BusinessWire #Fail: How to Burn Bridges With a Long-Time and Ex-Loyal Customer

I'm having a dispute with Business Wire about a bill, and I wanted to alert you to the situation and urge caution in continuing to use this distribution service.

To make a long story short, I mistakenly ordered $1,200 worth of add-on distribution services to what would otherwise have been a $600 press release. I was able to bill my client the $600, but I'm on the hook for the other $1,200. I figured out my mistake within a couple of days of placing the order, but by then it was too late. We got absolutely no coverage out of this extra stuff I ordered - in fact, I've never even seen any evidence that the materials were actually distributed.

I've paid the bill for the actual release, and I'm trying to negotiate a compromise with them on this bill. They've offered only a $200 discount, so I'd still have to pay $1,000 out of my own pocket - for absolutely nothing.

I'm told this has already been brought to the attention of an SVP, but I'm going to take it all the way to CEO Cathy Baron Tamraz if necessary. And I'm taking it to you as well.

Needless to say, there are many other choices for press release distribution besides Business Wire. You might want to keep this story in mind if you are still using their service, especially the part about their ordering process, which is confusing and does not meet current Internet shopping cart standards.

For me, Business Wire still has a chance to make this right before I have to pay the $1,000 to avoid collections. If they don't, I will certainly take my business elsewhere, after almost 20 years as a customer. And I'll be sure to keep you fully posted on their response to this situation.

Two New Ways to Use Texting in Media Relations

Here are two tidbit's from yesterday's Bulldog Reporter PR University audio conference on email/online pitching (which I moderated):

• Dave Satterfield of Sitrick & Co. said that he has texted reporters to answer questions and make clarifications  during major announcement events, while they were all in the room together


• The Vatican has been send text messages to followers and the media since 2003. Kevin Dugan of the Bad Pitch Blog said one of the reasons was to reduce the possibility of Vatican-related hoaxes being picked up by the media as legit.

"Vitch" is the first new PR catchword of 2010

Why send a plain old written PR pitch when you can send a "vitch" -- a video pitch?

That's right, the new thing is to make your pitch via video. It's certainly simple enough to do -- plan your video, shoot it with an inexpensive video camera, upload it to Youtube and spread the link.

Makes a lot of sense, too. Video is such an incredibly powerful medium, and now, through the evolution of technology, we can all be fast and cheap video producers.

The key thing here is that a "vitch" can't just be you reading your boring, stilted press release into the camera. You need to show something -- the newsmakers, the location, something, anything tangible. This, by itself, takes PR people out of their jargon-filed comfort zone.

I just picked up on this word so I don't have any good examples of video pitches and their results, but the whole thing makes a lot of sense to me. I plan to try it this month just to see what happens.

Company Gets $500,000 in VC Funding to Bridge the Gap Between PR and Media

I am one who believes there will always be a chasm between the media and PR, unless and until the media dies and all media is PR. Which I hope does not happen.

I've been working on the media/PR divide much of my career. I was known as a sympathic media person who helped PR people figure out if they had a story for me, and as a PR person, I've worked hard to teach PR people how to do a better job interacting with the media.

I've mostly considered it a lost cause to try to educate the media about PR, even though that was one of my original goals. Media people generally split into two camps: those who "get" the role of PR and deal with it, and those who "hate" PR and always bitch about it. Sometimes those in the latter group migrate to the former, but they need to do it in their own time. No use trying to teach them -- their ears do not hear.

Despite this persistent divide, some people obviously think it can be overcome. At least, that appears to be the gist of the strategy of a new company, Plato's Forms, which says is mission is:

developing solutions for companies and journalists that help address some of these challenging aspects of communications in the online media environment.

At this time, they say no more. In Silicon Valley-speak, they are in "stealth" mode, meaning they are developing their offering behind closed doors and plan to make a big splash when they unveil it at a later date. For now, they've got a half-mil to work with, partly from the pocket of founder Darryl Siry.

Their name, btw, refers to the philosopher Plato, who, their web site says, "held that we could not comprehend the true form of things, and could only grasp the reflections of their true meaning, as if they were shadows reflected on the wall." At least one philosophy major disputes this reading, however, judging from the comments about the company on a TechCrunch post.

