If you work with the media, you need to pay close attention to by-lines.
By-lines tell you who wrote the story you are reading. The Economist has a policy of no by-lines, but that's the exception to the rule and is supposed to reflect that every article in that magazine is the work of the entire masthead.
A PR professional has to make note of what kind of stories each reporter follows or produces. We approach the Sunday morning paper a little differently than the average reader.
While this practice seems so obvious to me, a number of times I've been in conversation with a journalist and brought up a story they wrote that I remembered and found interesting.
Their reaction is often surprise. They so rarely get direct feedback from their readers. Most feedback these days appears to be via online comments--and much of that is ranting, complaining or name-calling.
So the next time you read an article and appreciate the content, information, angle or the writing style, drop the author a note. Their emails are usually at the end of each story. He or she will surely appreciate the feedback, and it may lead to a relationship with that writer too.
A long-time client with business on both sides of Canada-U.S. border was telling me how much he enjoyed the Vancouver 2010 games. And then he threw down a great and fun challenge.
Dave is a proud American, but he found himself pulling for Canada during the Olympics while he was in Vancouver on business during the games.
He could not bring himself to audibly cheer for the Canadian athletes, however, and not for the reason you think! His problem? Canada's chant of 'Go Canada Go' was just too goofy.
My challenge, with your help, is to draft a new Team Canada chant that Americans can comfortably use. Let me know if you have a favorite or an alternate suggestion:
1. Apology Chant: This is a 'when in Rome' strategy and can be country-specific such as "Sorry Sweden! Sorry Sweden!" (Note: it's 'sore-ry,' not 'sahr-ry.') Or, it can be generic and fit all occasions: "Pardon us! Pardon us!"
2. Anthem Chant: "O Canada O!" While Canadians are famously polite, their national anthem carries a more-in-your-face message: Canada is "the true North strong and free." (The civility thing is just a facade. Don't believe me? Consider the brawling nature of Canada's national sport. This hommage to the anthem is all about the subtext.)
3. Obama Chant: "Yes we Canada!" About 45% of Americans will either love or hate this chant. The other 10% are undecided and could swing either way. 4. U-S-A Chant: "Ca-Na-Da!" (Chant and repeat).
5. Bilingual Chant: "Allez Canada! Go Canada!" or "Vive la Canada! Long live Canada!" If you're the guest of a Canadian government official, this is the recommended chant.
What a great excuse to write about my favorite grammar gaffes! This blog post is intended as a friendly refresher to all who email, text, type, blog, post or copywrite for a living. (However, like good table manners, good grammar is an asset no matter what you do for a living.)
1. It's or Its
This has to be the most common grammatical error. It's just too easy to slip up. The only solution is to carefully proof every its/it's in your writing and ask your colleagues to do the same when they proof it. (You do have a second set of eyes to review your writing, don't you?)
2. Commas
Here's the deal. When two independent clauses (i.e. clauses that stand on their own as sentences) are joined with a conjuction (and, but, so, etc.), a comma is required before the conjunction.
However, if you're connecting an independent clause and a phrase, no matter how sorely tempted you are, don't use a comma. E.g.:
(W)right On Communications is up for an InfluenceSD Agency of the Year award, and our team would be honored with your vote. (correct)
(W)right On Communications is up for an InfluenceSD Agency of the Year award, and would be honored with your vote. (incorrect)
3. Possessive or Plural?
The possessive s, like it's and its, is something to proof very closely. Most often, I find that the possessive is omitted. E.g.:
The cars horn blared. (incorrect) vs. The car's horn blared. (correct)
Neither fear nor forget the possessive plural. Approach it as a thing of beauty and a sign of your awesomeness every time you get it right: The cars' horns blared. (I'm awesome.)
4. Compliment vs. Complement
This is another common grammatical challenge, especially for people who write restaurant menu descriptions, apparently.
The cabernet reduction compliments the beef. (incorrect, unless the sauce can talk)
The cabernet reduction complements the beef. (correct)
The waiter compliments your good grammar. (correct)
Complement means to go well with something. E.g. Julie, blue complements yours eyes. If you were to say this to me, you would be paying me a compliment. (By the way, feel free.)
5. Creative Prose vs. Gobbledygook
Grammar is the difference between creativity and gobbledygook, in this blogger's humble opinion. Rules are meant to be broken, of course. But it's only creative genius if you're breaking the rules intentionally. Otherwise, it's wreaking havoc.
Trying to write creative, colorful copy without a basic understanding of the fundamental building blocks of the English language is like auditioning on American Idol when your only singing experience is in the shower or for your mom. You might think it sounds good...
Respect the rules, but experiment.
Two Questions for Others
Where do you stand on commas before "and" in a list? I had a client early in my career who insisted on using one, so I adopted that practice for her and hung on to it by habit. Since that time, I've had another client who prefers no comma before "and." I have two rules of thumb: 1) whatever you choose to do, be consistent, and b) if you're writing for a client and he or she has a strong preference, adopt it and be consistent.
