By Francis Moran
My colleague Danny Sullivan made the strong case earlier this week in favour of negotiating embargos with trusted journalists that gives them advance access to your announcement and executives so they can do a better job with the story. In return, they promise not to publish or broadcast anything until an agreed upon time and date, usually the point at which you release the news to the rest of the world. The benefit to the company making the announcement is that the journalist has more time and flexibility to deal with the story and, guess what, so does the company. It’s a tidy win-win situation, and something we do whenever practical.
Something Danny didn’t get into, though, is the frequent situation where clients confuse embargos and exclusives, an understandable mixup given that both usually entail giving select journalists advance access to the story. But whereas embargos still treat all media outlets equally in terms of when they can run with the story, an exclusive entails favouring one, or a small handful of, outlets, giving them advance and exclusive access to the story and permission to run with it prior your making a more general announcement.
Journalists love exclusives. Some clients swear by them. We point blank refuse to do them, and here’s why.
In my 30 grizzled years as a reporter, editor and communications practitioner, I have yet to see a single case where, outside the confused and muddy world of political reporting, an exclusive has ever been in the client’s favour. As a reporter, I might have enthusiastically embraced the proffered exclusive, assuring my source that giving me advance access would secure better treatment for the story. The reality was and is that the lineup in any publication generally is beyond the reporter’s influence, often beyond even the editor’s influence. It is, rather, determined almost entirely by what else needs to get into that issue, and space and placement are rigorously assigned according to news value.
Okay, that’s a little black and white, but, in the main, it applies.
As a tech PR practitioner interested in the long-term opportunity to tell my clients’ stories through the media outlets that genuinely influence their markets, I traffic in exclusives at my peril and at the peril of my clients. The outlets I favour with the exclusive simply are not going to give me significantly better treatment while those that I shut out are going to nurse a grievance against me and my client as only the competition-fuelled egos that populate an average newsroom are capable of nursing. It ain’t pretty.
Let me give you an example.
In the more-than-nine-year history of inmedia, there has been only a single client ever that took its business away from us and gave it to another agency, and it was entirely over our refusal to acquiesce to the marketing vice president’s insistence that we play favourites with a piece of news by giving an exclusive to certain media outlets. It was in the hothouse environment just prior the telecom meltdown in the U.S. and a fiercely competitive set of trade and business media was scavenging for any and every scrap of news emanating from the rash of optical systems startups that, like our client, were working on the brave new frontier of optical communications. The announcement was minor, and we simply saw no value in pissing off most of our valued contacts in favour of getting maybe an extra column inch or two of coverage in two or three of them. In fact, we saw it as running sharply counter to our client’s long-term interests, and told him so.
He disagreed, fired us and brought in a replacement agency that carried out his wishes. The wholly predictable result was that the news received the scant line or two it deserved in the publications that were favoured with the exclusive, and I spent the morning fielding angry calls from trusted editors and reporters all across North America and Europe who were understandably peeved at having been shut out.
Bottom line: Exclusives are a betrayal of the mutual trust that needs to be nurtured between PR practitioners and their media targets, they sour relationships that take a long time to cultivate and may never be repaired, and they contribute little or no added value. Don’t fall prey to their seductive but empty charm.
By Linda Forrest
Further to my post from a few weeks ago asking if journalist burnout was the reason for the escalation of the hacks vs. flacks war, I’ve done a little bit more digging in order to hopefully gain some insight into what job satisfaction ratings are like in the PR industry. Interestingly, the most recent figures that I could find point to very high job satisfaction amongst PR professionals, certainly higher than those indicated by journalists in the prior study. The International Association of Business Communicators, an association for public relations professionals, conducted a survey in 2006 and published the results last year. According to Communication World, the 2007 Profile salary survey was sent to 724 accredited members of the IABC, 125 of whom responded. Though a smaller sample size than the next most recent survey, conducted in 2002, the results from this study reflect an upward trend in both salaries and job satisfaction. In addition to the salary data gathered, respondents indicated the following:
Respondents to the pulse survey somewhat or strongly agreed with the following statements:
-If I had to do it all over again, I would choose a career in corporate communication (84.8%).
-Corporate communication is more respected by the media now than it was five years ago (63.2%).
-My salary compensates for the number of hours I am compelled to work (70.4%).
-I am satisfied with the opportunities for career advancement at my current company or organization (60.8%).
This analysis, coupled with the salary data collected, would seem to indicate that the PR industry is generally contented and well compensated. Perhaps my assumption that PR flacks can claim some of the same complaints as journalists is just attributed to the grumpy (and most vocal) contingents of both industries, those hoping that indeed the “squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Then again, a small survey is not necessarily representative of the entire industry, but still, it does give us some valuable, if limited, insight into the current state of the PR nation.
