On to more questions.

Q. What is the PR industry’s reputation today? How do other industries view Public Relations as a practice? Is PR being taken seriously everywhere? How has this changed in the past few years (if at all)?

A. I’ll answer this two ways. First, and this is just my personal approach to life – not just public relations – I don’t spend any time contemplating or thinking too much about how people view public relations. I’m usually too busy working to think about what someone may or may not think of the public relations industry. And the reality is that there will always be negative people, and I long ago realized that life’s just too short to spend much time trying to change people’s opinions about public relations – or politics.

Second, you can point to a wide number of public “scandals” that people blame on public relations. BP’s numerous communication mistakes after the Gulf oil spill. The current Penn State crisis (I’d be willing to be there was a PR person involved at some point – giving horrible advice on preserving Penn State’s “image.”) There are PR mistakes made every single day, just as there are business mistakes made every day, journalism/reporting mistakes made every day, etc.

Those mistakes should not – and frankly – don’t define the industry as a whole. Do they give PR a black eye? Absolutely. Do they invalidate all the honest, hard PR work going on every day, nope.

For me, it all boils down to what I bring to the table for the companies I work with. Companies, especially, startups live inside a bubble. That bubble is necessary to design software, sling code, and ship product. However, that bubble leads companies to believe that they’re doing life-changing, totally revolutionary work. While that might be the case, reporters need and thrive on context. Where does company X fit into the overall industry landscape, what about their product is truly unique, and what is similar to competitors?

It’s my job to work with companies to tell a compelling story about their product or service within the context of the overall industry and the overall news conversation of the week or month. To me, that’s honest, fun work, and I sleep soundly every night regardless of what some person or persons may be ranting about the ills of the PR industry.

Q. What is the most valuable skill for recent PR grads looking for a job today?

A. I touched on this in my earlier post answering these questions. My biggest piece of advice, and I can’t stress it enough is DON’T WAIT.

If you’ve investigated PR, and you think you’d like to work in the industry, DON’T WAIT.

DON’T WAIT – for professors to insist that you be well read and well-informed on daily news. Even if you plan to go into celebrity or entertainment PR, every PR professional should be reading every single day – the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today (at a minimum). Those newspapers, along with the Washington Post and LA Times drive the news conversations of the day and the week.

If you’re reading newspapers and blogs every single day, you can start to make connections and see how the companies and organizations you’re working for can fit into the ongoing news conversation.

DON’T WAIT – to learn digital content creation. Build a blog. If you don’t consider yourself technical, there are literally tons of online tutorials for people who are “non-technical”. Figure out what you’re interested in, and start writing about, recording video commentaries, start an audio podcast. Begin building your audience today. Those skills will be invaluable and required for PR professionals.

DON’T WAIT – to get PR experience. Sure, pursue internships and participate fully in any classroom assignments, but you can start gaining PR experience today. In every town, in every city, there are tons of worthwhile organizations – charities, non-profits – desperate for PR help. Help them build or revamp their website. Volunteer to help them with their Twitter, Facebook, Google+ strategies. Help introduce them to local media and local news reporters. Write press releases for them.

Classroom experience is valuable, but in-the-trenches PR experience and learning how to build an audience online and interact with that audience are invaluable talents and skills that will help you gain your first job in PR – and succeed and thrive over the long haul.

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During the first dot com boom, press release strategies for PR exploded in popularity. Dot com companies desperate for press attention pumped out press releases once or twice a week (or even more). Press releases about new hires, new buttons added to a website, new office pet policies at the company… It was out of control.

Consequently, a generation of entrepreneurs formed their opinion about public relations based on the part of the process that was visible to them – press releases distributed digitally by a variety of press release distribution companies. What many entrepreneurs and CMOs never saw were the short, one-on-one, relevant emails sent to specific, targeted reporters. Nor did they hear the phone conversations between reporters and PR professionals, again rooted in specific, relevant information of interest to what the reporter writes about on a daily basis – not desperate cold calls with information in which the reporter would never be interested.

History of press releases

Do you know how the concept of press releases began? Here’s a brief except from a SearchEngineWatch.com story noting the 100th birthday of the press release:

“On October 28, 1906, at least 50 people lost their lives when a three-car train of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s newly equipped electric service jumped a trestle at Atlantic City, NJ, and plunged into the Thoroughfare creek.”

That afternoon, Ivy Lee, who some consider to be the father of modern PR, created the first press release. The Pennsylvania Railroad was one of his clients. Following the accident, Lee not only convinced the railroad to distribute a public statement, he also convinced them to provide a special train to get reporters to the scene of the accident.