I proofed this post as best as I could, but if I made any typos, misplaced commas, etc. please let me know so that I can improve. Thanks!!
Curiosity is a very useful, if not essential, character trait in great PR consultants. If you’re not naturally curious about a wide range of subjects, you’ll struggle to get up to speed on your clients’ businesses and industries. You’ll also be less likely to muster a contagious enthusiasm for the subject you’re communicating.
Curiosity is helpful if you’re an in-house practitioner, of course. But for agency consultants, natural curiosity has some other major career benefits. Let’s break them down:
1. Curious consultants dive into topics and, thus, acquire an impressive knowledge of their clients’ subjects. This makes them an invaluable media resource as well as a credible spokesperson, advisor and strategist.
2. The curious are driven to follow through. Once they sink their teeth into a story, they have to know how it ends. So, they follow up with clients, media, partners, vendors, colleagues and other stakeholders to see through the story or project.
3. When you’re naturally curious, your mind likes to turn over a topic and you’ll think about it in the car, shower or post office line up. And that process is often when the best ideas magically materialize.
4. Curiosity fuels an inquisitive nature too. Curious people ask questions. And asking good questions is critical to developing a good strategy. Good question often lead to tough questions, and a good practitioner must get the tough questions on the table with the client before the media or other stakeholders do.
5. Curiosity can also help build relationships with clients. What does it say to a client when a consultant thinks to ask “how is the Australia expansion going?” or “has your son picked a college yet?” It shows them that you care about their business or about them as people, and that’s invaluable to the relationship. It has an added benefit in that you might learn something about the client’s business that gives you a broader perspective. It helps position you as a collaborator and helps take you out of the box that clients can sometimes put their subject matter experts in. Lastly, it’s helpful to understand what’s happening in your client’s personal life so you can take that into consideration.
The benefits above are tough to achieve if you have to fake or force curiosity, but if you foster it and encourage it in yourself, you’ll be rewarded.
What do you think? What are the benefits of curiosity that I missed here? Share below or on our Facebook page.
Is curiosity always good? Curiosity can have its pitfalls such as miring client discussions in trivial questions or nice-to-know tangents. You don’t want to be that kid on the grade school field trip who won’t stop asking questions. So, keep the questions on point.
It’s also important not to assume that your clients’ audiences have the same level of curiosity (a.k.a. interest) in the subject. As a rule, never underestimate their total apathy to your clients’ subjects, and work hard to find ways to drive and encourage curiosity and interest. Without either, there’s no basis for engagement.
So, ask why, how much, when, where and how. Ask them early, and ask them often. But remember that the question good practitioners really need to be curious about is this one: so what?
Be curious and pursue the answer to that question relentlessly on behalf of your clients’ audiences, and you’ll be at the top of your game.
If you’ve always thought that PR is just putting out press releases, think again. The press release is the least of it, folks. That said, it’s where clients often put the bulk of their attention.
Clients want coverage, of course. That’s how they most often measure the return on their investment, but when they don’t take the media’s needs into account and emphasize press releases over targeted story pitches or newswires instead of exclusives, they are putting their PR professionals into a box and, therefore, confining the reach and results of their own campaigns.
As your agency, we work on media relationships continually, we study the media landscape, and we identify coverage trends to ensure we’re able to be most effective for you. We understand the need to do more with less, but we cannot afford to shortchange any of our relationships or cut corners on best practices in our interactions with others on your behalf.
To understand the pressures of PR in 2010, we’ve collected below, in their own words, what journalists expect from PR professionals today. With thousands of pitches coming at them every week, trust us when we say that you cannot succeed with cookie cutter approaches, un-researched pitches or weak news angles.
And if you haven’t already, we also suggest you read Part 1 of this two-part post on the challenges journalists are facing today as well as our previous post about what makes a good story. After you’ve read through these comments, please share with us below whether this re-affirms what you already knew about PR or if it has caused you to adjust your perceptions.
NATIONAL BUSINESS NEWSPAPER: "If you're pitching a small startup that's not publicly traded, tell me why it's part of a bigger trend. Product pitches aren't likely to succeed. I don't really care for press releases announcing a new product debut at a conference or trade show.”
"It must be something done by a big company or an action of a small firm that affects the bigger players. I don't want product announcements or minor management activity."
REGIONAL BUSINESS: "The best PR pros are candid. In these difficult economic times, I still expect truthful answers to questions about a lack of funding or other problems. Don't be overly aggressive and keep trying to pitch deals I am not interested in."
NATIONAL NEWSWIRE: "I never do a story based on a single pitch about a company, person or product. The best PR pros frame their pitch as part of a trend."
"I would cover a show that a celebrity is appearing in, but I wouldn't write about a charity that person is promoting. I prefer exclusive pitches, but they don't have to be just for me. However, I don't want something that's already been exclusive to someone else."
