loose wire blog

How to Get Your Pitch Read Part XIV

One way to try to get the journalist to read beyond the headline/subject is the EMBARGOED tag:

Although it does sound somewhat pompous, and can backfire if it's not a story worth breaking an embargo for.

Likewise a subject line prefaced by BREAKING NEWS:

As you can see, MySpace's PR seems to think anything to do with their client is BREAKING NEWS, and deserves CAPS all the way.

Both of these are in danger of Cry Wolf Syndrome. Use them too many times and they wear out.

Another, better way to get your press release read than to send it and then recall it:

I have no idea whether these were all intentional but they certainly had me trawling through my trash for the originals. The fact that no explanation is given for the recall just makes it more intriguing.

This reminds me of an ex-colleague who used to put tiny mistakes in his Reuters features so they'd have to be corrected and run again. Doubled his chances of getting them in print.

Of course, overused, both endanger the credibility of the author: the journalist looking like an error-prone hack, the PR flak looking like someone who says something and then promptly takes it back.

Generating Meaning or Fluff?

I love this: a mashup that generates great-looking ads from Flickr pictures and a computer. The conclusion: We realise how easily affected we are by words and pictures together, but how the mix often doesn't mean very much, especially when they're ads.

By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.

Of course, it also raises the question: At what point would it be cheaper and more effective to generate ad copy by computer?

THE AD GENERATOR

Technorati Tags: ad generator,ads,automatiion,ai,buzzwords,copy,advertising,PR

What Price Tranquility?

It struck me, as I lay on a chaise longue at the Conrad Bali trying to filter out the drone of the jetskis, that hotels are selling a complicated product. My wife, for example, loves the clean, crisp white sheets and thick feather pillows of a king-size bed. Others go for the food, some for the ambience, some for the adventure, others for the sun, some for the service.

But in this stressful age, money increasingly buys and hotels sell tranquility: a chance to relax, zone out, be pampered, wander around in a bubble of soft footfalls, bubbling little fountains, soft tinkling music and the absence of intrusion. Of course, there are different grades of tranquility: If you want total silence, you go to an Aman resort; if you want tranquility plus active night life you go to Seminyak or Kuta. Tranquility is actually quite a sophisticated product. You don't actually sell it directly, but it's implicit in every photo and description of your hotel: But it's also, it struck me, more or less the one thing that hotels can't guarantee.

Tranquility is the result of effort and a complex management of logistics behind the scenes: You can train staff to keep voices low, to not intrude upon guests, to keep the sound of crockery being piled high to a minimum. But there are events you can't really control. Like, in the case of the Conrad Bali, jetskis swarming the beach in front of the hotel like Sioux around a wagon train.

"It's beyond our control," I Wayan Sumadi, the assistant manager, told me. Although the Conrad has a cooperation agreement with some of the jetskis operators--you can rent one from one of the poolside booths or from a guy on the beach sporting a Conrad-logoed ID card--the hotel, Wayan says, can't prevent them from dominating the seafront. The result is that no guests venture into the water and a drone that can be heard from the hotel lobby.

I've seen this problem before in Bali, but usually the hotel is smart enough to find out a peaceful coexistence that doesn't annoy the guests (Wayan says I'm by no means the first to complain.) Of course, public spaces are public spaces, but clearly the jetski owners rely on guests from the hotel, otherwise they wouldn't parade in front of them all day.

I feel for the guests who have come thousands of miles to buy some peace and quiet, and have to retreat to their hotel rooms to find it. I feel, in a way, for the hotel management who don't seem to have figured out that--despite an otherwise beautiful hotel and good service--the jetskis undermine the very product they've tried so hard to create: tranquility.

If I was the Conrad I would put this to the top of my agenda on Monday morning, and not rest until the situation is resolved. For more than a few guests, I suspect, tranquility is non-negotiable.

Technorati Tags: bali,hotels,pr,conrad,noise,ambience,customers

Why Reporters Hate PR Professionals

Peter Shankman recently told the story of how lazy/dumb/thoughtless PR types can be when he forwards a journalist request and gets mostly lame and irrelevant replies. His conclusion:

Is this what the agencies are teaching their employees to do?

If it is, reporters have every right to hate public relations professionals.

We're not doing our job.

At best, we're an industry that relies on hope, and not skill, on the off chance that we'll catch a break.

