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- Member Type(s): Expert
Communications Professional
- Title:Principal and Co-founder
- Organization:InkHouse Media + Marketing
- Area of Expertise:Public relations, social media
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Thursday, December 16, 2010, 1:12 PM
[ General]
Words, when wielded effectively, can carry great power. But that’s for another post. As we near the end of 2010, I’ve compiled a list of words that have simply lost their meaning from overuse. Many of these are perfectly good words that just need a time out.
The age of social media has placed an emphasis on easily digestible content and PR has followed by simplifying messaging and press releases accordingly. While Woody Guthrie was talking about music when he said this, we should think about it in the context of how we communicate as marketers:
“Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.”
In honor of simplicity, I asked the InkHouse team to send me their lists of words that we should retire after 2010. Most of these fall into the category of overuse in marketing materials, but we threw in a few pop culture terms for fun.
- Best-in-breed and leading-edge
- Leading provider
- Next generation and revolutionary
- Disruptive
- 2.0
To see the full list, go to inkhousepr.blogspot.com/2010/12/10-words...
Monday, December 13, 2010, 1:20 PM
[ General]
There is a lot we can learn from the Tea Party outside of election politics, but I will come back to this in a few paragraphs. A few months ago, I was honored when Business Insider asked me contribute posts from blog. A number of my posts have been syndicated now and one thing is true for all of them – my headlines always get changed. I don’t mind because as a PR person, I appreciate the value of a good headline. Inevitably, theirs are a bit more sensational and I believe that they have helped me get more readers than I would have otherwise. I’ll give you one example:
· Mine: “Make Hay While the Sun Shines”
I’ve written here before on the topic of creative and compelling headlines and believe strongly in their value. As Twitter becomes a veritable news aggregator for many of us, the importance of headlines has never been greater. Recently, @MrMediaTraining (Brad Phillips of Phillips Media Relations) tweeted this: “Why You Should Never Return a Reporter's Call By His/Her Deadline.” I immediately clicked on it because it sounded like bad advice. However, after reading the post I learned that he was advocating for spokespeople to call reporters back well before their deadlines so that they could play a part in shaping the story. Great advice and great headline – it worked.
To read the rest of the article, go to inkhousepr.blogspot.com/2010/12/what-pr-...
Wednesday, December 8, 2010, 3:44 PM
[ General]
Part 1:Embargoes and Exclusives
Last week Scott Kirsner, the Innovation Economy columnist and blogger for the Boston Globe, Ross Levanto, SVP at Schwartz Communications, and I sat down to discuss embargoes, exclusives, TechCrunch, social media, entrepreneurs doing their own PR, and other “under the covers” issues related to PR and the media. This is the first of four posts that will come out of that conversation. We started with the hotly debated embargo issue, which has received more than its fair share of attention over the past few years in the wake of high-profile policies against embargoes such as Michael Arrington’s back in 2008. This summer we blogged about the issue when a major news daily “accidentally” broke a story on a piece of client news. Scott posted his perspective in June where he included advice for how he handles embargoes (he is rarely interested) and outlined what he is interested in covering: “On the blog, I'm mainly focusing on trying to cover company formations, financings, important product launches, big-name new hires (and firings), shut-downs, and the like first.”
Read the full post here (with audio): inkhousepr.blogspot.com/2010/11/conversa...
Part 2: Is the press release dead?
In part two of my series following a conversation with Scott Kirsner, the Innovation Economy columnist and blogger for the Boston Globe and Ross Levanto, SVP at Schwartz Communications, we talk about the future of the press release. Last week Ross posted a piece of that conversation about targeting your audience, which I encourage you to read.
The topic of the fate of the press release comes up often, most frequently from those who have embraced social media and view it as a relic from the past. Many of these entrepreneurs, CEOs and marketers are looking to use their blogs as the mouthpiece for their news.
Scott said that he comes across younger, more entrepreneurial companies that think they are old school. He said, “They’ll announce interesting things on their blogs and via Twitter, which is great because you feel like that stuff is coming off the CEO’s cuff, but I do wonder about breaking news via your blog or Twitter feed that you may have been able to get the Globe, the Economist or Wall Street Journal to write about.”
Read the full post here (with audio): inkhousepr.blogspot.com/2010/12/conversa...