Cosmetics Gravy Train Stops for Beauty Blogger, and She Blames PR

Here's an interesting post from the other side of the PR/blogger divide: it's a well written, well reasoned post by a beauty blogger about her experience dealing with PR for cosmetics and other personal care products.

After starting her blog in 2007, she says she was besieged with free product -- full-size samples of everything she could possibly want. She describes being fairly journalistic about methodically trying the products and reviewing them. But more came in than she could handle and she gave a lot of it away to her friends and readers.

Then, the recession hit, and the companies a) got chintzy with the samples and b) wanted more out of sending a sample than the possibility of a post -- they wanted guaranteed good coverage.

It's a good post and worth reading for a firsthand account of how the other half lives. My value-add will be the PR perspective:

There are effectively no barriers to entry in blogging -- anyone can be a waitress one day and "fashion and beauty blogger" the next (or both at the same time).

Pre-Internet, the barriers to being a recognized and influential writer were fairly high, which made it possible for PR to figure out who to deal with and what they were getting out of the arrangement.

Now, since anyone and everyone can position themselves as "influential," PR has a lot more trouble to deal with. Accept anyone's claim to legitimacy and you end up giving away your products, or set up barriers and get blowback like this.

The “keyword trifecta” and other great web writing tips

Tips from today’s PR University web writing audio conference:

• Your press releases should contain a “keyword trifecta”: Your keyword search term should be in your headline and your first paragraph, and the keyword in your first paragraph should link to your web site. HT: Sarah Skerik, PR Newswire


• Be generous with your links — people often don’t want to include outside links because users may leave their site when they click on the link. But being generous makes you part of the conversation and is a win-win for everyone. HT: Debbie Weil


• Cowboy up! “Own your space and your authority” — meaning, be the communications expert and stand firm on what’s right and wrong in communications. HT: Skerik

And here’s the real bonus — a twit stream of tips and observations from the session — free!

Silicon Valley PR Gets the New York Times Treatment

I was out on holiday for most of last week and so missed the opportunity to offer some timely insights into the glorious coverage of Silicon Valley PR in the New York Times on Saturday, July 4 (an aside -- why does our industry get coverage only on national holidays and other B-list days?).

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="111" caption="Miller"][/caption]

Young Times tech reporter Claire Cain Miller discovered the latest it-girl in Sili Valley PR, Brooke Hammerling, who, the story asserts, is at the forefront of a new trend because she is as keen on pitching influential bloggers and other industry leaders as she is on pitching the professional journalists in the mainstream media.

Holy Reporter's Notebook, Batman -- stop the digital presses!

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="252" caption="Hammerling"]
[/caption]

Among Miller's other "findings" in this 3,000-word stemwinder:

• That Ms. Hammerling is, among other things, obsequious to a fault, folding her strategic tent at the merest assertion of a different idea from her A-list client


• "In the new world of social media, P.R. people must know hundreds of writers, bloggers and Twitter users instead of having six top reporters on speed dial."


• "Despite all these new channels, it’s still essential to know which mainstream publications to approach. If a start-up is seeking venture funding or new engineers ... PR still looks to The San Jose Mercury News, VentureWire or TechCrunch to get the word out."


• “She drops names like a boat anchor, so shamelessly, but at the same time, it’s, ‘Larry, Larry,’ and I think she’s lying and then I get on the phone and it’s Larry Ellison. She got him on the cellphone; I didn’t,” says a journalist who did not want to be identified.

OK -- enough having fun at Miller and Hammerling's expense. What are my takeaways?

When is a press release not a press release?

The term "press release" is a whopper of a misnomer. The public communication we call a "press release" hasn't simply been a message to the media for a long time.

Now, though, the web makes the term virtually meaningless. So many different people and audiences other than the media can access our press releases in real time that calling it a press release is almost a blunder. [If someone's got a better phrase, let me know]

So if reaching many different audiences is now both a given and an objective of our releases, what do we need to know to make the most of the opportunity?

