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In a reply to a publicist who contacted me recently on some subject or another, I surprised even myself when I wrote to her that I could not take up her pitch because she used the phrase “reaching out” in her email.
If memory serves, I actually went so far as to tell her it is my policy to say no to pitches in which the phrase “reaching out” or any of its variants is applied. It was a ridiculous, ornery reply to a well-meaning request for coverage, for which I apologize.
However, the “reaching out” phrase rankled me, and I am trying to figure out why. One reason is its overuse. This phrase -- “reaching out,” “reach out,” “reached out” or whatever form it takes -- is certainly overused in the p.r. biz today (and in many other places too)....
Hello again, readers.
Since we didn’t quite have time to peruse our favorite pitch responses last Friday, here’s a new edition of our weekly media relations series, put together with the help of our friends at Muck Rack.
First, Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times may be the most powerful tech journalist in all of media right now, and he has a point to make...
A lot of businesspeople wonder why a certain press release fell flat. Nine times out of 10, the answer is quite simple: It didn't highlight any news.
Once you're able to understand what's newsworthy, your press releases will start to generate results.
Focusing on the following six topics is a surprisingly common pitching mistake in the startup world. While some of the topics are trivial or just advertorial, others have a germ of an idea that could made newsworthy by a shift in focus in the press release....
Last week Uber General Manager Chris Nakutis (follow him on Twitter) spoke to a group of entrepreneurs about his experience launching the e-commerce platform Short Stack–and became the latest heavy-hitter to weigh in on the “do startups need PR” debate.
As you can tell from our headline, he answered in the negative.Nakutis said that PR was not a valuable tool in growing his business and that the return on investment was not immediate or well-defined despite the good press.
Here’s the key quote: new companies “can almost jump over the PR process.”...
One of our readers alerted us to a surprising example of how NOT to recover — and the most interesting part is that the mistake was made by PR News, an outfit that publishes newsletters, blogs, guidebooks and other resources which they say hone PR practitioners skills in things like media relations and crisis management.
It seems PR News sent out a blast email this week trying to get businesses to buy some of their products. The email talked about how to “score big” in business and carried the subject line: “Don’t be like Wichita State.”
Apparently the theory was that the subject might catch the eye of folks following the NCAA basketball championships. What PR News failed to understand is that it would offend supporters of the Wichita State basketball team which had just lost in the tournament following a 35-0 start to the season....
Apparently, Russian authorities think journalists are sabotaging hotel rooms in Sochi -- thanks to bathroom surveillance cameras.
The press arrived in Sochi this week for the Winter Olympics, and it did not go well.
Tweets, photos and full-on articles told the world of shoddy, unfinished accommodations that gave Vladimir Putin's Olympic Games a black eye before they'd even started. Russian officials remained largely mum as Sochi's unfinished construction — rooms without doorhandles, toilets that can't flush paper — became the story of the week that ends Friday with the Olympics' opening ceremony.
Then, on Thursday, a Russian official finally addressed reporters, ostensibly to set the media straight and correct the false narrative that gained so much momentum....
Power going out at the Super Bowl; Maker's Mark announcing its plans to dilute its whiskey; the woman who hid under her desk to avoid a TV reporter; Manti Te'o's fake girlfriend and a Canadian mayor's crack-laced meltdown. Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends. Time once again to take a couple of minutes and enjoy the wacky world of public relations blunders, bloopers and boners of 2013.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A public relations executive for the prominent New York-based Internet media company IAC lost her job on Saturday after she posted a message joking about AIDS in Africa and race on her Twitter account, sparking an online furor.
You can easily make the argument that young journalists need to learn that online verbal diarrhea has consequences in a business where you're expected to maintain at least a modicum of objectivity and personal distance from the audience.... In case you’re unaware of Shea Allen’s story, up until a few days ago she was an investigative reporter in Huntsville, Alabama, probably doing her fair share of personally satisfying work but I guarantee suffering through all the various indignities that go along with being a reporter in Huntsville, Alabama. That ended, both the good and bad, as soon as she published a post to her personal blog called “Confessions of a Red-Headed Reporter,” which both laid out and ever-so-gently riffed on the real life of a small-market reporter. This was the result...
...When you find out the aforementioned movie critic passed away via email, it sucks even more. It sucks to find out someone died via email at all, right? But when that email is a pitch shoving "a relevant expert" down your throat, it's a whole new universe of sucking. It's a dimension of sucking so far beyond the "sucks universe" that it takes light from sucks a year to reach it. It's a state of sucking so far beyond sucking it takes the light from sucking one year to reach this new level of bad pitching. You get the idea. Yet, less than 24 hours after Roger Ebert went to the big movie theatre in the sky, someone who shall remain nameless, sent out the following pitch en mass. This pitch was sent to me separately by Shannan amd Traci - two different PR professionals....