Since that original post, we’ve also received word from Simon Owens pointing us to his blog where he’s dug a little deeper into the original study that I referenced and interviewed the researcher who authored the original study on journalist burnout.
By Danny Sullivan
When a technology company approaches the date of a significant news announcement, the possibility of offering the story to media under embargo is often raised. For those unfamiliar with the term, it simply means giving selected media advance access to the news that you will be distributing, usually on the understanding that they do not publish anything until after your news has been issued. Although some publications have a policy not to accept material under embargo, the majority of news-oriented media tend to like them a lot and for good reason. Most editors and reporters that have to deal with breaking news are swamped every day with a deluge of potential stories, all of which demand on-the-day coverage. By receiving information on a news story in advance, they are able to conduct interviews at a time that is convenient for them and produce their article over the course of a few days, rather than in the fraught few hours available on release day.
But it should be noted that using embargos is not a valid strategy unless you are already convinced that your story is going to be regarded as worthy breaking news on the day. Embargoing a story that would normally be rejected on launch day for having little news value does not suddenly give it the prospect of receiving blanket coverage. Indeed, it will probably be rejected even quicker if you try and do so.
Similarly, make sure you are targeting the right people with an offer of embargoed news. You’ll be wasting your time speaking to an editor about a week-long embargo if he or she doesn’t go to print for another month! Embargos have to provide some advantage to the media before they’ll be interested.
There is often a fear among tech companies that the media may break an embargoed story before the agreed date of release. Most media are very accustomed to working with embargos but, at the end of the day, it is only a verbal agreement that can easily be broken, intentionally or otherwise. While such an event is a potential risk, it is a very uncommon occurrence – the media know that their continued enjoyment of the benefits of embargoed news is predicated on such agreements being adhered to.
So please use embargos, but do so wisely, and the media will thank you for it.
By Francis Moran
What does an RFID infrastructure company from St. John’s, Newfoundland, have in common with the Livingston, Scotland, outfit that makes the world’s most advanced prosthetic hand? Well, besides being inmedia clients, Cathexis Innovations and Touch Bionics both find themselves this week at the same trade show, Arab Health 2008 at the Dubai International Exhibition Centre in United Arab Emirates.
Touch Bionics is there to exhibit its i-LIMB hand, the world’s first artificial hand featuring five individually articulating digits that has been been fitted to scores of patients worldwide since being launched this past summer. Cathexis, whose mobile RFID reader IDBlue is also a world first, is demonstrating its event-management application at the show, a massive undertaking billed as the largest science gathering in the Arab world.
I can’t help being tickled by what I’m going to do next — email Cathexis’s CEO Steve Taylor and Touch Bionics’ marketing director Phil Newman and suggest they look each other up. At the risk of sounding — hell, let me be honest, at the risk of being — a bit self-promotional, it’s a lovely example of both the broad range of technologies represented in our client portfolio and the truly global scale on which these companies operate. I only wish I could be in Dubai to personally introduce these two chaps to each other.
By Linda Forrest
Many moons ago, I had the great pleasure of taking a communications course with Dr. Eric McLuhan, son of world famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan. A well-respected author and professor in his own right, Dr. McLuhan’s course was designed in order to provide the students, who were studying a range of topics in business management, with a solid language base upon which to establish themselves as competent writers and communicators.
Through course material, we were taught the wonders of styling sentences and how to properly use punctuation. These sound like fundamentals and they are, but the amount of proper grammatical and punctuation training included in a typical primary and even secondary school curriculum is positively lacking. This post-secondary course had us circling grammatical errors, doing word puzzles, correcting punctuation, and learning the true value of a semi-colon among other activities in the name of strengthening our communications abilities. As a result, I feel that each student in that class ended up a better writer and although I’m not certain of the whereabouts of the majority of my classmates, I’m confident that they’re better communicators today because of it.
Having always had a love of language and reading, I consider myself quite the philomath and get positively giddy at the prospect of learning a new word (being in technology PR, this opportunity presents itself quite often, as you can imagine.) Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day email has been coming into my inbox for years now. Having had no idea that I would end up in public relations as my career, my strong feeling is that no matter where I ended up career-wise, I would have been well served by my love of knowledge and language, in part fostered by the course taught by Dr. McLuhan.
Writing is predominantly what we do here at inmedia. Although we may not subscribe fully to the idea that the medium is the message, I feel lucky to have been educated in part by Dr. McLuhan and to this day still make use of some of the reference materials provided in that class. Everyone, even professional writers need to “sharpen their saw” on a consistent basis and I’m glad to have these tools at my disposal. So, thank you, Dr. McLuhan.