We've become an industry of posers, hoping that we'll get through another day without being exposed as a fraud.

Peter's response to this industry-wide problem was to set up a Facebook group. Now that's gotten too large he's set up a website and list, to which PR and industry types can subscribe. Peter will post journalist queries to the list. He tags on an excellent proviso: 

By joining this list, just promise me and yourself that you'll ask yourself before you send a response: Is this response really on target? Is this response really going to help the journalist, or is this just a BS way for me to get my client in front of the reporter? If you have to think for more than three seconds, chances are, you shouldn't send the response.

It'll be interesting to see how this pans out. Sadly, I suspect many PR types don't really care about relevance or blowing it with a reporter by making an irrelevant pitch; they just want to be able to add another number to their report. As Phil Gomes of Edelman points out, ProfNet owns this field but their usefulness has dropped off in recent years. There's plenty of room for more and better players. 

(Vaguely related vent: I got another one of those emails with a subject line "May I call you on this?" this morning. How useful is that? Does it give me any idea of whether it's relevant and interesting to me? That I now have to read the contents of the email to get a clue isn't going to endear me to you. That you are so keen to phone me tells me you're a high maintenance PR contact I don't want to waste time with. I take great joy in sending an empty email with the subject line "No" to these emails. And I add their domain to my "PR spam" filter. I know, it's harsh, but life's too short.) 

The home of Peter Shankman - Shankman.com

Technorati Tags: pitching, journalists, PR, pitches, shankman

The "Have I Got a Story For You" Trick

I'm no fan of bad, sloppy PR, and to me there's nothing quite as sloppy as pitching a product to a journalist s/he has already written about. Do these people not have any records at all? Do they have no idea of what coverage their product has already received?

I've been pitched two products in the past week that I have written about already in my WSJ.com column. OK, not everyone reads the WSJ, and not everyone reads the column, but it's not exactly a backwater publication that would have not shown up in someone's records, had they been keeping any.

First there was the Unotron washable keyboard, which I pretty much dedicated a whole column to a couple of years back (it shows up on the CollegeJournal with a search unotron wsj). In response to a request to the PR/expert source clearing house ProfNet a few days back I received a pitch from a PR guy which began

If you are looking for the latest technological advancement in computer keyboards, I may have your answer.

What surprised me here was that my column was copiously cited on the company's own website.

Then there's something called the Loc8tor, a tracking device I wrote about a few months back in another WSJ.com column. I just now received a pitch with the breathless subject line: "STORY IDEA: New RFID Tracking Device Finds Valuables with Directional Capabilities":

I am contacting you regarding a new product story that will help your readers stay organized and find their valuables. 

The original column doesn't show up high in the search engines if you look for loc8tor wsj but a reference to it clearly shows up in a link to Peter Morville of findability.org, whom I interviewed for the piece. Seems the PR company could use the product themselves to keep track of previous coverage of their client's product.

(It's only "new", by the way, in the sense of newly available in the U.S.; the product's been around for at least a year in the UK and elsewhere. The PR person involved clearly doesn't have a particularly good database as my column has carried an Asian dateline for the past year, and my blog and webpage make clear I'm not U.S. based. Minor details, I grant you, but I feel sorry for the poor sap who's paying the agency if he's hoping for a well-targeted PR campaign.)

What's telling, to me, in both of these cases, is that I had originally dealt with the companies themselves, not with their PR companies. In fact, I'm not sure either had PR companies working with them when I dealt with them. In other words, these companies have hired PR companies to go get coverage, who then go undo the positive work the company itself had done by pitching to the self-same guys who have already given them coverage.

I can understand, I suppose, this kind of thing happening. But it's still sloppy, and clearly indicates that the PR company, when hired, does little or no research into what coverage the product has already received. Surely that would be the first thing you'd do, if only to see whether those publications or writers have already written about you might be worth cultivating for follow-up coverage down the track? At the very least, I guess I would assume you don't want to alienate those people by showing you have no idea what they've been writing about?

PR note #273: When you get a new client, Google them.

Technorati Tags: pr, pitches, unotron, loc8tor, journalism, media players

A Tip off the Old Block

Chris "Long Tail" Anderson fires off at PR with both barrels, blocking unsolicited press releases and naming-and-shaming those who sent them:

Everything else gets banned on first abuse. The following is just the last month's list of people and companies who have been added to my Outlook blocked list. All of them have sent me something inappropriate at some point in the past 30 days. Many of them sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list without asking. If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it--turnabout is fair play.

