By Danny Sullivan
Any person working in technology PR has probably had to deal with a fair amount of rejection in their time. And no, I’m not trying to make some kind of controversial statement about the psychological make-up of the average tech PR practitioner (although wouldn’t that be interesting?).
I’m simply talking about news release rejection syndrome. It might sound something like this…
“You’re calling from who? About what? No, I can’t do anything with that.”
Show me a PR professional who says they’ve never had an approximation of that conversation, and I’ll show you Pinocchio.
Unfortunately, responding to that conversation with a mumbled “Okay, goodbye,” is as far as a lot of PR practitioners are able to go. And there is a good reason for this – they are often under-equipped in their understanding of the story to go any further.
It doesn’t have to be like that. What at first sounds like the utter rejection of your breaking news story may yet hold the promise of good quality coverage, if you have the ability to go beyond the words written on the pages of that release.
A knowledgeable, well-briefed PR person should be able to move beyond that initial exchange to explore additional avenues and opportunities that may exist for coverage. Perhaps these will not fall in the short-term, but gaining an understanding of your long-term opportunities is a highly valuable exercise.
Understanding and being able to discuss the whole story and not just today’s news should be a requirement for anyone trying to pitch a technology or business desk. Sure, it’s not going to save you from the rejection of your news release, but it’s going to give you the best possible chance of succeeding over time.
By inmedia
Earlier this week, Brodeur announced new findings on how blogs are influencing traditional journalists. According to Jerry Johnson, head of strategic planning at Brodeur, “While only a small percentage of journalists feel that blogs are helpful in generating sources or exclusives, they do see blogs as particularly useful in helping them better understand the context of a story, a new story angle, or a new story idea. It appears that reporters are using blogs more for ethnographic research than they are for investigative research.”
Here are some highlights from the ongoing research project by Brodeur in conjunction with Marketwire:
- The majority of journalists said blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested – except news quality: The biggest impact of blogs is in the speed and availability of news. Over half also said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.
- Blogs are a regular source for journalists: Over three-quarters of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue.
- Nearly 70% of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis: Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs. Nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week.
- Journalists are increasingly active participants in the blogosphere: One in four reporters (27.7%) have their own blogs and nearly one in five (16.3%) have their own social networking page.
- About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” – reading blogs but rarely commenting.
By Francis Moran
My colleague, Linda, wrote a post yesterday about the reality that virtually every market niche imaginable has a media channel that reaches it. She managed, but only with great difficulty, to avoid referencing one of our favourite expressions here at inmedia. I am not as disciplined, so let me explain what the title of this post means.
When you have two professional marketers in the family, some casual conversations can take a peculiar bent. Such was the case when my wife, a seasoned marketing communications strategist, and I were driving along a city street here in Ottawa a while ago. Up ahead, I spotted a car, with a canine passenger whose head was sticking out the window, as dogs love to do. Being a dog owner myself who often indulged my pooch’s enjoyment of high-speed scent sniffing, I said, “Hey, there’s a dog lover.”
We got a little closer and saw a flag on the car bumper featuring the French tricolour but with a yellow star in the upper left corner. I’m a bit of a flag nut and a Maritime Canadian, so I was easily able to identify it as the flag of the Acadian nation, people of French descent who settled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick starting in the early 1600s. In 1755, refusing to surrender the neutrality they had been granted in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht that ceded their territory to Britain, more than three-quarters of the Acadians living in Nova Scotia were forcibly expelled from their land and deported, many to Louisiana where they became known as Cajuns, a term that is derived from Acadian. It was arguably an early example of what today is called ethnic cleansing. Still, the Acadian culture persists in many parts of Maritime Canada today.
“Oh, it’s an Acadian dog lover,” I said to my wife.
We got even closer, and saw there was a rainbow stripe above the license plate. “Oh, it’s a gay Acadian dog lover,” I said.
“Now that’s a market niche,” my wife quipped. “Yup,” I agreed, “And I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a Gay Acadian Dog Lovers Monthly that reaches that niche!”
There isn’t, of course, but you know what I mean. We now consistently use this story to illustrate that segmentation can be endless, that clear market niches can be identified, and that, the non-existence of Gay Acadian Dog Lovers Monthly notwithstanding, there almost always is a media channel or channels that reach any niche you can identify.