This, in a nutshell, is what we will be talking about on Wednesday at 1 PM ET on the PR University audio conference, "New Ways PR Can Use SEO and Smarter Writing Techniques to Reach Wider Audiences."

I'll be moderating and will be joined on the call by:

• Paul Furiga, ABC, President, WordWrite Communications


• Laura Sturaitis, Senior Vice President, Media Services & Product Strategy, Business Wire


• Paul Dyer, eMedia Director, WeissComm Partners, Invigorate Communications


• Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR

We'll be covering these and other topics:

• SEO Fundamentals: How to conduct preliminary keyword research—plus online tools and new techniques for finding your company or brand’s keyword sweet spot


• Word counts, hyperlinks, headline writing rules and other SEO guidelines for optimizing press release copy without alienating readers


• Using video, audio, photos and multimedia to boost your online footprint


• SMR Update: What a social media news release (SMR) is and how it differs from a traditional press release


• Overcoming the challenges of creating and distributing effective social media news releases


• Online Distribution: How to seed your releases, announcements and ideas in blogs, forums and even Facebook, LinkedIn and beyond


• Measuring your success: new tools for measuring the effectiveness of your press releases

Hope you can join us!

When You Pitch the Media, It's Not About You

If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about PR, it would be this: to make all press releases and PR pronouncements about the interests of readers, users and editors, not about the organization issuing the press release.

Think about it: aside from pronouncements from the White House, how often are news stories just verbatim press releases from an organization? Virtually never, right? Instead, all news stories are broad stories about a particular situation, with many elements, possibly including you, your boss or your organization.

Yet to this day, the vast majority of press releases are written in that stilted, third-person style ("So-and-so announced today") as if we were contributing an article to an imaginary media outlet.

Why, just today, I surfed over to PitchEngine.com to check it out -- this is a site that intends to help PR people shift from issuing stilted old media-style press releases to new style press releases that are supposedly more user-friendly for the social media environment. But they don't apparently have editors stopping users from taking their old third-person perspective and jamming it into the SMR format.

A couple of today's PitchEngine headlines, plucked fresh from the site:

• THE WILMA THEATER Announces Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo as the final selection for its 2009-2010 Season


• Paws Unlimited Foundation Holds their Open House to Raise Awareness and Funding for their No-Kill, Ten-Acre Animal Shelter in the Greater New York Region

Do you care? Why should you?

But, there was a ray of light in this headline:

• Revenue Sharing Cuts from Governor, Legislature to Trigger More Crime, Layoffs Statewide

It's about Michigan (should have been in the headline) and was posted by the Michigan Municipal League. But at least it's about other people and not about them!

To communicate in today's world, think "infosnacks"

Tweets. Text messages. Emails. Emoticons. LOL.

You name it, and we can shorten it into a tidbit of information. That's an "infosnack."

No longer do people want to "digest" a full newspaper article or curl up with a good book. Give me the story in 140 characters (twitter) or even less (TXTing) and let's get it over with.

So -- to get to the point -- what sorts of "infosnacks" are you providing to your key audiences? Are they the usual corporate inedible mush, or is it something tasty and brief?

This is one of the main challenges in PR today -- in some ways bigger than the Internet revolution itself. People don't have time, or don't want to take the time, to understand what you are trying to say. They want it now, fast.

That means:

• Short email subject lines


• Tweets


• Social media style press releases


• 60 second videos


• TXT messages

Give it to them the way they want it, or find yourself asking why you're being ignored.

Online Media Echo Chamber Tries and Convicts Domino's

I'm skeptical about the supposedly major damage done to the Domino's brand by a gross YouTube video a couple of its employees made showing them sneezing on a sandwich and doing other inappropriate food-handling things (you can search for the video online if you want).

Soon after the video hit YouTube and started to make the rounds, Domino's responded with its own video apology, and they posted apologies on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Still, online communications pundits seem to believe that the company didn't do enough, fast enough, to combat this incident and that the video and their response had "damaged" the brand.

You know a story like this is peaking when the New York Times weighs in, and so they did, saying,

In just a few days, Domino’s reputation was damaged.