It's not a bad response, albeit a tad unfair to not give due warning: The list includes identifiable individuals, whose comments should be solicited prior to publication. But it is definitely a problem for us journos, and his list does reveal those PR agencies that are most egregious in this regards: 5wpr.com, webershandwick.com, techmarket.com (not heard of them) and sspr.com. I've had problems with at least one of these and have set up a filter to dump anything from that domain into a junk folder since I get so many follow-up emails it's dizzying.

The problem here is sloppy, generic email blasts rather than carefully targeted emails. ("Dear X, here's a press release you may be interested in", compared with "Dear Jeremy, I know you've written on this subject before, but that was 18 months ago and I thought this announcement by our client may possibly offer a fresh angle on the topic").

It's not that we don't need press releases, it's that we need the right ones. And the more we're sent, the less time we have to find that nugget. PR folk don't seem to get this; one recently apologized that she couldn't separate out the ones that matched my interests and so asked me to bear with receiving all of them. Needless to say all of them now are sent to my junk folder so in effect I'm not getting any.

The best way for both sides to get something out of each other is, in my view, simple. Journalists (and bloggers) set up a page that explains, in detail, what their interests are (mine is here.) PR pitches get a stock response: "please check my PR page for what I'm interested in. Future releases that don't match these interests will be blocked, along with further traffic from this address."

The Long Tail: Sorry PR people: you're blocked

Technorati Tags: pr, public relations, spam, wired, chris anderson, journalism

Confusing, Sleazy Checkbox Syndrome

(Please see update below)

I am always amused by how even those companies you would think wouldn't stoop to the foot-in-the-door tactics of spammers, do. Like this one from IBM, at the foot of a submission form -- specifically for journalists, no less:

(The text reads:

This data may be used by IBM or selected organizations, such as Lenovo, to provide you with information about other offerings. To receive this via e-mail, check the first box below. Alternatively, if you would prefer not to receive such information by any means, check the second box.
    Please use e-mail to send me information about other offerings.
    Please do not use this data to send me information about other offerings.)

Why, specifically, two separate check boxes? What happens if you check both? Have you committed yourself to both receiving emails to get information about other offerings, and yet not allowing IBM to use this data to contact you? That would at least be a challenge for them. Leave both unchecked IBM cannot email you about other offerings, but they can use the data you just gave them (namely your email) to send you information about those exciting other offerings.

I urge you all to send them a query on their main submission form trying out both, and let me know what happens.

(Update Nov 2 2007: IBM have agreed having two checkboxes is confusing and unnecessary and promise to remove it. I have also tried leaving both unchecked, or checking both and error message is returned. So upon reflection I don't think this is a fair example of Sleazy Checkbox Syndrome and I take back my harsh words about Big Blue. It's poor form design, but it's not done to confuse the user. Interestingly a more egregious example I recently cited also seems to have disappeared, as far as I can work out. Laplink have yet to respond to my request for comment.)

 IBM Press room - Contact a media representative

Technorati Tags: ibm, public relations, journalism, checkboxes, sleaze, spam

Lost in Transmission

I dread to think how much eBay is paying Waggener Edstrom to handle press relations for their Toy Crusade. At least I think that's what is being launched -- all the press stuff I received this morning, including image-laden email, attachments was all in Chinese. Oh, except for the headline.

I know I should, but I don't speak Chinese.

Now, admittedly, the event is about China, it's being organized in Hong Kong, and the website itself is entirely in Chinese (no English version in sight), but you'd think one of the world's biggest PR agencies could have managed

• to have a database of journalists' language preferences clue: names are often a giveaway), or
• perhaps an English-language version somewhere in the text, or
• a link to an English-language version, or
• an explanation that this is a Chinese-language only event/issue, or
• a link on the email indicating it was sent by an intern with no idea of what mayhem he may be creating for himself by blasting off emails to all and sundry, or
• a link in the email to a place where we journalists can complain volubly and ensure we never receive another email like it.

