Posts filed under 'PR Tools'
By Kyle Austin
Photo courtesy of Gizmodo
With a seemingly worse reputation than its second cousin – the press release – the press conference has been brought out to the cow pastures in most industries. Political leaders, along with governments and corporations in Asia, making up the fairly small list of abstaining parties still practicing the art of the media scrum and photo op.
However, thanks in large part to Apple and Steve Jobs, a new ‘press conference on steroids’ has emerged over the last several years in the form of the live press event.
Capitalizing on the Internet Age, and the media’s desire and willingness to report stories minute-by-minute, the live event has become a powerful PR tool to disseminate major announcements to a broad list of media outlets. It allows for pre-event buzz, live event buzz and post-event feature stories, which maximizes the exposure for the brand and whatever they are announcing. It also allows corporations and PR folks to avoid going down the road of pre-briefings under embargo, which have become unbelievably challenging with bloggers and reporters looking to scoop each other by minutes, and even seconds.
Unfortunately for most corporations thinking about hosting a live event (to paraphrase the great Rick Pitino), “Steve Jobs isn’t walking through that door.” So how do you pull off a successful live event without an iconic CEO? Here’s a few basic tips.
1. It all starts with the invitation: The number one goal of most live press events is to get butts in the seats. In order to ensure this you need a good invitation. The trick is you need to spark interest in attending while maintaining a certain level of mystery to increase pre-event speculation.
- One way to spark interest, without giving the announcement away, is with the location. Most successful live events are hosted in a location that is a natural tie-in to the theme of the announcement. For instance, Apple’s Rock-N- Roll themed event last week utilized the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts – which usually hosts dance groups and other entertainment acts. Try to plan for a location like this rather than using corporate headquarters. It will help with getting bloggers out of their current seats, and into yours.
- Apple has also capitalized on pictures being more powerful than words in their invites. A picture that symbolizes the theme with a few teasing words – keeps the pre-event buzz going, and serves as the art for pre-event blog posts. It also allows you to get reporters in the right frame of mind heading into the live event, to ensure that they aren’t let down by what actually transpires.
- Aim for getting the invites out 2 weeks in advance of the event and plan on following up repeatedly with media to get the event on their calendar.
- Keep reminding them even if you get an RSVP. Attendance at live events is usually (anecdotal evidence) 60 – 70 percent of those that said they will be there.
2. Room logistics: A great location is nothing without a good room. The old PR trick of lots of people in a small room still can work, but if you want to spawn live blogging you better make sure everyone can see the stage.
- Stadium-style seating is best. If that’s not possible, just make sure everyone has an equal view.
- Bloggers and reporters interested in live-blogging will want seats and space to type. Try not to overfill a room to the point where no one can report live because they can’t get their laptop up in front of them.
- Make sure you have the room set-up for the conclusion of the live event. A room close by for one-on-one interviews (great for the ever-popular Flip interviews), a demo area and some food should be in the planning.
3. The connection is key: While the status of the Internet connection may be an after thought for the typical press conference, it’s a top line item for the live event. In order to maximize the exposure of the event, you need to make sure that the connection will support minute-by-minute tweets and posts by attending press. Bring in IT people to make sure the connection is fast and reliable.
- Make sure you let media know that they will be able to live-blog, and there will be a reliable connection. Some folks have given up trying to cover events live do to unreliable connections provided by companies.
- Make it simple for media to log in. We’ve handed out cards with press materials at events, which detail network names and passwords for easy log-in.
4. It’s all in the delivery: Steve Jobs and Apple are successful with live events because they keep the media hanging on every word. While your news may not rival Apple’s (in terms of media interest), you have something important to share (that’s why you’re considering a live event). Make sure that news is shared at the end of the event, so the media hang on every word throughout.
- The live event should be planned out minute-by-minute. You want to make sure that you give media attendees the news in advance of it crossing wires, but you don’t want to take the air out of your spokesperson’s delivery. Plan to email the details on the big news (along with the secondary news and pictures) to attending media when the spokesperson finally delivers it.
- It’s a good idea to give those folks attending a head start on reporting that news before the release crosses the wire. 15-20 minutes after the email has gone to attendees seems to be a good time to officially put the news over the wire.
5. Become one of the live-bloggers: Given that every company is a media company, the live event is the ideal venue to leverage all of the media channels you have available to you. Even if you can’t attract 100 media outlets like Apple, you can get your story out to everyone through your own channels.
- Make sure the folks managing your corporate Twitter handle(s) put out the hashtag (#) to follow the live event a day in advance of the conference.
- Those folks should also have a copy of the spokesperson’s remarks on hand the day of the event, so they can relay the important parts of the delivery to their Twitter audience as they occur.
- Assuming you have a corporate blog to leverage, you should also leverage it to live-blog. In addition, have a full blog post written in advance – that you can put up when the release crosses the wire. House photos and other media there, to increase traffic to the blog and the corporate Website.
