CyberFootprint

Before you start reading this post, go to Twitter and search for the #prfail channel. Then look at the types of complaints that come up frequently.

3) The PRO promised to call me, but he didn’t.

2) The PRO didn’t do his homework and sent me a press release about investment banking (mommyblogger complaints)

Here comes my personal favourite:

1) The PRO called me again. The call was only about “Did you get my press release?”

Let us look at the situation from a journalist’s point of view: Someone you probably don’t know is calling you in the middle of an unfinished article to check whether you looked in your mailbox yet. Honestly, wouldn’t this irritate you?

This is a peak of ignorance from the PRO’s side, and a bane of mutually beneficial relationship between the journalist and the PRO. Not only this behaviour sends negative messages about the practitioner (it literally says “I’m lazy and unimaginative,”) it also puts the agency / organization into wrong light. How do we deal with this problem?

Send an original news release that will be read

Optimizing the copy for better readability on the computer screen could help the odds of being picked up. Writing like a human, for once, will definitely make a difference. The press release doesn’t have to follow a traditional structure: headline, lead, quote and supporting facts all in form of an inverted pyramid, followed by a boilerplate. What a good press release should do, is to tell a story. Play around with the format and the medium of the message you want to send. PR is ideas management, so use your head.

Know the journalist in person

If you must call, talk about the topic of the news release, not about your interest in the issue (When will you write about it? Do you think this is a good material for an interview?) Chances are that you will score more points, because you will stand out of the crowd of other PROs and you will not annoy the living hell out of the editor.

If the journalist knows your face and your behaviour, he will always be able to connect the face to the e-mail you sent her. This gives you a chance to transfer some of your personal credibility to the news release you are pitching. Make sure you use it!

Don’t be surprised when you fail

Given that the journalists are overloaded with information, most of which is bad pitches, you cannot expect your press release to hit the mark of 100% success rate at all times. In fact, most of your press releases will not hit even 50% at the beginning of your career. Worry not, this will improve in time.

The best way, in my opinion, to make the transition from a rookie to a veteran PRO as fast as possible is to stick to four basic maxims of communication: quality, quantity, relevance, and manner. You can find more about these maxims in Paul Grice’s work, and I highly recommend reading about them.

Other details

What we have covered so far outlines the bare essentials of good media relations. There are other aspects to the process, and if we’d like to describe them all, we would turn this post into a book. Instead of rambling on and on about other possible pit falls of media relations, I will give you a list of recommended reading, so you can educate yourself even more in-depth. Here we go.

• Vojta has a good post on timing of your pitch
• I talked about practices to avoid
• Matthew Stibbe advised how to make your copy more human
• Nick Balkin’s ironic best practices manual for PROs

Image credit: clickrme. I would also like to thank Veronika Zavřelová and Tess Slavíčková for introducing me to Grice’s maxims of communication.