Serious lesson in this: At the very least, this kind of email is likely to end up as spam in a non-Chinese speaking recipient's email inbox because the Bayesian filters will have been trained to treat it as such. (This is what happened to mine.) So that's all pretty much a waste of everyone's time.

But at the most, as a PR agency you're being paid large amounts of money to target the message to the right people. I'm clearly not the right people. So either don't send it to me, or send me an English language version, or send me a query about whether this might be of interest. Or expect me to get grumpy, and take 15 minutes of my day to write a grumpy blog post like this.

Update, Aug 27 2007: I've just heard from Waggener who have offered an apology and explanation:

In the case of the toy crusade press release, a staff member accidentally inserted the wrong distribution list, and this was overlooked by their supervisor during the checking process.

People do make mistakes and of course the individuals concerned are very apologetic.  To be sure, we have also added more safeguards to the process to minimize the likelihood of this ever happening again.

Fair play. Of course it's better that these things don't happen, but they do, and their response is measured and the right one. The proof will be in the pudding -- will it happen again?

Technorati Tags: waggener, press releases, PR, china, hong kong, spam

A Literate Scam

Good grammar is important, whether you're pitching a story to a journalist or a scam to a dupe.

Here are two examples: how not to and how to. First off, a PR pitch that endangers its credibility with an error in the subject line:

And now, here's an example of getting it right: A scam that not only illustrates good grammar (right down to the correct use of the singular verb with "couple") but also how callous scammers are getting:

<...>

The Foundation is non-profit and Our Mission is to facilitate inspiring, meaningful outdoor experiences for youth who suffer life-challenging medical conditions as a result of HIV/AIDS.

We offer new hope and life skills for adjudicated youth, at-risk youth and those with disabilities and dependencies.These adventure programs build esteem, confidence, and character values that help build the foundation for a family and career.

<...>

We have a couple of Donors in CANADA and USA who has pledged but and we need a Payment/Liaison Agent urgently who will among other functions accept funds on our behalf and we will offer 10% of whatever we get in return.

<...> 

The scam, by the way, is probably seeking a phisher's mule: Someone who will allow their bank account to be used for laundering funds obtained from phishing expeditions. But it may also involve attempting to fleece the individual in time-honored 419er tradition.

I'm not suggesting, by the way, that the text is original. It's lifted from several sources, however, indicating a degree of sophistication on the part of the scammer. Some is from the Tony Semple Foundation for Hope, some from  the Wilderness Outdoor Leadership Foundation. (This explains the apparent non-sequitur from the first paragraph to the second.) The scam has used different names for its foundation, each a variation on the organizations whose words it has stolen: for example, the Foundation of Hope and the OutdoorFun Foundation UK. It seems to have been running about a month.

Technorati Tags: scams, grammar, spelling, phishing, PR, mules

How To Blow It From "From"

I'm amazed by how many times this happens, and it always seems to be PR folk in the technology industry who are the culprits: An email where the sender, say Geoff Blah, hasn't filled in the 'From' field in his email program or service so it appears in my inbox as from 'gblah@aol.com' or, sometimes, just gblah. (Yes, very lame for a PR person to be using their AOL account to send out pitches, but that's another story.)

Why is not having any 'from' name not good?

• Well, first off, it looks shoddy. It would be like sending me a letter and not bothering to actually put your name at the bottom, requiring me to decipher your handwriting. Or handing out namecards without an actual name on. Your emails are your business cards.
• Secondly, it suggests a lack of technological prowess that may undermine you, or your agency's, claims of being 'best of breed' or whatever is the cool term these days. One I received this morning was from a PR agency that claims expertise in consumer technology and IT technology. (The same agency hasn't bothered to check its DNS registration, so entering the website's name without the www's -- blah.com, not www.blah.com - - will result in an error. This further erodes my confidence in their much trumpeted 'technical savvy.')
• Thirdly, it raises the chance of the email itself being discarded as spam. A lot of spam filters check these header fields for unusual or inconsistent activity and not having the 'From' alias field filled is one of them.
• Fourthly, it irritates me and I hate being irritated in the morning.

So, all together now: Fill in your name in your email program or online service. Anything less looks like you're either in a real hurry or you're not sure what you're doing.

