Gaining media coverage is what the PR business is all about. Whether the objective is to drive traffic, grow a membership base, increase new business inquiries, raise awareness, improve SEO etc. However, it’s important to leverage that media coverage in as many ways as possible. If you glance at your media coverage, get a good feeling about it and then just file it away, then you aren’t doing it justice. You should promote your PR.
Here are some ways that smaller companies can leverage their media coverage to maximum effect:
- Circulate to employees to show that the company has a high profile
- Send to clients/ prospective clients
- Share via social media, such as posting on your facebook page
- Put it on display in office – perhaps in reception, if you have one
- Post on website, in your online media centre
- Use on proposals/ presentations
- Write a blog about it – how the story happened or who the case studies are in the piece
After all, you worked hard to earn that media coverage, so why not show it off!
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Traditionally when you think about defining PR you’d probably say things like ‘enhancing reputation’, ‘influencing opinion’, ‘creating word of mouth’ or ‘generating advocates’. However, we believe that PR is now much broader than that, to the point where it is as much about search engine optimisation as it is about reputation.
SEO is of course all about driving traffic to your site via high rankings on search engines.
The types of people that have traditionally been in the hitherto separate camps of PR and SEO are very different types of people. PRs tend to be creatives, relationship builders, writers and communicators and SEO experts tend to be, well, techies.
They are very different disciplines, there is no doubt about that. You might almost go so far to say that PR is an art and SEO is a science. However, practitioners in both disciplines are going to have to learn to bridge that gap, and fast. PRs must at least have a very good knowledge of the core principles of SEO and vice versa for SEO and PR.
SEO agencies must team up with PR people to generate the best type of online content and the most effective PR coverage.
PR people must collaborate with SEO experts to enhance and leverage their campaigns. The commercial reality in 2011 is that companies need to drive traffic to their websites and SEO is a much more cost-effective way of doing it than competing for key-word advertising. We may well see more PR agencies take on SEO people to sit alongside the account management, creative and planning people.
There will already be clients out there who want to undertake PR purely for the rich SEO benefits that it brings. For these companies, creating a good impression with viewers of the online media where you achieve coverage is a nice by-product, but not the core aim. Not least because the conversion rates for good SEO are arguably much better than PR on its own. This trend is going to grow – significantly.
Clients should look for PR agencies that are very capable at SEO and SEO agencies that have access to quality PR resources. There may even be PR/ SEO teams that evolve out of this in the same way that copywriters and art directors go together in an advertising agency.
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My definitions of news
In my opinion, there are two main types of news (from a PR point of view) – hard news and soft news. Hard news is when something is actually happening and soft news is when you ‘create’ something.
Both of these types of news can be divided into external (or industry) and internal (or company).
Here are some examples:
Hard/ External news – the FSA fines a broker for a data breach; a bank suffers an ATM robbery; an insurance company wins an award; the financial ombudsman publishes a list of most complained about institutions.
Hard/ Internal news – one building society takes over another; a credit card provider launches a new product; an insurance company signs a distribution deal with a supermarket.
Soft/ External news – a mortgage broker comments on the Bank of England’s interest rate decision; a credit card company says that it will voluntarily change its literature in the face of criticism from the Treasury Select committee; a lender donates money to an emergency charity appeal.
Soft/ Internal news – a fund manager announces the anniversary of the launch of a fund; a loan provider issues a survey around Mothering Sunday; a bank releases stats on the most popular time of day that people log-on to their online banking service.
You’ll notice that the first category you have no control over, other than how you react to the situation (or crisis). The second category is all about planning, but at least you saw it coming. The third one is about spotting an opportunity and reacting quickly. The fourth category is the one where it can go wrong. There’s too much temptation to overfill this category when there’s not enough going on in categories 1 – 3.
If you’re a company that provides a product which has become commoditised and you are in the middle of the pack when it comes to price and service then all you’ve really got is category 4. This is when you start spending loads of money on surveys.