The New York Times was so impressed with this innovative approach to corporate communications that it printed the first press release—verbatim—on Oct. 30, 1906 as a “Statement from the Road.” In the weeks that followed, both newspapers and public officials effusively praised Pennsylvania Railroad for its openness and honesty.

PR would certainly be easy if the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, etc., just printed your press release verbatim, but we all know that’s not the case.

SEO press release strategies?

Following the explosion of press releases during the dot com boom of the late 1990s, a new SEO press release strategy grew up. It started in the 2000s and continues today. Some SEO agencies and consultants followed press release tactics to boost a site’s natural search engine rankings by issuing lots of press releases with great anchor text links to a company’s website. As is typical with most SEO strategies, there are other SEO experts who disagree with press releases for SEO. I wanted to mention the concept of press releases for SEO purposes. However, using press releases for SEO is almost completely unrelated to using press releases with the intention of interesting a reporter, journalist or blogger to write about your company.

Reporters don’t care about press releases

Do reporters care about press releases? No. I have many friends who are reporters (and personal friends that I don’t approach about my clients). When discussing press releases, I often tell clients. I’ve never, ever heard a reporter say, “I can’t wait to open my email and read all the press releases that PR people sent me.” It just doesn’t happen. Why? Because 99.9% of press releases are written in a formal, stilted tone. They’re overwritten and often bury the importance of the announcement in formal language. Despite the pleas of numerous PR professionals and David Meerman Scott’s excellent and impassioned Gobbldeygook Manifesto, CMOs just can’t help including industry buzzwords like “best of breed,” “robust,” etc. Reporters don’t read those words. It’s that simple. If they read the release at all, they literally mentally block out those buzzwords, and they try to decipher the formal language, as they ask themselves, “Is there something here that I should care about?”

If reporters don’t care about press releases, what should you do? Relevant, targeted emails and phone calls. Relevant = news that is of direct interest to the types of stories that a reporter writes and what they care about. If a reporter doesn’t write a personnel column, don’t ever send them an email about new executive hires. If a reporter only writes about a vendor from the perspective of a company using that vendor, with specific success stats, then don’t send the reporter news strictly about a vendor. If you’re a vendor or a PR person working a vendor, don’t pick up the phone or send an email to the reporter until you’ve got a client who is using the product ready to talk – and with some stats to back up what you’re saying.

5 Sentence Email Rule

If you’re sending emails to a reporter, remember the 5 sentence email rule. Don’t send a reporter a multi-page press release. Keep your email to five sentences. You can learn more about the five sentence email rule here and here. Reporters, more than just about anyone else, are deluged, bombarded, and inundated with emails. If you follow the 5 sentence email rule with anyone, it should be in the emails that you send reporters.

On that note, don’t forget the importance of your email subject line. Yes, reporters often delete emails strictly based on subject lines. Write, revise, and re-revise your subject lines until you have a compelling subject line that piques a reporter’s interest.

Finally, is there any use for press releases? Certainly. Press releases are very effective tools to convey information – not to reporters, but to potential clients and potential partners. When potential clients and partners reach your website and start exploring the “About Us” section, press releases can give them a very good idea of what your company is doing and what your products are capable of (in addition to your marketing/sales info).

How do you use press releases to market/publicize your company?

(The image for this blog post is from the Sweet Smell of Success from 1957. If you work in the PR industry and you haven’t seen this movie, stop what you’re doing and rent it now. From IMDB.com, “Powerful but unethical Broadway columnist J.J. Hunsecker coerces unscrupulous press agent Sidney Falco into breaking up his sister’s romance with a jazz musician.”)

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However, many companies unfortunately spend so much time every day immersed in the verbal and written shorthand of their company, it’s often difficult for them to communicate about their business in a way that’s easy to understand and easy to comprehend what makes their company truly unique.

I’ve repeatedly had discussions with clients about communicating with reporters or drafting an initial press release about a new service or product. I repeatedly use the “cocktail party” example. You need to be able to explain what your company does as if you were meeting a group of people at a cocktail party and they ask you what your company does and they have zero technical knowledge. Some might call it an elevator pitch. Regardless of what you call it, it’s invaluable. If you can’t explain in 2-3 concise sentences the compelling reason for your service or product, in plain English that a technical newbie can understand, you’ve got a problem. You should spend the time necessary to perfect that explanation, because busy consumers and potential customers or users won’t give you a second chance.

On more than one occasion, I’ve gotten into serious disagreements with clients about the tone and style of press releases. Some business executives equate a stiff, formal corporate tone in a press release as somehow imparting gravitas to a company’s announcement. I just don’t agree. Stiff, formal corporate communications is simply a holdover from an antiquated approach to corporate communications.