Technorati Tags: email, public relations, pitches, etiquette

Lame PR Responses #34,223(b)

When independent blogger Mary Jo Foley, who knows more about Microsoft than Microsoft does, interviewed the company's new Corporate VP of its Searching and Advertising Group recently, she was told that Microsoft had recently launched an ad-funded version of Microsoft Works, the application suite you think will be a cheap alternative to Office but turns out not to be.

She couldn't find it online anywhere so, she asked Microsoft PR. Which is always a mistake:

I’ve asked Microsoft for more information on the new ad-funded Works suite. No word back yet. Update: Even though Microsoft’s own vice president discussed the product, no one will talk. The official comment, via a Microsoft spokeswoman: “We’re always looking at innovative ways to provide the best productivity tools to our customers, but have nothing to announce at this time.”

Agh. These kinds of mealy-mouthed, knee-jerk-and-yet-probably-took-all-day-to-form, smug, self-promoting-and-yet-information-free responses drive me nuts. How many people had input on that particular phrase?  Thirty? How many emails had to exchange hands in the crafting? Forty? And how, exactly, does this help the journalist? Or, for that matter, the reader?

And don't get me started on how a VP statement ("Microsoft Works has already been released as an ad-funded product") is then throttled into submission as a slab of slippery PR perch, flailing on the floor of the meaningless drivel wet-market. How dysfunctional is that?

Poor Ms. Foley. Spare a thought for someone who has dedicated themselves to trying to make some sense of Redmond's utterances. I only have to sit through the occasional PowerPoint barrage of buzzwords, cliches and tautologies spewing from the mouths of identikit Microsoft promoters wearing Joe 90 glasses. She has to do it on a regular basis.

» Microsoft Works to become a free, ad-funded product | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

Technorati Tags: microsoft, works, pr

"How's the Review Going?" Spam

At a conference I have been attending I was asked to explain to PR folk there what journalists want. Apparently, by the time my session came around, the PR folk had been put off by several previous journalists who had presumably used clear language to express what they want because most didn't turn up. Wisely, since the three who did either nodded off, feigned stomach convulsions and left the room or got overly fresh with their BlackBerry.

This didn't stop me ranting and raving like a lunatic about how PR people don't often understand what we want. One thing I didn't mention is the Bane of the Follow-up Email. These are emails sent (often automatically) in the period after a journalist expresses interest in a product sufficiently to download it, or receive further details on it, or whatever. From then on the PR person will send a weekly email -- exactly the same one, each time -- asking for a status update. Forever, or until the PR company no longer represents the client, or the PR person dies, or the company they work for gets shut down for being a spammer.

Now, not many PR agencies do this, but those that do seem impervious to the irritation this causes folk like me. Imagine if every PR agency did this: A journalist's inbox would be so full of these things they wouldn't be able to do any reviewing at all. So my policy is never to reply to them for fear of encouraging the practice. But, frankly, it is no better than spam, and it leaves the journalist (well, this journalist) in a frayed and hostile mood, which can't be good for the company or the product the PR person is being paid to promote.

So, please, no mindless follow-up emails unless it's to offer fresh (and relevant and useful) information, and certainly no automated one that goes out every week. We'll get to your products when it suits our schedule, not yours, and if you start to bombard us we'll probably ditch the idea of writing about your product in a fit of petulance.

Technorati Tags: press releases, public relations, spam

News: Demise by Increment?

Is the problem with journalism that it always focuses on the increment?

Was reading Jeff Jarvis' piece on the revolutionary impact of the iPhone -- not, I hasten to add, about the iPhone as an item (the fetishism surrounding it may mark a lowpoint in our materialistic age) but about the citizen journalism coverage of the absurd lines forming outside shops by those eager to be an early buyer (yes, this, too, may mark a low-point in our cravenly submissive consumer culture, but let's not go there. At least for now.)

No, Jarvis was more interested in this real-time coverage and what it represents. He rightly suggests this is real-time coverage on a par with the Virginia shootings -- something that Duncan Riley, who writes good stuff at the usually puffy or snarky TechCrunch, has already called eventstreaming.

Jarvis is right: the subject matter aside (Virginia Tech shootings vs absurd consumer lines outside stores that don't sell out) this is a good dry run for something more serious. But it's Jarvis' other point (if you've read this far, sorry for the wiggly lines getting here) that caught my attention: the tendency of media to pick holes in the potential of this:

Problems? Of course, there are. I never sit in a meeting with journalists without hearing them obsess about all the things that could go wrong; that is, sadly and inevitably, their starting point in any discussion about new opportunities. I blew my gasket Friday when I sat with a bunch of TV people doing just that.

