the aforementioned publisher. Having pitched a series of contributed articles by email, I was calling to follow up and discuss the level of interest in my proposition. The publisher, a 30-plus-year veteran of the Canadian publishing world, talked about shrinking editorial space and how he’s unable to commit to publishing an article, however appropriate for his readership. With shrinking ad budgets, increasing competition from exclusively online publications and other factors, it’s not feasible for him to accept and commit, based on an abstract, to publishing something that would take up precious room on his pages. Rather, he’s suggested that we develop an article purely on spec, and that once submitted, he’ll review it and if he’s got the room and inclination, he’ll publish it.
This is an eminently reasonable proposition and he’s not alone in this position. However, look at it from my standpoint as a content developer for hire, and that of my client. It’s no easy feat writing a 1,000-plus-word article and the creation of said article would cost not inconsiderable time and money. Is this the best use of my limited time, given that each hour spent on the account has a dollar figure attached? Would my time be better spent creating content that I am certain will be published? This is calculus that has to be figured out on each and every opportunity that comes along: Is this the best use of my time and my client’s dollars?
Then there is the other half of the equation: the potential value of the coverage in terms of prospective customers, partners, channels and others who will see the article and pick up the phone. Trade publications can be highly focused propositions; they come as niche as you like. So, if you’re trying to reach a small specialized group and this opportunity, if it comes to fruition, will get your message out to them effectively, perhaps it’s worth your time and effort to develop a piece on spec.
Just a few weeks ago, another of my clients flat out turned down the opportunity to submit an article for an exclusively online publication. Having reviewed the circulation numbers for the print edition and the number of site visitors, it just didn’t make sense to them for me to spend my time writing an article that would be seen by limited readers, especially in an industry where hard copies get read far more frequently than virtual ones. For this client, it simply didn’t provide the return on investment that they were looking for, and that’s just fine. There are plenty of other opportunities to pursue on their behalf where the ROI is higher.
Each opportunity needs to be assessed and then harsh decisions made. There’s no right or wrong answer here; each circumstance requires each client and each PR practitioner to weigh the pros and cons of the situation and make an informed decision about how best to invest time and effort for the most return.
By Linda Forrest
I’ll admit it. I fell for a couple of doozies this morning when reading my morning email.
The first one really had me. I subscribe to HARO, Help a Reporter Out, which is a free service where PR professionals are sent pitching opportunities from reporters. I scan these email reports several times daily to see if there’s anything suitable for my clients. This one caught my eye and infuriated me no end:
Summary: Why don’t PR people listen?
Name: April Phules (Business Magazine)
Category: General
Email: query-7cc@helpareporter.com
Media Outlet: Business Magazine
Deadline: 07:00 PM EST – 1 April
Query: I’m doing a story about PR people, and why they have a much lower ability to listen or follow directions than regular people. Is this something they’re born with, or something they learn once getting into PR? All answers welcome.
Okay, so the reporter’s name should have tipped me off, but I haven’t had my coffee yet so I’m a little slow.
Still fuming from reading that outrageous query, I clicked over to another newsletter from parenting site Babble, which suggested 10 ways to raise a genius. Putting little stock in such things, but curious nonetheless, I clicked through. Needless to say by the time I got to #4 I knew that something was up.
PRNewser tipped its hat to some of the best corporate April Fool’s jokes here.
Happy April Fool’s Day!