The proof of brand damage? Found online, of course:

The perception of its quality among consumers went from positive to negative since Monday, according to the research firm YouGov, which holds online surveys of about 1,000 consumers every day regarding hundreds of brands.

An online survey? Is that a joke?

Two observations: Domino's pizza is terrible: cheese and tomato sauce on cardboard. It's hard to imagine that their brand's "quality" image was materially harmed by a sophomoric (obviously) online video. And how many of Domino's core customers are tracking the brand online? I didn't do any man-on-the-street interviews, but I doubt that the "average" Domino's customer cares what is being said about the company online.

Even as powerful as the online world can be at times, it's still only a tiny fraction of the real world. My advice is to keep that in mind, and in perspective.

UC San Diego PR Nightmare!

It's that time of year again, as parents and high school seniors anxiously await the 'fat' or 'thin' envelopes from the colleges of their choice. Only this year and for some time, colleges have also sent out emails announcing the news.

That's what UC San Diego did this week -- except they sent the "you're accepted" email to all 47,000 people who applied -- not just the 17,000 who were accepted! Oops!

“It was one of the greatest moments in my life and then, boom, it was one of the lowest,” said Arya Shamuilian. “UCSD was my first-choice university.”

UCSD apparently recognized the mistake immediately and sent out a correction and apology. Then, the admissions office stayed in late to take angry phone calls.

One of the hallmarks of a crisis is that it becomes public and requires a public response. After all, we all face fire drills every day in our jobs. They only become crises when our problems become big and widely known.

In this case, it would seem that UCSD did a pretty good job. They quickly issued a follow-up email, they made themselves personally available, and they posted everything on the web.

This last part is the learning of the day. Since we all have access to web search, it's crazy to hide behind false walls trying to avoid sharing information under circumstances like these. People will find the stuff anyway, and you'll look extra bad in the process.

So I give UCSD an A for how they handled this crisis.

Which New Media Skills Do PR People Need to Compete?

This post is a follow-up to a great post by PR Pro Sarah Evans called, "Top 4 new skills all PR professionals must have." You MUST read this post. Evans' top four skills are: basic HTML coding, SEO for PR, how to use a Social Media Release, and online presence (on Facebook, Twitter, blogging, et al).

I'm just going to add on here with some additional thoughts:

• HTML coding, while critical, is not as important as having the basic ability to use a Content Management System (CMS). What's a CMS? It's the blogging software I'm using right now to write this post. Using it successfully doesn't require any knowledge of HTML, though such knowledge does help. A CMS can also be used to manage a web site (I use one to manage the web site of my client, El Dorado Ventures), and again, using it doesn't require HTML knowledge, though again, it helps. Either way, if you are scared of using a CMS, get over it -- fast.


• Need to know more about HTML? Needless to say, there are a gazillion web sites devoted to HTML and web programming, but for starters, here's one to bookmark: HTML Code Tutorial.


• Newswire distribution services: It has gotten to the point where I rarely if ever rely on the traditional newswires to disseminate my press releases. I think it's much more useful to distribute your release via a quality email distribution list of journalists you think might cover your news. What the newswires do offer that you can't get anywhere else is third-party web site distribution of your release. Which means: when you put a release on a newswire, they turn around a push it out to potentially hundreds of web sites that immediately create a new web page with your release. For example, here's a list of the sites that re-use Business Wire releases, and here's an example of a release I put on Business Wire that is now also posted on Reuters.com.


• Using online media databases: do you know how to navigate and use online media databases such as Cision or Vocus? You must.


• Video: Do you know how to make a low-cost/free video and post it on YouTube? If not, get up to speed ASAP.


• Blogger relations: very different from traditional media relations in every sense. Every single blogger is different (take the difference between me and Sarah Evans for example -- same 'beat' but totally different blogs) and needs to be approached in a customized way.

These skills, of course, are in addition to the three core skills of PR: writing, pitching and being a communications strategist.

Blogger Research is an Unavoidable Chore

I'm in the midst of creating a fairly important list of bloggers for a client. When completed, this list has the potential to generate key publicity for this client. Yet unlike creating a list of mainstream media targets, I'm finding this process more and more tedious.