Very true. Journalists do this all the time. That's because we're trained to. Not a bad thing, actually, being able to spot problems. But it has a downside. And quite a big one. It's this:

Journalists are taught to identify "news". In some situations, it's obvious: A bomb goes off in Baghdad; two guys drive a flaming SUV into Glasgow Airport; Apple launches a cute phone. All news, and no one would disagree.

But it's the rest of the stuff that gets problematic. Most journalists don't have these kinds of stories to work with so they're forced to look for them, and that mostly involves prying apart things, people, organizations, situations, points of view and seeing some incremental change or difference that merits a news story, such as U.S. family terrorized by possible phone hoax (Cellphones Terror Weapon Horror!)

So Wikipedia, for example, gets coverage not for the millions of great articles in there and the millions of people who go to it first for information, but the few articles that are wrong, badly written, libelous, mischievous or biased. That, for a journalist, is the news story. (Wikipedia Unreliable Shock!)

Some companies and PR folk know this tendency and exploit it: Several security companies base their business model on the idea that there are enough journalists out there to write scare stories about mobile phone viruses for an industry to emerge (I wrote what I thought was a piece somewhat mocking this scaremongery only to get another company in the same business email me thanking me for my article and suggesting that I write about their product, which rests on all the same scaremongery that I was trying to pooh-pooh.)

I am not saying journalists only write negative stories and not positive ones. I'm saying that we journalists tend to focus on kinks in the same picture, magnify them and then call it news. This is nothing new, but we should be smart enough to realize that if it's not just us journalists making the news anymore, we have to be ready to accept the notion of "news" is changing.

Just as we can see lots of things going wrong with citizen journalism, and fixate on those to the exclusion of the bigger picture, we may well be missing the bigger picture that technology is giving us.

23 Ways to Make a Better Pitch

There's been quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing in the light of a recent post by Charles Arthur of The Guardian (original post here; more discussion here) about journalists and PR pitches. So I thought I'd throw in a few ideas of my own, which rapidly expanded to 22 23. (Note to self: never write these in the morning before I've eaten.)

1. Put a link to the product/company's website in the press release or pitch. Really.
2. Don't duplicate the pitch (your contact list should be pruned of any duplicates, whether they're different email addresses or not). It looks poor to get lots of emails from the same person. One email, one pitch.
3. Make sure your contact list and press releases are geographically sound: Not everyone, amazingly, lives in the U.S. and cares about Texas.
4. Drop the lame intros and get to the point.
5. Leave out industry jargon.
6. Don't bury the significance or drown it in longwinded subordinate clauses.
7. If you're going to offer "an expert" to comment on a news event, be upfront about any possible conflicts of interest. We'll find them eventually and we won't be impressed.
8. Don't offer to write our story for us. It's frankly insulting.
9. If we try out your client's product and have negative feedback, don't take offense or try to persuade us otherwise. Instead ask permission to pass it onto the client. We like to think we're experts, and while we're probably not, getting into a debate about it with anyone less than someone big from the company is unlikely to sway us.
10. Don't try to win us over with the line "your rival has written about us! Maybe it's time for you to!" It reveals only your ignorance about how journalism works.
11. Put contact details on the press release that are helpful, including time zones. IM and Skype are legitimate communication tools: offer them. (But don't pitch via them unless you know the reporter well enough.)
12. Don't leave out important information, such as the imminent launch of a new product in the range that will make the review of the soon-to-be-obsolete model we're working on look silly.
13. Don't follow up with phone calls or a reminder email if you don't get a reply to a pitch. If you don't get a reply assume we're not interested. Know how many press releases and pitches we get per day?
14. If we do reply with interest, please respect our deadlines, time zones and preferred medium of communication. We're not prima donnas (well a bit) but there's a reason why we give this information. Whole days can get lost if you don't understand that the whole world is not on Seattle's timezone.
15. If we request a particular expertise or subject, keep your pitch to that subject. It wastes everyone's time to have to read through pitches that begin "I know you asked for an expert to comment on polar bears, but would be you be interested in talking to one of my clients about athlete's foot?"
16. Similarly, please don't try to force a pitch to fit a request. "Your request for comment on polar bears made me think of my client Bob who doesn't know anything about polar bears, but once went on holiday to Finland, which has lots of snow. He could comment on how snow is white, like polar bears."
17. Don't think that writing a pitch as if it's a done deal is going to make it any more likely to result in a sale: "When is a good time to set up a phoner with my client?"
18. Never, never, call us out of the blue. Especially in the middle of the night. (Second reminder: not everyone in the world is on Seattle time.)
19. If someone leaves your company make sure their email address patches through to whoever took over their job/accounts. Don't let the email bounce back.
20. Make sure you, and your clients, have updated About/Press pages that let us find contacts quickly and easily. And email addresses, too, please. No just offering a phone number, or a lame email form.
21. If we do contact you out of the blue with a request, do please respond with more than a press release. Chances are our request doesn't fit exactly what you're working on, but that shouldn't stop you from helping us, even if it's only passing us on to someone else who might be better suited to help us.
22. If such a request does not fall in your geographic area, don't just leave the reporter hanging. (That's you, Sony!)
23. Not every request is going to follow exactly your launch and publicity schedule. Roll with it. The important thing is getting some coverage.