Richard Millington, the founder of FeverBee Limited, an online community consultancy, recently wrote about this issue specifically related to companies communicating to their online communities. Take a look at Millington’s post for a hilarious – and painful – example of how one company tried to communicate with their online fans.

Warren Buffett, the unparalleled investor, has long championed plain English to discuss complex financial matters. In 1998, Warren Buffett wrote the introduction to an SEC document about how to write clear SEC disclosure documents. (As an aside, the SEC obviously has its limits on “informal” communications to investors. Revealed in Steven Levy’s new book about Google, In the Plex, the SEC wasn’t pleased with Google’s IPO filings because of the founders informal and unorhtodox letter to potential investors. The SEC ordered multiple revisions.)

Here’s a portion of Buffett’s intro:

“One unoriginal but useful tip: Write with a specific person in mind. When writing Berkshire Hathaway’s annual report, I pretend that I’m talking to my sisters. I have no trouble picturing them: Though highly intelligent, they are not experts in accounting or finance. They will understand plain English, but jargon may puzzle them. My goal is simply to give them the information I would wish them to supply me if our positions were reversed. To succeed, I don’t need to be Shakespeare; I must, though, have a sincere desire to inform.

No siblings to write to? Borrow mine: Just begin with “Dear Doris and Bertie.””

Takeaways:

- Can you explain what your company does in 2-3 easy to understand, yet compelling, sentences? If not, write, revise, and redraft, until you can.

- Is your insider knowledge of your company and industry creeping into your press releases and content on your web site? Ask a spouse or friend – in a completely different line of work – to take a look at a recent press release or website redesign and give you their feedback. Can they easily understand what you’re trying to say?

- Does your company’s press releases and external communications have a stiff, formal style? Question that style? Why are you writing that way? The goal of communicating is to be easily understood.

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In the absence of “news,” many companies go radio silent, but silence can be deadly. If your company isn’t generating consistent media coverage, it’s inevitable in today’s 24-7 news cycle that your current clients and potential clients will soon ask, “What’s going on with company X? I never see them mentioned anywhere.”

But what do you do if your company doesn’t have any hard news to announce? Do you scrape the bottom of the barrel and issue a press release touting existing features that have already been announced? One sure way to alienate reporters is to send them non-news. Eventually, reporter will see your number on their voicemail or your name in their email, and they’ll say, “Who cares.”

Yet, in the absence of news, why not make your company a “resource” for reporters? Most smart companies watch their vertical and marketplace like a hawk. They try to stay up-to-date on what their customers and potential customers needs are – either anecdotally or through original research.

Why not take the extra step, tap into the research and knowledge that exists in your company, and package that data for reporters. By initiating a data-driven PR strategy, you become a go-to resource for reporters.

What does data-driven PR look like exactly?

I once worked with a company that had developed proprietary technology to track streaming radio content across the web and determine how many people were listening. Nielsen, the traditional media measurement service, had not yet developed a comparable technology or rating service. The PR team I was working with recommended that our client package their streaming tracking data akin to Nielsen’s traditional tracking of terrestrial radio stations. Each week, the company released a Top 10 Internet Radio Streams ranked by listenership and popularity.

Once we convinced the company to develop this branded weekly data, we built a comprehensive list of media reporters – especially reporters who covered the radio industry. And, we began sending the branded weekly Top 10 data to a wide list of reporters.

Not surprisingly, initially the reporters were skeptical. They’d never heard of the company or their technology. We answered questions, and sure some reporters said they weren’t interested at all and we stopped pitching them. At the outset, media coverage was slow. But we continued our strategy and sent the data every week.

The campaign worked. First, one publication published the Top 10 Internet Radio streams list, then a second publication, then a third, and so on. Then, after publishing the list for several months, one week we missed our regular release date for the data by several days, and we received multiple emails and phone calls asking where the data was.

In today’s never-ending media cycle, the media beast has to be fed. Reporters are looking for information. Reporters usually aren’t interested in rewriting a press release or publishing a story about the latest small feature upgrade. If you can provide a reporter with accurate, informative data related to your specific industry or vertical, many reporters will be interested.

However, I should mention, whenever possible stay as neutral as possible. Most companies aren’t going to issue data that directly contradicts their business model. But you shouldn’t pull together industry data and issue a press release or a report that says in effect, “According to our recent data, we have the solution to all your problems.” Take a neutral path, strive to be a resource for reporters by providing insightful data about your industry and vertical, and data-driven PR can lead to consistent media coverage for your company to augment your company and product PR efforts.

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