The reason is implicit in the nature of blogging -- every blog and blogger is unique. Every one has a different point of view and publication schedule. Most of the bloggers I'm targeting are industry people blogging on the side -- that doesn't diminish their importance to my client, but it does provide some likely explanation for the infrequency of their posts. It also makes it especially important that we research them and know exactly who they are before pitching them, because my clients could easily find themselves across a conference table from one of them.

All told, there's really no way around the tedium at this point. It would be nice if one of the media databases had already done this research so I could just pull down a list and go, but they haven't as far as I know. And with millions of blogs out there, it seems unlikely that they ever will.

This is one of the dark realities of the growth of online media and the fall of the mainstream media. Reaching out effectively to individual bloggers is time-intensive, and given the minute audiences of most blogs, probably not cost-effective for most PR people. Yet spamming bloggers with canned pitches, while cheap, is likely to be ineffective as well.

This is why people are talking about the rise of social media (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) as ways to "pitch" stories into the blogosphere and online without resorting to time-consuming list-building. But social media pitching has its own drawbacks, namely the indirect nature of such pitches and the loss of control once you put something out there.

Journalists Expect to Receive Your Press Release Via Email

The headline of this post may sound stunningly obvious, but let me repeat and explain: the vast majority of journalists prefer to find out about your press release by getting it in their email inbox.

According to a survey of more than 2,300 journalists conducted by Bulldog Reporter and TEKgroup International, email was the preferred method of delivery among 75% of respondents. Other methods trailed far behind:

Commercial newswires (such as PR Newswire or BusinessWire) 8%
Official alerts sent from a corporate online newsroom 7%
U.S. Postal Service 2%
Fax 0.8%
Express delivery 0.5%

So, should you skip using expensive wire services altogether? In some cases, that may be the right and cost-effective way to go. But wire services offer an important secondary benefit: giving your release third-party credibility and placement of your release in databases like Factiva, and on web sites that simply post press releases verbatim.

Nevertheless, pay a lot of attention to your email pitches -- they're crucial. Write good, non-spammy subject lines. Keep your story pitch at the beginning of the email brief. Include links to background material -- not the materials themselves.

If your corporate web site looks credible, media sites will link to it

Time and again, the biggest complaint from journalists trying to do company research on the web is corporate web sites are hard to navigate and hard to use. "If they're not usable, we'll just go to Google," says Dan Gaines, managing editor of LATimes.com.

But a good credible corporate site? Gaines says that more and more, LATimes.com and other media sites will link directly to your site if you've got relevant information for their users.

Take that as golden advice. And for more such advice, tune in next Tuesday, March 3, at 1pm ET for a FREE webinar I will be moderating with Gaines, and Ibrey Woodall, Marketing Communications Director of TEKgroup International, a purveyor of corporate newsrooms. You can sign up for the webinar here.

This free 60-minute webinar for PR professionals will explore and analyze the results of the latest Bulldog Reporter/TEKgroup International survey of journalist usage of the Internet and other resources to research, follow and report news and features material.

More than 2,000 journalists participated in the survey, which covered how journalists use news sites, social networks, email and online newsrooms to research the news.

News Wires Are for Web Dissemination, Not Reaching Newsrooms

I did a release this morning about my interesting new client, Shareholder Representative Services. They are a very successful new company pioneering a new market niche in the venture capital space.

The release was about a new client win. Now, the vast, vast majority of new client press releases are turgid and boring and will get picked up only by the narrowest trade media, if at all. In our case, this client win probably won't get picked up by any trade media, because the niche is so new.

So I submitted a release to Business Wire with the following headline and lead:

Shareholder Representative Services (SRS) Relieves Venture Capitalist of the Stockholder Representative Headache
Former Shareholders of Era Systems Name SRS as Their New Representative in Merger With SRA International

San Francisco, CA – February 19, 2009 – Being the representative of the shareholders who sold a venture-backed company to a big corporation is a lot of work – even if the merger goes flawlessly. Venture capitalist Jonathan Perl with Boulder Ventures knows firsthand – he has been a shareholder representative before, and recently signed up to do it again, in the merger of Era Systems Corporation, which was acquired in 2008 by SRA International (NYSE: SRX).