But wait! It doesn’t have to be like that. There is actually some very, very good content in category 4 – just look at the Nationwide Building Society House Price Index. So surveys are not necessarily bad. They just need careful planning and good placement.
The other option is to move out of category 4 and into category 3. That means being really savvy about piggybacking, which is quite an art. More on that here.
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Must try harder
This is the first in a series of blogs looking at the online media capabilities of various types of financial services provider and the first organisations I’m looking at are the Building Societies. I’m a big fan of the mutual sector, having worked for Nationwide Building Society in the past and I am fully behind the concept of putting members’ interests above shareholders. However, it is disappointing to see that Building Societies fall short when it comes to online media centres and using their website to communicate with journalists.
For this blog I analysed the websites of all 56 Building Society brands, even though recent mergers mean that strictly speaking there are only now 49 Building Societies. The results were quite eye-opening and I imagine if I were a journalist looking for information on these organisations I might have to work quite hard to get it.
48 of the 56 Building Societies provided links to news about their organisation. That’s 86% but it really should be 100%. Every organisation has news of some sort or another, even the tiniest Building Society with a handful or branches. At the very least, they should showcase their community involvement.
Next up, I looked at the availability of contact details for PR contacts. This is where things start to go downhill for Building Societies, because just 30 of them (54%) listed a phone number for a journalist to call. Of course, I understand that only the larger Societies have dedicated PR people, with Nationwide the only one to have a press office of a significant size. However, there should be someone, potentially the Sales & Marketing Director or the CEO who should be listed. Likewise, email contact details were slightly worse, with 29 Societies (52%) listing them.
Finally, I looked at social media capabilities and, frankly, this is laughable. Building Societies have a strong role to play in their communities and now is a good time to promote the mutual model. Creating and taking part in communities is important online as it is offline so Building Societies should recognise that. Just four Societies are involved in social media at all, that’s a lowly 7%. Respect is due to Saffron Building Society for their blog, facebook page and twitter feed. Well done also to Ipswich Building Society for their twitter feed and Hanley Economic for their CEO blog. I guess Stroud & Swindon should also get a mention because they make limited use of social bookmarking tools on the site.
Overall, the sector could do a lot better without too much more effort. Nationwide Building Society in particular needs to get to grips with social media and quickly because it sets an example for the rest. Come on guys, you can’t ignore it any longer!
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La-La-La!!
I was recently asked to write an article for What Investment magazine on spread betting (I’ll post a link when it is published), which is the first time that I have written in a freelance journalist capacity. Having spent eleven years trying to get journalists to write about my clients or my company, I now found myself on the other side of the fence and it was an enlightening experience.
Writing a feature for a magazine is actually quite different to the writing that I was used to, which is primarily news releases, thought-leadership articles or features for internal magazines. What was refreshingly new was the impartiality aspect of the writing – normally I am used to having an agenda and pushing a particular point of view, but now I was free to take the article in any direction that felt right.
I dealt with around eight different organisations and commentators for this piece and found it quite an eye-opener. Consequently, I have some tips for organisations dealing with journalist requests, especially if you don’t have a dedicated PR person:
- Ignore the deadline. If you want the coverage, get off your arse, drop whatever else it is you were doing and sort it out straight away. The earlier you get your information and quote to the journalist the greater the chance that it will make it into the early drafts of their article. Plus the greater the chance that you can actually influence the direction of the article.
- Don’t send too much. It’s better to send three carefully crafted paragraphs which get to the point than send two pages of data. Just make life simple for the journalist. Reading an essay is a lot of work.
- Don’t cop out by sending pre-existing press releases, articles or reports. Don’t tell the journalist that everything they need to know is ‘on page 9 of 27’. Pull together a bespoke response and do the legwork yourself.
- Try and take a different point of view to the masses. If a journalist has got nine separate people saying roughly the same thing then you are competing for airtime. If you take a contrary opinion to the rest of the sheep then you immediately stand out.
