Month: July 2007

Tom Foremski has highlighted a new social media news release service* called PRXBuilder. Currently in beta (and free to use), it is intended to provide an easy means of creating and distributing rich media releases.

However, the bit that caught my eye was an extra service called NewsAds – ie using Google AdWords to advertise and drive traffic to the original release. You can see why clients might like this idea – for example you choose to set a specific budget to try and drive particular levels of traffic – or indeed set a cap in case you have an unexpected "hit" on your hands (or at least be in control of how much you want to spend on a particular news release campaign).

Using PR to support advertising campaigns is as old as the hills – but using advertising to drive attention for a press release is a novel inversion of tradition. However, you do have to wonder  how credible target consumers will find these ads – or indeed the news release itself if they’ve been led their by an ad.

*I’m making a conscious effort to refer to news releases rather than press releases these days – given that the new accepted wisdom is that they are intended for anyone but a journalist.

Excellent post on Strumpette from Ike Piggot – anyone who can use Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle as a metaphor for what’s happening in social media gets my vote:

Outside observers kill communities in a hurry, regardless of the
transparency of their motives. The only tolerated agenda is pure:
thrash metal fans don’t want Mr. Labelpants from Arista watching over
their shoulder. The Curse of Heisenberg: The act of observing disturbs
the observed. So that leaves us with completely Naked Conversations.
The PR guy now has to be the biggest fan in the forum – the king of the
community – top Twit in the Twitterbin. And then corporate expectation
will be nothing less than maximum influence. That means that only the
rabid fans will have the inside track to be PR representatives. Even
transparent, the lack of Motive Purity changes the dynamic of the
group.

Bottom line: Corporate expectations being what they are, some
degree of control will remain on the agenda. The message might be out
of their hands, but then again it never was firmly in their grasp to
begin with. The illusion of control was a product of a tiny number of
outlets – slits that kept the electron beams somewhat coherent with a
minimum of interference. A few years ago, the slits became close enough
together to blur the results, and now the screen is gone altogether.
We’re all bathing in our own complex streams of radiation, and PR’s
challenge is to create relevance once again.

You can choose to be immersed in the community.
You can choose to be an advocate.
You can choose to be transparent as to your motive.

But you can only pick two of the above, because the communities won’t let you have all three.

Perhaps time to dust off my piece about Godel’s Incompleteness Theorum and PR.

There was me saying that Facebook could be the way forward for PR – and then along comes Danny Bradbury and shows how LinkedIn could help get rid of us altogether (well, almost).

Specifically, Danny is referring to the use of LinkedIn Answers as a research tool:

"I checked out the Answers feature, and oh my, does this contain a
lot of possibilities. Given that I was writing an article on it I
thought I’d test it out, and asked a question related to another
article I was working on, just to see what would happen. I got back
about six answers – all very relevant, intelligent, and right on the
money. And the answers came directly from people associated with the
subject. No intermediaries, no proxies. And I was able to check out
their profiles to assess their background. This lets you know where
they work, so you could call up their company, ask to speak to them,
have a conversation and verify that they’re creditable.

This strikes me as a more honed, targeted way of supplementing your
research and unlike some automated PR services it also means that
you’re likely to end up speaking with people who haven’t paid for PR
(which is a limiting factor elsewhere). It’s not something that you’d
use as your only form of research, of course, but it’s a useful tool
nonetheless."

I know the PR defense – it relies upon people who are on LinkedIn, who are prepared to take the time to respond to the question, etc, etc. But again, I think Danny has rightly identified that there now tools emerging that could easily remove traditional PR from the equation – and is that necessarily a bad thing?

Haven’t been able to log in to Facebook all day – perhaps I should be grateful. Then again, wouldn’t surprise me if their servers have melted with the ever spiralling number of new users being added daily.

The Viking Manifesto didn’t take long to read – and shared with David Meerman Scott’s book a common theme about the importance of telling good stories.

Which made me wonder about the curious PR phrase pitching or selling stories to journalists. As we all know, the PR industry seems to be pretty hopeless at doing this – more specifically, what is pitched or sold to a journalist is anything but a story in the proper sense of the word.

So what makes a good story – a cursory Google search revealed this helpful little crib sheet. I realise its more geared towards general creative writing, but it did make me realise why PR writing generally fails in its objectives.

Let’s look at some specific examples:

 
A good story needs conflict and resolution. Stories are made up of people, 
places, and happenings. Strong stories usually have a well-defined main character — a he, a she, an animal, a machine, or whatever — 
that encounters some kind of trouble (conflict). There is something blocking our protagonist, whether it is nature, another person, or even the main character him or herself. The action taken signifies personal growth and 
change — possibly an “ah ha!” — and finally, some sort of redemption. It is the believable action moving the story from beginning to middle to end that keeps the audience entranced.

The protagonist in virtually all tech PR is simply the company or the product. We all know what’s going to happen ie our product/company is the best – buy it/us. No "Ah Ha!" or redemption there.

A good story creates vivid images. Through our knowing, as the storyteller, 
what vivid images the story creates for us, we will create images for our listeners. They may not see the same images we see and imagine, and that is the exciting part of storytelling. We want them to imagine their own images that relate to them and their experiences as the story unfolds. 
This is the part that makes interaction so important. If our stories help the listener to think of his/her own stories, we have succeeded in igniting
   a storytelling spark.

Vivid images in a press release? Not likely. What image is conjured by: "ACAL ATM Parts has been authorised as a certified reseller for
Passfaces Web Access and Passfaces for Windows, patented authentication
software which increases data security in a wide range of applications
including high-risk sectors such as banking and finance." I haven’t singled this release out specifically – pretty much any release you see these days would fail on this test.

A good 
story is not “wimpy.” In the excellent book The
        Storyteller’s Guideby Bill Mooney and David Holt , many well known storytellers give their views on what makes
  a “wimpy story.” Michael Parent says, “The difference between a good story and a wimpy story for me is the wimpy story gives too easy a solution.” Laura Simms says, “A wimpy story is one that points toward something very obvious, that doesn’t have resonance inside, 
that doesn’t provide an experience.” Jon Spelman says, “To
        me, the strongest mark of a good story well-told is its sincerity. I think there is something about a wimpy story that is insincere; it’s unauthentic.
  It’s not true to the person who is telling it.” Kathryn Windham
  adds, “When you find interesting people, you are going to find interesting stories.”

Most tech press releases make out that the solution is easy – or states the blindingly obvious – and of course, sincerity abounds, yes? Perhaps the lack of interesting people is a reason for the lack of interesting stories?

 A good 
story is the story that is perfect for your audience.  We must keep in tune with the listeners and change direction if we aren’t connecting

Given the failure rate of PR with connecting with journalists why haven’t we learned to change direction?

A good 
story is a story that you love and love to tell. Never, never, never, 
tell a story you don’t like, even if a client has requested it. As a storyteller, we are never on the outside looking in as we tell the story. 
We are a part of the story. We have internalized that story and we truly care about it. We can’t do that, if we don’t like the story.

This is as good an acid test for PRs as it is for creative writers.

In short, PR better get better at telling stories – or stop pretending that stories are what journalists are being pitched.