- If it makes sense, and you calculate that it won’t take butts out of seats, look into the possibility of live streaming the live event. Ustream provides a quality service. You could even host the live stream on your corporate Facebook fan page.
September 17th, 2009
By Ben Haber
I recently wrote a post about how journalists were getting very tired of phone pitches and preferred receiving them via email or Twitter. In the post I mentioned how Twitter could become a great pitching platform if not for a few things holding it back. So, here is how Twitter can make itself the best pitching platform for journalists and PR people.
The first step is to create a new communication option/folder beyond a @reply and a DM. This option would be specifically for pitching and does not require someone to follow you. It would allow PR people to send 140 character pitches to journalists through a separate folder within Twitter, where they can be read and either responded to or discarded. Here are a few benefits to this method:
- Since journalists can’t follow everyone, this will allow them to still receive pitches without having their regular Twitter stream full of tweets they don’t want.
- Since pitches will be 140 characters or less, journalists won’t have to spend a lot of time reading them and PR people can get right to the point.
- PR people will have a great way to share news with relevant journalists they may not have existing relationships with.
To enhance this feature even more, each message should have 3 options for journalists. They can either respond, archive, or trash the message. Once they select which option, the PR person will be automatically notified so that there are no follow-up calls needed (a common complaint from journalists). If the journalist doesn’t like the topic then the PR person will know and can move on. If the message is archived it means that the reporter might have use for it later, and if the journalist responds then it’s a win-win for everyone.
To take this a step further, this system could also make things really easy for journalists. When they are looking for sources for an article, instead of posting their request to HARO or ProfNet and waiting for the emails to be blasted out, they can simply send their request on Twitter and have pitches sent to their pitch folder.
Additionally, if anyone abuses this system journalists can simply block the user so they won’t receive any more messages from them.
Can you think of any other ways we can make Twitter an amazing pitching tool for all?
July 13th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
One online service that I’ve grown attached to is Mint.com. Simply, Mint.com is the most effective way to manage your money, rent, loans, bills, expenses, financial planning in the Web era (Personally, I love the email alerts when I go over my chosen budget). All of this has allowed Mint to become the most used online personal finance service on the Internet, with more than 1 million users.
It has also enabled the company to build a high brand affinity with its users. In addition to being a great service, Mint has harnessed user’s positive experiences with the service and turned them into brand fans on Facebook. As I’ve followed closely over the last several months, Facebook is making very steady progress in appealing to marketers. Fan and brand pages, check. Vanity URL’s, check. Mint.com is one company that has taken advantage of these changes.
Their Facebook page has grown extremely popular with more than 32, 000 followers and constant interaction. From Mint.com prize pack giveaways, to financial haiku contests, to updates on their latest blog posts, Mint leverages Facebook to the fullest.
Before the vanity URL gold rush I speculated that Mint would be one of the first companies to get their customized Facebook URL. And they were. You can now find them easily at www.facebook.com/mint. Yup, they beat the US Mint, the herb and Wrigley to the findable, SEO-friendly domain.
In addition, Mint’s Facebook admins have been diligent in integrating video and their other social media channels (i.e. Twitter) into the Facebook experience. They’ve also started to use Facebook as their de-facto HARO or Profnet service; allowing their PR and marketing team to track down users for stories that may fit a particular angle or be from a certain area. Anyone from Minn-e-sota?
Mint’s approach is not siloed within Facebook. Their aforementioned blog is extremely popular with more than 11,000 RSS subscribers. This visual-friendly post got 400 plus Digs.
It’s obvious that Aaron and his team understand the future of integrated marketing and are building a brand that has real staying power.
July 10th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
How Re-Tweetable are Your Press Releases? – Photo courtesty of www.FinancialAidPodcast.com and www.ChristopherSPenn.com
While many folks are ordering tombstones for press releases, the truth is (for now anyways), we still need to leverage them (in an evolved form). Yes, the traditional press release can be taken out to the cow pasture, but an evolving social media (or Web-friendly) release – heavy in hyperlinks, social tags and media – can still be a worthwhile PR tool.
Many clients (brands) still look at press releases as marketing speak; heavy in product and service jargon that journalists covering the beat have a hard time understanding – let alone the typical consumer. As communications continues to shift towards direct-to-consumer interaction, press releases also need to adapt.
Of course, savvy clients are big fans of Google News so they should understand that the modern, digital press release is read by hundreds to thousands of consumers on the Web (including potential sale’s leads) in its original form (both on Google News and other news aggregator sites). So what is the best way to maximize the return on investment on digital releases today? Here’s a few basic tips.
- Free is Good: Now more than ever, those of us within this industry need to focus on return on investment. Sometimes there just isn’t the prospective return there to pay for the distribution of a press release on a paid distribution wire. While it is still necessary in most cases to use pay-for wire services (i.e. BusinessWire and MarketWire) for major corporate (investor / financial) and product announcements, a large percentage of clicks on press releases come through Google. Social media distribution services like PitchEngine, which are free in their most basic form, also get picked-up on Google. While we still advise that clients use this tool as a supplement to pay-for wire services for major announcements, these free services can be used as alternatives to paid services for lesser announcements. In addition, although BusinessWire has added new tagging features within the last couple weeks, which includes Facebook and Twitter, PitchEngine and other social services tend to allow for better social sharing capability (or Re-tweet-ability) than their paid-for counterparts. Once the release is up, it’s important to make sure the release is shared across communities (i.e.: Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc).
