When will PR professionals learn

As PR professionals our job is to get our news out and to get it covered in the media that matters. I’ll repeat that last bit “to get it covered in the media that matters”. We should not judge ourselves on the number of releases we write and issue it is the amount of times our messages appear in the media that our target audience reads that matters.

This was brought home to when reading an interview in PRWeek with the editor of a web site. He says that his pet peeve is receiving emails saying “this’ll be good for your news section” when he doesn’t have a news section.

This is one thing that I keep stressing to the people I work with. If you want to get coverage you need to know who your audience are, you need to know what media to use to reach that audience and you need to have a clear idea of what you need to do to get coverage in that media. The scattergun approach is just not effective.

Approaching editors in the right way and only giving them news that matters to their audience establishes your credibility and makes it a “no brainer” when they receive material from you.

This works both ways of course. Within my sphere of technical communications I often get magazines calling me and asking if they can reproduce my press release for a small fee. My first question is always, so tell me about your readership. Occasionally I get, “I don’t know somebody else deals with that” or more often I get “our magazine goes to senior managers and decision makers in xyz industry” to which my response is generally “so tell me why a senior manager would be interested in reading about my widget”. That normally throws them.

If these people want me to pay for a placement with them they need to do their research, they need to understand what audience I am trying to reach with my press release and modify their pitch accordingly. Without that they have no credibility with me.

www.weetpr.com

Social sites and their use for technical pr

I am exploring social networks at the moment and trying to understand just how it can help me with B2B Pr to a technical audience. I am learning lots and having fun along the way. I am making connections with new people and re-connecting to old friends.

I am a big fan of twitter at the moment, much to the amusement of my kids (luddites). I have been following Stephen Fry, the british Genius and a hero of mine. It was kind of nice to get a message the other day to say that Stephen is now following me. Next time I see him on the box I can say "There's Stephen, a follower of mine".