Link: the LOOSE wire blog: How to be a Press Expert.
From Wall Street Journal’s Jeremy Wagstaff
Categories
Month: May 2006
Categories
When is Guy Kewney not Guy Kewney?
Link: newswireless.net .:. Blog .:. Really, what matters is that the BBC ….
Read this and find out. Apparently heads have rolled at the BBC.
You really couldn’t make this one up. Barclays Bank Chief Exec John Varley has taken at out a mortgage with……HSBC. And the finance director and deputy chairman also have morgtages with other banks. Talk about not eating your own dog food.
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More from the Glide survey:
83pc of PRs surveyed said they used their own personal media contact lists for deciding who to send information too – ie PRs still seem to have an "information hoarding" mentality.
90pc used their personal knowledge and "intuition" when deciding who to send releases to.
So for all the investment in smart databases to decide what information to send a journalist, PRs still have an undocumented feature – an override button called "gut feel" – which determines what they send to people.
New survey conducted by Benchmark Research on behalf of Glide Technologies has thrown up some interesting, if not entirely unsurprising, results about the PR industry in the UK today.
The full report is here:
However, the one item that caught my eye was the calculation that £2.5bn is spent on press releases in the UK. This based on the survey finding that 39pc of PR professionals time is spent on creating, distributing, and following up on press releases – and the estimated total size of the UK PR industry at £6.5bn. Couple that with only 32% of releases received by the media being of genuine interest, then I calculate that means £1.7bn is being wasted on irrelevant press releases.
Although I’d take this calculation with a pinch of salt, it would be fair to say that an awful lot of money is still being spent (and wasted) on the humble press release.
The survey also highlighted a clear discrepancy between journalists desire to be contacted by email and PRs who still overwhelmingly use the phone.
I know the reasons for both sides views. Journalists have been jaundiced by too many wasteful phone calls along the lines of “did you get my press release”, or are you attending exhibition X (see Phil Muncaster of IT Week vent his spleen re: the pre-InfoSec deluge of calls asking him whether he was going – Muncaster InfoSec rant )
On the other side, PRs often feel that they will get more “attention” by actually talking to the journalist. Though of course that still means you need a good enough story to give them.
My take on the survey as a whole is that is shows the same old values still apply to PR in terms of media relations – journalists will give the time of day to a trusted source – but even that doesn’t guarantee they will use a story. Perhaps some of that wasted £1.7bn could be spent on training PR professionals to get better at becoming trusted information sources.
Other findings below:
81% of Journalists on a desert island opt for laptop over a phone
Email remains the most popular delivery format for journalists. Fax, post, newswire, PDA and SMS all decline. RSS and IM emerge.
76% of journalists more likely to use press communication with photos etc.
89% of journalists will visit an organisation’s website most of the time when writing about them
Journalist Complaints
Poor use of email (e.g. sending large attachments) accounts for the two greatest online deterrents to journalists
Only 32% of releases received by the media are of genuine interest
73% of journalists think an organisation is ‘not media friendly’ if its online press information is poor. 60% think they’re ‘lazy’, 50% that they’re ‘incompetent’.
Research conducted by Benchmark Research.