When Should PR Pros ‘Tell Journalists How to Do Their Jobs?’ Doh...bad PR... Well here’s a highly fraught debate: to what degree should PR pros manage the message in content created by the journalists they pitch? When does “making helpful suggestions” turn into “telling journalists how to do their jobs?” This week journalist Jim Romenesko (who everyone in media should follow on Twitter and Facebook) brings us a couple of cases in which he and some of his colleagues believe that PR pros went too far. In the first instance, a reader who is also a newspaper editor received an unusually bold pitch from a man who claims to transcend the traditional role of the flack...
The standoff has lasted nearly 24 hours. The company whose site was taken over claims the designer is blackmailing it. ...zAccording to Adweek, Fitness SF denies Jonen’s claim and is eager to be back online. It claims Jonen is blackmailing the company. While this online feud is sure to resolve soon, we can all sit back and bask in the glow of someone who took action, even if it was career suicide. It will also be interesting to watch how Fitness SF handles the crisis—at least everyone knows their URL now. Twitter is certainly buzzing with this news, and Fitness SF is taking the brunt of the blame...
Auto firm Tesla is giving a New York Times reviewer a car. The goal was to show off Tesla's "electric highway" of charging stations for its electric car between Washington and Boston. The problem was that the car didn't make it.
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Is hiring a public relations firm even worth it in a world that changes so quickly? Has the whole game of a public relations firm become obsolete because of 800 TV channels, thousands of satellite radio channels, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Meerkat, Periscope, blogging, Blabbing and all of the other social media platforms? Can a firm even grab the attention of television, radio or newspaper producers long enough to pay attention to their pitch?
I’m writing this after giving three different firms a year each to produce results. They promised results, I expected results — neither result was delivered. And each relationship started the same way; we met at my home or out for lunch to get to know one another. I told them my story, they asked who I wanted to reach — they got excited, I signed a contract and then I pumped them with massive amounts of relevant content that they could pitch to producers....
Invariably, each year brings its share of PR crises and scandals, and 2014 was no exception. This year had a robust number of meltdowns, PR debacles and downright embarrassing episodes among some of the globe’s most recognizable brands. Here’s a partial list of some of the year’s worst PR crises.
Last week, Gawker uncovered a hapless tie-up between genetically modified seed/pesticide giant Monsanto and Condé Nast Media—publisher of The New Yorker, Bon Appetit, GQ, Self, Details, and other magazines—to produce "an exciting video series" on the "topics of food, food chains and sustainability."
Marion Nestle was offered $5,000 to participate for a single afternoon. Since then, I've learned that Condé Nast's Strategic Partnerships division dangled cash before several high-profile food politics writers, in an unsuccessful attempt to convince them to participate....
When it comes to recent Google Plus news, what we have from Google is a failure to communicate.
To recap, last Thursday Vic Gundrota, senior vice president for Google Plus, publicly announced his resignation by this rather touching Google Plus post And Then.
His boss, CEO Larry Page, responded with his own G+ post to Gundotra’s.
The cat was out of the bag the previous week with this post on the Secret app: “Vic Gundotra is interviewing.”
Of course the news exploded in the technology media and speculation continues to echo around the Internet. Including Google’s own survey asking if G+ would be missed as reported by Curtis Jacob?
What was missing was a proactive Google PR response....
One of the hottest new apps set to debut this week at SXSW, that annual intermingling of tenuous ideas and easy money, was LIVR, a social network exclusively for drunk people. Media and investors alike lined up to laud it....
"I've worked closely enough with media, and I've done enough of this sort of thing before, to know that the media would blindly jump at it. I was more surprised when people did reach out to me; I can count on one hand the number of outlets that bothered to call me up.
The media in a way allows this to happen to themselves... The media will just jump at a juicy story and not look deeper into it. I think it's because a lot of people working at these blogs and media outlets are overworked and underpaid. Especially around an event at SXSW, they need to crank out story after story. So it's kind of like this cheapening journalism. I don't know if they can even be called journalists anymore; it's more media as a mouthpiece for the companies that want to get a message out."...
Should you REALLY invest in a PR Section on your website? We think not-- and here's why.The time has finally come: You can go ahead and get rid of that “Company News” section.
Nobody’s reading it. In fact, a recent analytical report compiled by Chris Scott of Headscape suggests that the fewer than 1% of visitors who DO read your press releases tend to leave your site shortly after.
So there you have it: your company news page – with all its press releases, employee event descriptions, award notifications and job promotion updates – is actually driving your prospects away...
Social media offered many opportunities for (quite justified) outrage this year. But did they come at a price?
...Here was instant comeuppance for someone who said something terrible. Here was comeuppance for a white person generalizing shallowly about Africa, the continent, as if it were one large country with only one story to tell. Here was a woman reveling in her whiteness and assuming that her whiteness was some kind of shield against a disease that does not discriminate. I was amused by the spectacle. I followed along even though something in my stomach twisted as the hours passed. It was a bit surreal, knowing this drama was playing out while Sacco was at 38,000 feet.
At the same time, I was horrified. It all felt a bit frenzied and out of control, as interest in the story mounted and the death threats and gendered insults began. The online outrage and Sacco’s comeuppance seemed disproportionate. The amount of joy some people expressed as they engaged with the #HasJustineLandedYet hashtag gave me pause.