- Be human. Don’t make your spokespeople sound like robots. We’re writing for people here, so speak like a real person, not like a corporate drone.
- Clarify exactly what is needed. If the journalist’s initial request is a little generic then feel free drill down into a bit more detail. At this stage, the brief their editor has given them may well be fairly open, so if you are savvy, this is your time to suggest different angles.
- Make sure you have stock items like photos and case studies on file.
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If you scan a lot of news releases you’ll notice a high proportion of them use a similar sort of language. It’s the language of corporate speak, only to be found in PR and marketing materials and never used by anyone in real life. There seems to be a distinct lack of creativity when it comes to using adjectives in external communications. The worst culprits are the words ‘leading’ and ‘delighted’.
Why can’t PRs think of more words to use than ‘leading’ and ‘delighted’?! It seems like every company is a leader and every spokesperson is always gushing that they are delighted about winning a new client, hiring a new manager or winning an award. Why don’t you stop and think for a moment about whether this is really news and what you really feel about it.
Let’s take leading first – it’s actually ridiculous to use this adjective when you think about it, because so few companies ever substantiate or qualify this claim. Do you sell the most, do you have the most customers or members, are you the fastest growing, have you won the most awards, are you the most trusted by consumers? If you are, then say you are – don’t just say you are the number one. In any case, no journalist is ever, in a million years, going to write about your company in the exact same way as you have presented it in your carefully crafted news release.
Secondly, we come to ‘delighted’. If you look on twitter for #delighted there are an increasing bunch of well-respected journalists who tweet every time some hapless spokesperson uses ‘delighted’ in a quote. And the rest of us are all having a good laugh at the spokespeople’s (and PR’s) expense.
Are you really delighted? Can you not think of something else to say?
Being lazy about language makes your news look like an identikit communication and undermines what is a potentially serious or interesting message. Get creative and do yourself justice.
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I have noticed a huge variation in the quality of online media centres in the financial services sector. It’s vitally important that your media centre functions effectively, looks good and helps you to interact with the media. If it isn’t up to scratch then you are missing out on big opportunities and making the company look amateurish.
Here are the seven deadly sins of online media centres:
- Not having contact details. If you want to do PR then you need to be instantly contactable. That means email address, landline, mobile and any other details you think might be relevant. What bugs me the most are those standardised email contact forms. Nothing says ‘we don’t really want to talk to you but we’re making a token effort’ like one of those forms. The journalist will think ‘get stuffed’.
- Not having your news releases/ articles/ white papers in an easily searchable archive. You’ve written all this good stuff – why make it difficult for people to find what they want?
- Not having any content or not having updated it for months/ years. I’ve seen quite a few online media centres that haven’t had any fresh content for a year or more. What happened, did you just get bored? It makes your organisation look like it has one foot in the grave.
- Not having any sharing functions. Make it easy for users to post things to twitter, tag it in delicious or whatever.
- Not having any multi-media content. Get with it and have pictures at the very least and ideally some video. It’s so much more engaging.
- Not having the functionality for people to join/ sign up for news. It doesn’t need to be complicated. Just give people the option to ‘opt in’ if they want to.
- Posting your coverage as company news. It’s fine to post your coverage and include links to online articles where you have been quoted. It shows that you are a mover and a shaker. But don’t dress them up as ‘press releases’ or something that they are not. Would you expect a journalist to report on something that has been written by a rival? Of course not. Stick your coverage in a section called ‘in the news’ or ‘media coverage’ or something like that.
I’d also add one more which isn’t necessarily ‘deadly’ but is certainly a bugbear of mine – calling it a press centre. Hello? The days of Fleet St. are over. The media are newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, website, blogs and social media sites. It should cater for all of these.
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I’ve taken part in loads of brainstorms in my career and there have been occasional flashes of brilliance from attendees but by and large I have found them a pretty blunt instrument. The concept that you can somehow force a bunch of people in a room to come up with killer ideas in a 60 minute time frame seems a bit unrealistic to me. I just don’t think that most people’s brains work like that. What I often experienced were a lot of recycled ideas and a lot of playing safe.