By Linda Forrest
At inmedia, we work within a pretty specific niche – we do media and analyst relations for business-to-business technology companies. Period. This does cover a wide spectrum of technologies working in a variety of sectors, but most of our clients have a very well defined business and tend to be focused propositions targeting a very particular customer, be it a voice application developer or a purchaser of x-ray sensor equipment for the veterinary market.
The challenge? How do we reach these niche audiences and get through to the tastemakers and influencers that help our clients’ customers make purchasing decisions?
The good news is that there is a media channel for everyone and everything. If you can imagine it as subject matter, it is almost guaranteed that there is a trade publication, web site, blog, newsletter, magazine, television show, radio show or other media channel that covers the topic, if not exclusively, then at the very least, on a sporadic basis. It has been our experience that more often than not, there is at least one media channel devoted to whatever specialized audience you must reach in order to sell your product or service.
Just as companies develop products for a known customer-base, so too do media develop channels for particular audiences. It’s safe to assume that if there’s a market for your product or service (and you had better hope that there is), there is a media channel that speaks directly to that market. Using our range of monitoring tools and directories, we ensure that we’re targeting those media outlets that truly have the potential to move your market, no matter how focused your offering is.
When it comes to speaking to your media marketplace, it’s quality, not quantity that matters. The readership of a niche publication may be only 3,000 people, but if those 3,000 readers are purchasing decision-makers in your market, then this is likely to be a very high-value media target for you. Do more people read the New York Times? Absolutely, but it’s unlikely that coverage in that publication will influence the purchasing decisions of your niche audience as much as these more focused publications are likely to.
By Francis Moran
Francis’s favourite fictions is a continuing series of posts on common myths surrounding the practice of public relations. When I give this as a presentation, I subtitle it, “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives.” Today’s fiction comes courtesy of a chief financial officer at such a venture who nixed her marketing vice president’s intention to hire us, saying, “I can’t measure marketing so I won’t fund it.”
Too bad; the company she used to work for is now out of business, taking a genuinely valuable technology advance and more than $30-million in investors’ money with it. Maybe now, she at least has a yardstick with which to measure the cost of not marketing.
It is an enduring myth, though, that marketing in general, and maybe public relations in particular, evades measurement, that there’s no way to calculate the return on investment for such an inexact science. As with many of my other favourite fictions, it is a myth perpetuated in large part because it serves many in the PR industry itself to do so. Theirs is a black box science, they tell gullible clients, dependant on things like “relationships,” and intended to “build buzz” and a bunch of other ambiguous terms deliberately employed expressly because they do evade objective definition.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
I can’t imagine that any client today will sign on to a program that doesn’t at least define a scope of work in clear and unambiguous terms. In other words, a critical path of activities that at least tells the client how much PR stuff they’re buying, how many news releases, analyst briefings, story pitches, trade shows supported, that sort of thing. We call that measuring outputs, and it’s as far as many agencies are prepared to go. We think it’s a good, but woefully inadequate, starting point.
Any agency worth its retainer should be willing to describe the results its efforts will produce in similarly unambiguous terms. If you invest in our exerting this much effort, dear client, you will see this much media and analyst coverage over the term of the program. We call this measuring outcomes, and we define it very clearly in terms of specific objectives for the program. We tell you which media outlets and analyst firms we’re targeting. This is not unusual. What is unusual is that we will then tell you exactly in what percentage of them we expect to generate coverage over the term of the program, what type of coverage that will be, and what sorts of stories, key messages and so on that coverage will contain. We break down our objectives by category of activity, setting success objectives for individual news releases, product launches, analyst tours, trade show briefings, speaking programs, and so on.
We like this approach because we’re not asking our clients to buy a bunch of PR stuff from us. Rather, we’re asking them to invest in a given level of effort, the outcome of which we have clearly defined. Now they only need to ask themselves whether those results are a good return on the investment we’re asking them to make. At the end of the program, our clients don’t need us to tell them whether we have achieved the objectives or not. They can tell, without a trace of uncertainty or ambiguity, for themselves.
If your agency or internal PR department won’t commit to setting those kinds of objectives, it’s time to find a new one.
But, as they say on the late-night infomercials, don’t call yet, there’s more.
Even if we achieve the outcomes we projected, is it worth anything if that media and analyst coverage hasn’t advanced our clients’ business objectives? Here’s where the wheat really gets separated from the chaff. I’ll write more about this in a future post.