- Shorter Headlines: Given that we live in a 140-character world with the advent of Twitter, one would think that we would begin to shorten other aspects of our communications toolbox. It hasn’t really happened to date. Brands continue to spend too much money, with too many words, with the aforementioned pay services and headlines are continually wasted on Google News. Google news only supports 63 characters with its headlines, yet companies continue to make their headlines longer than most tweets. It’s important that companies not only shorten their headlines, but also include search keywords within the first 63 characters.
- Hyperlinks or Anchor Text Up-front: In addition to allowing for easy click-throughs to corporate Websites or micro-sites, the use of hyperlinks (or anchor text) also weighs releases as more relevant in the eyes of Google’s search engine. Google’s search patents, which have been disclosed over the years, illustrate how and why Google’s engine ranks anchor text and hyperlinks so highly. Using anchor text with keywords (as part of an SEO strategy) in the opening of your release builds relevancy, leading to more link views and inevitably more clicks on the release, and your Website.
- Using Hyperlinks, in Addition to Full Domain Names: Although Google continues to score anchor text (i.e. RaceTalk) higher than full domain names ( i.e. http://www.racetalkblog.com), consumers still click on full domain names. Press releases distributed through paid services are often likely to see Website click-throughs higher on full domain links than the hyper-linked alternative. It’s important that you include both within your release (especially for the corporate Website).
- Market your Return: Once you’ve got the right service and the right format for your release, and the results that come with it, make sure to market the return on the release up the ladder. Free services like PitchEngine offer you click results on your release and paid services like BusinessWire offer you much more. BusinessWire offers paying customers full click-through results that tabulate which links viewers clicked on within the release, which site referred them and where (wire, Google News, etc) they viewed the release. It’s imperative that these results (especially the amount of traffic driven to a Website or product page) are shared with the client or up the ladder (for PR folks working in-house).
May 26th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
As Twitter becomes a bit noisy with its growing popularity (and celeb status) more users are looking for ways to segment the groups of people they are following / conversing with. While this can be done using PeopleBrowsr or Tweetdeck, destination sites like AthleteTweets, CelebrityTweet and newly-introduced JournalistTweets are also becoming popular.
As I covered recently in response to the Wall Street Journal’s memo on Twitter guidelines, Twitter can be a powerful journalism tool for crowd sourcing and building relationships with readers. Other journalists agree. A survey by PR Week / PRNewswire found that 22% of journalists are currently leveraging Twitter for these purposes. A separate survey by the TEKgroup found that 38% of journalists would be interested in receiving corporate news via corporate Twitter handles. So as journalists begin to rely on Twitter for news and story angles, how can PR folks keep track of what their media contacts are tracking within the ever-noisy Twitter ecosystem?
Enter journalisttweets.com. Cision, a global provider of media monitoring, research, distribution, and evaluation services for the PR industry is positioning its free Web destination as a site for PR professionals which provides the inside scoop on developing news stories (WSJ‘s newsroom excluded), by streaming and sorting Twitter traffic from top journalists around the world. (Update: Got an email from Gregory Galant, CEO of Sawhorse Media, who noted that they launched a similar service - MuckRack.com – a month before JournalistTweets.com. Will have an update on their service in the near future.
This beta service delivers tweets from thousands of media sources in North America and the UK, organized by topic or region. It is also fully searchable by content and journalist name to quickly identify key influencers and issues. In addition, a “Top Tweeters” link displays tweets from frequent tweeters at media outlets.
I’ve given the service a quick run and I think it shows some promise. Although brands see better ROI delivering direct to consumer messages via Twitter, folks like myself – handling media relations for clients – have found Twitter to be a great tool for digital media relations.
I do like how JournalistTweets breaks journalists into different sectors (Business / Entertainment / Health / Technology). Actually, I think they should take it one step further. If they could start breaking it out by beats (i.e. consumer tech & gadgets) or even by outlet (i.e. New York Times) I’d be really interested in it. In fact, the latter is something that publications should turn into destination sites for themselves. I’m surprised that BusinessWeek, an advocate for the journalism usages of Twitter, hasn’t created a destination within Businessweek.com called “BWTweets”, which would track tweets from all of BusinessWeek’s editorial staff.
Anyways, I hope that Cision continues to consider adding these other features as I think it could be a good place to track the developments within newsrooms and find relevant media contacts (Cision 3.0 if you will). Of course, in the meantime the amount of journalists on the service needs to be added to (Cision does include a way for people using the service to suggest journalists to add) and they should work with the search functionality, which I was having some trouble with yesterday.
Nevertheless, a step in the right direction for PR services.
May 19th, 2009
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