This time, Perl thought better of his decision and turned the job over to Shareholder Representative Services (SRS), the professional choice for managing the post-closing escrow period after a merger.

To my surprise, I had a call from Business Wire after submitting this release last night, with the editor there saying that this wasn't a properly written release, because it had a soft news lead, and that "the media" prefers hard news leads. They recommended I rewrite it, though I didn't get the call in time and the release went through as submitted.

Media Still Underwhelmed By Press Areas of Corporate Web Sites

Here's another area that PR needs to get right yesterday if we are to survive or grow as a business over the long-term: meeting the needs of journalists via our corporate web sites.

All too often, our sites are repositories of incomplete or merely promotional information, rather than the facts and figures that journalists need to do their jobs. As I've always said, the easiest way to get in the media is to be available and cooperative when the media calls (or emails, or searches your web site).

Jakob Neilsen, the guru of web usability, recently released an update to his report on how journalist use the web for research. If you have the budget and you are responsible for the press area of your company's site, you must spend the measly $248 Neilsen charges for his 287-page report.

If not, you can read the summary here.

Here's a taste of Neilsen's report: the top-5 reasons journalists gave for visiting a company's website are:

• Locate a PR contact (name and telephone number)


• Find basic facts about the company (spelling of an executive's name, his/her age, headquarters location, and so on)


• Discern the company's spin on events


• Check financial information


• Download images to use as illustrations in stories

Note that "buying into your promotional hype" or "watching a video of the CEO give a speech" are not among the things journalists are looking for on your site.

Arrington Gets Spat On, Gets Death Threats

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington reports that media relations has gone to a whole new level of bad: he was spat upon this week and was the subject of a death threat last summer.

Serious stuff, and seriously out-of-bounds, it goes without saying. Arrington writes a blog, for godsakes. Yes, it is influential, but no company's life or death literally depends on Arrington's good graces. At least, that's what I think is at the root of this -- TechCrunch is known to drive traffic, so everyone wants Arrington to sprinkle some of his pixie dust on them. When he doesn't, people get disappointed -- or, it seems, worse.

So point of perspective #1 -- Arrington writes a blog. If your marketing strategy depends on getting mentioned in his blog, your company sucks and is going to die anyway. If you don't want your company to suck, find other ways of getting publicity.

Point of perspective #2 -- Arrington is a rare figure in the media, someone who has insisted on making up his own rules. I believe that these stupid actions by certain individuals are an unfortunate reaction to his go-it-alone style. So I would a) advise serious PR and media relations people to take a breath and continue to do PR with TechCrunch using proven and intelligent techniques, and b) I would advise Arrington to look at how he does business, compare it to how other successful media franchises do business, and adjust accordingly.

As Arrington titled his post, "something's got to change."

Obama's Rhetoric Tops My 2009 Comms Wish List

It has been a long, long time since we've had a president or other national leader with the rhetorical skills of Barack Obama. It is going to be a treat to listen to him talk and use the power of communications to push his agenda.

So Obama tops my 2009 Comms Wish List. Here are my five wishes for 2009:

1. That Obama's powerful rhetoric and use of language begins to spur a rise across the nation in literacy, and in the business world, that more comms professionals are inspired to raise the quality of their language and communications skills in their business communications


2. That the economic downturn is less severe and less widespread than feared, because often, comms and marketing are among the first cutbacks


3. A corollary to the above: that there are lots of examples of top managers deciding to maintain or even increase their comms and marketing budgets this year because they realize, correctly, that now is the time to boost communications spending, not cut it


4. That I start to see more PR practitioners embrace, really embrace the power of social media and new online technologies to spread their message, instead of just putting out an old-fashioned press release and then praying for traditional media pick up.


5. Here's my curveball: that I see lots of goofy and inane PR and marketing stunts that defy logic and provide juicy fodder for bloggers like me!