Technorati Tags: PR, journalism, pitches, promotion, public relations, press releases

First Impressions, Last Impressions

What’s the first and last thing you’re likely to experience in a country you visit? And what kind of lasting impression is that going to leave?

Cigarette-burn marked toilet paper dispenser (empty) at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta Airport, April 28 2007

Toilet paper dispenser at Singapore’s Changi Airport, April 28 2007

Investment in tourist attractions, advertising campaigns and big ticket infrastructure projects may lure visitors, but chances are they will remember what hits them first and last. If you want to win visitors over, bathrooms at airports might be a good place to start.

Travel tip: the practice in an Indonesian bathroom, by the way, is to yell out ‘paper please’ ('minta tissu') to the attendant once you’re perched in the cubicle. He’ll then hand you some under the door.

Tags:  toilets, bathrooms, tourism, indonesia, singapore, pr

Wagging The Journalist Tail

I’m a bit late on this, but if you’re a journalist it’s an interesting glimpse on just how much effort PR puts into spin: Microsoft’s PR agency sends its memo on a Wired journalist to the journalist himself (the dossier is here).

Much has been written about how it is normal practice to have PR closely monitoring a journalist, and we shouldn’t be surprised. True, I guess. What surprises me about the episode is the degree of influence/control those writing the memos assume they have over the process. Take these examples from the emails in the memo:

• Spin: They are requesting a photo session with Jeff Sandquist {Microsoft’s director of platform evangelism} so we’ve secured the focus of our story. Translation: We wanted them to write about Sandquist and they are.
• Interference: Fred will be writing early this week and we expect him to finish mid-week and will be in touch with him throughout the process. We should have a look at it early March and it should run late March for the April issue. Translation: We will be exerting influence over the writer as he writes.
• Influence: We’re pushing Fred to finish reporting and start writing. Translation: We are exerting influence over the timing of the journalistic process.
• Professional pressure: We will continue to push Fred to make sure there are no surprises. Translation: We will exert influence over the journalist to ascertain the content of the article and (implicitly) seek to remove anything we don’t like.
• Personal pressure: I would hate for them to feel like the story somehow missed the true essence in which Channel 9 and 10 came to be…I know it would be pretty disappointing to them if those elements weren't captured somehow. Translation: We will use all tools in our kit including personal feelings and guilt to ensure the journalist writes what we want.

We should point out that Chris Anderson at Wired has written about how Waggener Edstrom, the PR company, were not given a draft of the story, they were faxed a proof (i.e. a final version that cannot be corrected.) I can understand the sense in doing this, but I’d say it’s still one step too much (and it doesn’t quite gel with what Wired’s research director Joanna Pearlstein says in a comment, that “we do not share copies of stories with sources prior to publication, period.” Might be worth clarifying this.)

We should also be careful about concluding that just because the PR flaks think they’re heavily influencing the process, they may not be. The proof, of course, is in the pudding. Was the final story what they were aiming for?

Journalistic integrity is the issue. Jeff Sandquist, the subject of the story, has written about how Wired has been trying to apply the lessons of transparency learned from Microsoft to its own institution. This might or might not be true. Transparency is fine, but more important is opacity. PR shouldn’t be granted, or assume that they’re being granted, such extensive access to the journalistic process. That should be sacrosanct.

