Tag Archive for 'PR'

Mad Bloggers

Published
by
David Parmet
on 12/17/2008
in Stupid Agency Tricks
. Comments

Mike Arrington observes:

All this stress on the PR firms put on them by desperate clients means they send out the embargoed news to literally everyone who writes tech news stories. Any blog or major media site, no matter how small or new, gets the email. It didn’t used to be this way, but it’s becoming more and more of a problem. As the economy turns south, PR firms are under increasing pressure to perform and justify their monthly retainers which range from $10,000 to $30,000 or more. In short, they have to spam the tech world to get coverage, or lose their jobs.

Link

Funny thing, just the other day I was discussing with another PR blogger the increasingly common “we’re offering you an embargo” emails we’re both getting from firms who obviously never read our blogs, or just could not care less as long as they can get a hit, any hit.

With the economy rapidly going to hell in a hand basket, this will only get worse. As Mike points out, the agencies are under a tremendous amount of pressure and that pressure means that increasingly lower paid, junior staff are on the front lines with little or no supervision and are being told to produce or take a walk. Which means more candidates for the Bad Pitch Blog and more pissed off tech bloggers.

Update: I like Brian Solis’s take on this:

The truth is that embargoes are special. They are not supposed to be used as a “PR trick” for locking-in stories with anyone and everyone. Ideally, they’re strategically reserved for important stories and they’re only effective when used in a “less is more” approach. Embargoes ARE NOT dead, however, they need to be practiced with great focus and respect. I guarantee you greater results and stronger relationships if you work with a smaller group of trusted and relevant contacts rather than embargo spamming everyone from the A-list to the C-list in your wish list.

This isn’t email marketing. It’s not a numbers game. There are real people on the other side of our “pitch.” This process must become humanized once again.

Link

Update 2: Robert Scoble points out that many companies are getting more hits through Twitter than through TechCrunch. I’m not so sure about the number of hits but I could imagine that dealing with Twitter is a lot easier than dealing with TechCrunch.

Update 3: Centernetwork’s Allen Stern has a very thoughtful piece on all of this. The money quote:

At the end of the day, it’s all about trust and relationships. It seems to keep boiling down to that, no matter if it’s about paid reviews, advertisers, how winners are selected at startup conferences or embargoes.

Link

Update 4: ReadWriteWeb is very happy to take your embargoed news.

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Simple Answers to Easy Questions

Published
by
David Parmet
on 11/17/2008
in Profound Thoughts
. Comments

The Horn Group asks Is Social Media Killing PR?

No. It isn’t.

More details from Media Bistro’s PR Newser.

Why PR?

Published
by
David Parmet
on 9/11/2008
in Required Reading
. Comments

Amidst all the noise from a week ago, Jeremiah Owyang strikes a blow for truth and justice with a smartly (as always) written post “How PR Can Help Some Startups.”

The money quote:

Some PR folks have become their own hubs. What’s this mean? They should up to so many tech events, that they’ve developed real relationships with influencers regardless of who their client list is. There’s a handful in silicon valley you can identify at any event or party, they literally are “hubs” and people are constantly surrounding them.

PR people have to learn that ‘relations’ is as important a part of their jobs as media is. Those relations will not only outlive their clients, but might help them outlast the next downturn.

Thank you Jeremiah for this.

PR People as Car Dealers

Published
by
David Parmet
on 7/28/2008
in State of the Art
. Comments

I’ve often used the car dealer example as a way of explaining the changes brought about by social media. Do you remember what it was like to go with your Mom and Dad to a car dealer, circa 1975? Do you remember Dad clutching a worn copy of Consumer Reports? Do you remember the wheeling and dealing and offers of undercoating? Do you remember waiting six to eight weeks for delivery?

No more. Now you can go on the Web and right from your local dealer’s web site you can see what they have on the lot and how much it will cost you to drive off in your very own new gas-guzzler. You can even find out how much that dream car cost the dealer. And if you can find a better deal, your local guy might even match it.

The point is that the power relationship between car dealers and car buyers has reversed. Only a decade ago, the dealers held all the cards - they knew the price and you didn’t. Now we have access to all the information we need to make an informed decision.

Now the problem with this analogy is I never thought of it from the perspective of the car dealers. And until recently I never realized that I am a car dealer - of sorts. We PR folks have acted like car dealers for years, often treating our clients like clueless newbs who think we have some secret power to create media opportunites for them. LIke the mythical roledex that can get us the front page of Businessweek with only one phone call.

The problem is our clients are just as smart as we are and many of them are way ahead of us in using Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools. So they have access to the same journalists on Twitter that we do. They can subscribe to the same media email lists we do. And they know (hopefully) almost as much as we do.

So what can we offer them when they can subscribe to the Help A Reporter Out list just as easily as we can?

Still more on Bloggers vs PR flacks

Published
by
David Parmet
on 5/15/2008
in Required Reading
. Comments

Stowe Boyd wades into the stormy seas between bloggers and PR flacks and as usual, he gets it right:

The root cause here is the delusion on the part of the clients that this sort of PR carpet bombing works, that mass media messages embedded in a press release or press release-ish email work, and that we, the bloggers, actually react positively to this junk.

Link

Stowe argues that bloggers need to stand up and say “no mas” and then be explicit to PR folks in how they want to be pitched. He’s got a point, but I would flip it around and put the onus on us, the PR folks in the trenches.

We need to get ourselves smarter. And we need to get our fellows smarter. And we need to keep getting even smarter. We have to understand that public relations is about relations and if you wouldn’t ‘relate’ to your friends or loved ones that way, why on Earth would you ‘relate’ like that to some blogger or journalist who could make or break your client.

Update: in the comments, Bob LeDrew points out, quite correctly:

We also need to get our CLIENTS smarter. Or maybe, if there’s no other choice, to get smarter clients.

Well, yeah. But in any case, we need to develop backbones and tell our clients the way things should be done.  We aren’t paid just to say ‘yes.’