NATIONAL TV NEWS BUREAU: "I look for character-driven topics with really amazing people. I want exclusives. Don't pitch my show if you're also trying to be on other networks too. Links to video of your client is very helpful. I can also use b-roll."
NATIONAL NEWS MAGAZINE: "The best PR people provide exclusive information and a unique angle to the story. We'd never write about a particular product and sometimes get those types of pitches. It's obvious when PR people don't read the publication and suggest things we'd never cover."
NATIONAL FINANCIAL NEWSWIRE: "Give me a unique insight into what you do and give us access to people who aren't normally available for interviews. If we won't use the pitch, we'll let you know quickly, so you can offer it elsewhere. Don't include us in shotgun blasts that go out to everyone.”
MAJOR MARKET DAILY NEWSPAPER:“"I don't do stories about individuals hired to run a company. I want to be connected with experts who have knowledge of a specific issue in the news. Don't be cute. Be succinct. Tell me in the pitch what the news is. Don't pitch me ‘Joe Blow' who can talk about the economy or the markets."
The last 18 months have been hell on journalists and, therefore, to a lesser degree, on media relations professionals too. To adequately explain what late 2008 and 2009 have been like in our field, we’ve got to start with the journalist’s view. Hence the two part approach to this post.
In 2008 and 2009:
• Journalists feared for their jobs. Therefore, they wanted only to cover the most compelling stories. (To understand what a compelling story is, see our last post.)
• Journalists were forced to cover more beats. One columnist we work with had his column frequency and coverage area doubled, was assigned obituaries and asked to contribute regular human interest profiles. Another had to produce streaming video product reviews for the paper's website while blogging and producing daily business news coverage.
• Journalists had less space to cover stories. Page counts shrunk in print publications and with them coverage opportunities became tighter too. A story that might have merited coverage two years ago now literally had nowhere to run.
• And, of course, journalists did lose their jobs in layoff rounds and many of the press contacts we'd made over the years were downsized.
In this environment, (W)right On Communications simply worked harder and smarter to give our clients' stories the edge.
In 2008, we began adopting more social media strategies to find additional avenues to deliver client messages and help our clients engage with their audiences and stakeholders. We watched as traditional reporters and columnists joined Twitter and Facebook and news media began to embrace real-time social media tools to break news and encourage reader participation and commentary. (In that regard, the trends weren’t all bad – given a different set of circumstances, this would have been pretty cool. But the triple threat of Craigslist, media fragmentation and decimated advertising budgets took a lot of the fun out of it.)
Our support of traditional media relations continued, however, with a greater than ever emphasis on best practices.
What are these best practices you ask? At their heart, they’re consuming traditional and social media in frequent and large doses. We read a lot! That means blogs, newspapers, and magazines as well as journalists on Twitter and Facebook. This is how we know who’s writing what, what’s new with who (or, er, with whom), and what they’ve been writing about lately as well as what they are likely to write about in the future. In addition to this, we’ve had to stay on top of trends in our own industry, first and foremost, but our clients’ industries as well.
Such research has always been necessary to produce results for our clients, but never more so. It’s not just the current economic environment. It’s also the low barriers to entry in the PR profession--from easy leads via HARO to easy and cheap press release distribution via PRWeb. These tools as well as more expensive but convenient databases like Vocus and Cision that allow people to send thousands of emails with the push a button mean that journalists are receiving 400 emails or more a day—and many to most of them are either completely outside of the journalist's beat or perhaps in their beat but containing no real news.
So, yes, sticking to best practices is, unfortunately, the way to stand out and serve the last journalists standing.
And, no, 2009 was not an easy year for media or PR professionals and 2010 may see some small improvement, but for those who haven’t cut corners and have kept their skills, knowledge and relationships fresh, the outlook is much brighter.
Stay tuned for our part two post, in which we acknowledge more of the perils of our industry.
Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers surveyed recently reported that half used Twitter to monitor for PR problems, but only 22.4% actually contacted Twitter users who posted negative Tweets.
Monitoring is fairly easy--if time-consuming--but it's also reported to be the most effective use of Twitter for these brands. This makes it even more surprising that 1 in 2 brands is not monitoring its image via Twitter at all. That's too bad. Twitter's beauty is giving you a real-time window into what people are saying and thinking about your business or industry.
Only one in four brands on Twitter actually reported using it to reach out and engage people directly when they had a complaint or criticism. Monitoring or listening is important, but reaching out and dialoguing is what really make a difference. Yet, going that extra mile appears to be a little more difficult for brands.
Is this a classic case of activity (monitoring) over productivity (acting on the information)? What do you think?
Here's a little advice for organizations that are monitoring but not responding:
+ Have a social media policy that makes it clear what scenarios are important to respond to. + Develop key messages, FAQs and some tough Q&A so that your employees have the tools to respond accurately, confidently and on message. + Assign responsibility and accountability to an individual or team of individuals (in-house or agency or both) to manage these social media interactions (not just Twitter but blogs, Facebook, and more.) + Now track and evalute this outreach to learn what works and continuously improve your online image management