Somewhere along the line, we forgot that this drama concerned an actual human being. Justine Sacco did not express empathy for her fellow human beings with her insensitive tweet. It is something, though, that the Internet responded in kind, with an equal lack of empathy. We expressed some of the very attitude we claimed to condemn....
New webmaster rules target core PR practices around press releases...At least, so Tom Foremski claims. Wrong Tom. You're way off base with your interpretation of new Google rules and how they will impact PR agencies.
Foremski's best known as the author of "Die press release, die", an infamous rant aimed at PR people. In his post, he misinterprets Google's directions on getting SEO slapped for black hat SEO linking practices. Then he wrongly applies his mistake, concludes somehow that it applies to press releases, and aims it squarely at his favorite target - PR people.
Sorry Tom. The worst practitioners of bad press releases are not PR agencies or legitimate PR pros. They are usually marketing departments or uninformed small business people who mistakenly think press releases are a great way to easily get "free advertising." Their news releases don't contain real news. They simply stuff releases full of marketing nonsense.
If you want proof of that, check out my blog where I've written 4 or 5 best-of-bad-press-release blog posts that have proven to be remarkably popular and entertaining.Most savvy PR people rarely use news releases. In fact, PR pros these days are usually social media leaders, skillful storytellers and adept content marketers.
Unfortunately, the same thing is happening in social media channels, annoying consumers and, instead of engaging them, pushing them away. It's time Foremski wrote the sequel to his famous anti-PR rant and called it "Die Marketing nonsense, die!"There's probably a very nice sequel for me too write as well. Its called "Die lazy journalism, die!"
After the tragedy in Boston, one brand thought it would be a good idea to tie its scone recipes to the bombing. After every national tragedy, you can be sure that some clueless brand will try to exploit it. In today’s episode of “What the hell were they thinking,” the food website Epicurious sent out the following tweets to its 385,000 followers... Get your legs blown off by a terrorist? Try these scones! Lose a cherished friend? Maybe this bowl of breakfast energy can help! Okay, those tweets are beyond absurd. So Epicurious deleted them and tweeted this alleged mea culpa: First, let’s be clear: their earlier tweets didn’t “seem” offensive. They were offensive. The word “seem” shifts the burden of blame onto their readers, who the brand seems to think were overly sensitive. It stops short of fully acknowledging the obliviousness of their tweets....
Many companies large and small have attempted PR stunts and there are some great examples of successful events large and small that have worked out for the sponsoring company: think Red Bull’s Stratos Mission, with it’s daredevil leap from the edge of space, or Kentucky Fried Chicken’s giant logo in the Nevada desert, or even the granddaddy of them all, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. These efforts and others like them garnered tons of free press coverage for their sponsors, generated millions of impressions, and ultimately led to increased awareness and sales. But for every successful PR stunt that is launched by a wide-eyed marketing team, there are dozens of unsuccessful efforts littering the road. Even though the old saw, “there is no bad PR” is still widely subscribed to, real damage can be done when an attempt at a PR stunt fails, in truth the damage done to a sponsoring company’s reputation can be immense (not to mention the expense). Here are 5 legendary examples of PR efforts gone horribly, terrible, awfully wrong. #fail has never had better friends than these!....
As corporate public relations mistakes go, this one’s unlikely to earn Office Depot (NYSE:ODP) a spot in the hall of shame. But it was just the kind of screw-up made easier in the digital age. On Wednesday at around 7:20 a.m., the company accidentally and prematurely announced its merger with OfficeMax (NYSE:OMX), by tucking the major news inside its fourth-quarter earnings statement. The release disappeared shortly after, followed by silence from the companies and some media reports that the merger talks were still ongoing. Were they ironing out last-minute details of their nuptials? Apparently not: At 9:45 a.m., both companies put out official word announcing that it was a done deal and they were, in fact, coming together. Experts say they did the right thing by clearing up any confusion as early as possible. “Avoid the temptation to be cute,” says Scott Kurnit, CEO and founder of Keep Holdings, an e-commerce and advertising company. Here are five more memorable PR blunders....
What freelancer doesn’t know the anxiety and frustration of waiting for a way-past-due payment from a wayward client? While obsessively checking and re-checking our mailboxes to find the money that must surely be on its way and wallowing in the depths of I-finished-my-work-on-time-but-still-can’t-pay-my-bills-despair, we’ve sometimes found ourselves fantasizing about sabotage. But, because we like to think of ourselves as responsible, civil, and professional individuals (and because we’d like to ‘work in this town again’), we keep such delusions of diabolical grandeur to ourselves. Frank Jonen, who runs his own small Web design company, apparently had no such qualms about taking full-scale revenge when his client, Fitness SF, allegedly failed to pay him fairly for his work. In retaliation for this lack of proper compensation, Jonen replaced the Fitness SF website with an angry letter written on behalf of himself and “the tens of thousands of freelancers and small businesses out there facing larger corporations who can afford to starve them out” while urging the fitness club’s members to take a stand by cancelling their memberships and slamming the company on social media....
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Adam Buckman slays another tired bromide by lazy PR people who keep "reaching out" or wanting to "chat."