Thursday, November 18, 2010, 10:07 AM
[ General]
A few things happened over the past week that have gotten me focused on the importance of immediacy. First, New Hampshire announced plans to crack down on its ban on texting while driving – reminding me of how addicted we all are to the ding of a text notification. Second, I read Om Malik’s post on “ Perpetual Nowness.” He is suggesting that we are constantly seeking the next thing and “suffer from a collective cultural amnesia about what happened five minutes ago.” Naturally, this got me thinking about PR and the state of news media. Public relations has always been fast-paced and social media has only amped it up. It’s also the same for bloggers who are under intense pressure to be the first to break a story, even if it comes out at 1 a.m. We’re all nagged by the constant urge to check the text/IM/email/Facebook/Twitter notification we just heard beep in the background. But is all of this “nowness” helping us or hindering us?
Working in PR requires an insane attention to detail and the ability to do 10 things at once. This is my nature and I embrace it because it makes me good at my job. If you’ve met me, you know I’m not a very Zen kind of person. I’m type A. But the call of now from all of my devices and alerts has given me pause to consider whether it’s making me a better PR professional or just a more manic one.
As it turns out, my 22-month old had the answer. She’s been working very hard at teaching me how to be here, now. As all parents know, it’s pretty close to impossible to think about anything else when you’re in the midst of a meltdown over which pair of shoes your toddler is going to wear to the park. But in all seriousness, I get small slices of each weekday to see her, so I made a decision that during those periods, I would sign off. Cue the panic alarms!
Miraculously, my experiment is working. I am not missing anything, I’m coming up with better ideas for work, and am finding more moments to enjoy with my family. It turns out that “here and now” is more than a Letters to Cleo song. So cheers to the here and now, but please, don’t make me respond to every message within the minute. I’m silencing my notifications, pledging NOT to check messages in the park and banning email from meetings! Wish me luck.
Monday, November 1, 2010, 9:37 AM
[ General]
Original post located at: inkhousepr.blogspot.com/2010/10/currency...
The notion of “content” has taken on new meaning in the age of social media. Public relations used to be limited in many people’s minds to media relations. But today, social media has given us all a platform for becoming part of broader conversations and creating dialogues that previously were not possible. In fact, the contribution of interesting content has become a virtual currency to broader recognition today.
This requires communications professionals to consider content in a different light. It’s not a 180-degree turn though, it’s a slight skewing of the angle. After all, content creation has always been the job of PR – a press release is actually supposed to be written just like a news story so that it can easily be repackaged as one. Ironically, those guidelines were developed (and proliferated through the AP Style guide) many years ago, but they are more important today than ever as bloggers simply repackage press releases as news stories.
Before the advent of real-time communications and social media, PR’s job was also to be a conduit for expert’s perspectives on the news to the reporters who cared about them. We had to identify issues of relevance and connect the experts to the masses. These same principles apply today as we look to help our clients create the content so critical to their visibility with target customers and partners. What’s changed is the pace and the channel – virtually anyone can connect with key influencers on social media.
So what does it take to break through all of this conversation? We tell our clients that they should still broadcast their messages when it’s appropriate, but that they must also contribute to the dialogue and join the conversations that matter in their industries. Remember though, that contributing does not mean posting your press releases on your blog. You need to add something useful – a perspective, data, case study, video – anything that adds context, background or interest.
The good news is that this content does not have to be created from scratch – it can be found within virtually any organization. Here is where you can start to look:
1. Mine your data. What data do you have internally that could reveal something no one else knows about your industry? One year, we worked with a mobile voice recognition company and we asked them to look at the top 10 most common voice-powered Web searches. We didn’t know what we’d find, but the results showed that on mobile, people search for destinations such as “Facebook.com.” When we looked at Google’s most popular desktop search terms, we saw a big difference. On the desktop, people search for topics such as “Michael Jackson.” We wrote a press release and got a bunch of coverage during the slow week between Christmas and New Year’s.
2. Read the news. Do your executives have an opinion about what is going on in the news? If so, get it out there on your blog, through Twitter and directly to reporters who are covering the topic. Just make sure your executive has the background to make him or her an expert. And if that fails, make sure they have something controversial to say – controversy almost always breeds interest.
3. Listen to your customers. What trends are taking place within your customers’ organizations? One of our clients offers disaster recovery and business continuity software and after hurricane Katrina, we discovered a number of customers who had used the software, and also had amazing stories about how they helped their businesses continue operations in the midst of the terrible disaster. We pulled these stories together into advice for other companies as they prepare their corporate disaster recovery plans.
Once you find this content, the next job is packaging it and timing it appropriately to make an impact (see our post on how to blow a press release). This topic could fill a number of additional blog posts, but the key to creating conversations is fostering a two-way dialogue. The starting point can be a press release, blog post, video, Tweet or Facebook status. It’s what you do with it afterward that creates the conversation.
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