I’ve heard this kind of thing on twitter before, from people in agencies who say that the same idea gets floated again and again. Part of the problem might be that attendees aren’t briefed properly before the brainstorm so they don’t fully understand the objectives. (Incidentally, the best brainstorms I experienced included some whacky stuff like Play-Doh.)
I then asked my twitter followers how they came up with their best ideas and a few like me said that it was either when they were falling asleep or in the middle of the night sometime. I have a theory that daydreaming or dozing allows you to be more creative as your brain frees up some of its RAM, if you like.
After a little bit of web browsing I came across this piece, which sums things up nicely.
One of the smartest ways to think is not to.
I propose that daydreaming should now be compulsory in the workplace!
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We all know that journalists are bombarded with PR material every day and that unfortunately, some of it is poorly targeted, poorly produced and not relevant. Journalists can actually get some brilliant story ideas from PRs, as well as really useful content to enhance an existing story and vital statistics, quotes and case studies within very tight deadlines.
So I guess the answer to the above question depends on whether the PR is trying to ‘get a story to run’ or ‘stop a story from running’. Journalists would have a pretty hard time functioning if there weren’t efficient PRs to organise spokespeople, source stats and case studies quickly or investigate customer stories. Similarly, they would probably rather have the mobile numbers of all the experts and top people than have to phone a press office and get an anodyne reactive statement.
Either way, journalists and PRs do depend on each other, but not exclusively, and less so since the advent of social media. Journalists source stories from readers, contacts, announcements, surveys and increasingly from bloggers and social media platforms such as Twitter. PRs need journalists to be featured in newspapers, magazines and on radio and TV, but now they can also go direct to their target audience via websites, podcasts, iPhone apps, forums, blogs, Facebook, YouTube etc etc.
It comes down to the skills of the PR individual and the ethos of the company as to whether the PR function is a barrier or a facilitator. But the acid test of who needs who more comes down to one simple thing – who pays for lunch – and that is still the PR.
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Which? recently highlighted the top 10 most useless financial products including things such as mobile phone insurance and packaged current accounts.
Whether you agree with the Which? assessment or not, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at these products from the point of view of the PR person that has to promote (defend?) them. Which? essentially said that people don’t need these products or that they can get better deals elsewhere. So how do you contend with that?
Well, it depends what the criticism is. If it is that the rates or returns aren’t competitive, then fair enough, people don’t have to take these products but there might be many reasons why they might want to do so. For example ease of use/ ease of applying, service, consolidating different types of products with one provider or other benefits that come with the product. Price is not the only factor and some people simply don’t want to constantly shop around for the best deals, they just want to go down the simplest route.
If the criticism is that people don’t need the product, then that simply isn’t valid for everyone. People don’t NEED to buy mineral water, they can just get it for free from a tap. People don’t NEED to buy super unleaded petrol, they can just buy the normal grade. But people sometimes want to do these things so if consumer demand is there, however niche, then there is nothing wrong with catering for that, provided that people have all the information to make a decision.
This leads to the next criticism, which may be that people are hood-winked into taking out a policy or buying a product and not realise what they are getting into. This is where things get much trickier for PRs as your company or client is being accused of dodgy sales practices. There are no easy answers here and protestations that people should have read the small print are not going to find much sympathy with journalists. Ultimately, you can only do the best you can, but if something is rotten, it is rotten.
From a commercial point of view, bad media coverage does not necessarily mean that the providers will amend or withdraw the products. If the product is generating revenue then some companies will take the view that bad PR is a ‘price worth paying’. However, it is the PRs duty to flag up risks and to do their best to change companies for the better, too make them more transparent and to improve their reputation. It would be great to be in a position to make organisations more consumer-friendly using external reputation as leverage. This is what PR can potentially achieve.
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