There’s a simple way of looking at this. Replace Microsoft as the subject with a government. Would a publication and its readers feel happy about this degree of involvement by officialdom in the framing of a story? I’m sure it happens, but as a reader I guess I’d just hope it doesn’t. As a reader I’d be saddened by all this; not because PR is doing something it shouldn’t, but that from the tone of the emails, it sounds as if PR assumes extensive rights to be intimately involved in the story. That means this kind of thing is common.

I’m a journalist, so my interest is simple: to ensure that what I write is what I think is correct and that I have managed to filter out as much as the spin as possible, so that what remains is as close to the truth as I can get it. For the record, I would never tolerate this degree of involvement in the process. Of course I’m lucky; I intentionally live and work a long way from anyone who can personally manipulate me through relationships, and although I write for The Wall Street Journal I’m no big fish. In fact, I have a lot of problems securing even basic stuff like a copy of Office 2007 to review; in the light of this episode I’m quite grateful. I’d rather be ignored than be subjected to this kind of pincer movement.

Bottom line: It’s sad that there’s no sense of irony here that so much effort is put into trying to control the message that is ‘there is no control’.

Tags: microsoft, PR, wired, longtail, waggener+edstrom, spin

Hotel To Guests: Use Skype

It seems that hotels are finally making the best of a bad thing and realising the old days of fleecing their guests with overpriced phone calls are past. In fact, one hotel is suggesting that in fact it is on the customer’s side, if this ad from today’s IHT by Hong Kong-based Shangri-La Hotels is anything to go by:

The wording is “Consider subscribing to Skype – the free Internet vocal communications service. It could save you a small fortune in long-distance mobile phone charges.” Note the ‘mobile’ inserted here, implying that it’s mobile operators who alone have been the culprit. Indeed, it would be interesting to see whether this isn’t some fiendish plot to get guests to pay for in-room Internet services.

Staying at the (otherwise magnificent) Conrad in Bali’s Nusa Dua a few weeks back (yes, it’s a hard life), for example, I was surprised by having to pay about $10 for an hour’s Internet connection which was slower than a blood-drunk mosquito. (Tip: just piggy back the lobby Wifi if you can. It sucks, but no more or less than the connection in the room):

I’ve asked the Shangri-La’s PR for details about the Skype ad and their Internet charges (if any.) I’ll post their comments once I hear back.

Tags: phones, skype, bali, hong+kong, phones, hotels

Not Stopping Traffic? Blame Wikipedia

I'm not one to court fame, although it is flattering, I must confess, to be recognised in the street. First there's the odd sideways look as they approach you. Then the diffident approach:
"Excuse me, are you Jeremy Wagstaff?"
"Why, yes, I am!"
"You don't remember me, do you?
"Er, no."
"I'm your wife."
"Oh, yes. So you are. Sorry."

Actually, that almost never happens. In fact, it's unlikely to for the simple reason that no one has thought to create a page about me on Wikipedia. Of course, why should I be so presumptuous as to think I deserve one? And would I not be obsessively checking it were such a page to exist? And do I want people to know what I did that night in Bangkok in 1990 when I was chased by a woman in a car reversing at speed through heavy traffic on Sukhumwit? Probably not although I'll tell you if you really want.

Still, there's definitely a cultism about Wikipedia biographical entries. The organisers have had to gamekeep against congressional aides, PR companies and even the entries' own subjects to prevent them whitewashing their past. Even one of the founders has been alleged to have indulged in a bit of airbrushing of his own past.

But my beef is this. Why, should the mood take me to search Wikipedia for my humble name, do these matches appear?

Results 1-13 of 13

• Nonjuring schism
  Relevance: 7.4% - -
• List of footballers (rugby league)
  Relevance: 5.2% - -
• Royal College of Art
  Relevance: 4.2% - -
• List of fictitious people
  Relevance: 4.2% - -
• List of Yorkshire people
  Relevance: 3.6% - -
• List of notable Old Carthusians
  Relevance: 1.8% - -

I am not a rugby league footballer. I never went to the RCA, although I once won a Lego competition. I am not, as far as I know, fictitious although my lack of an entry on Wikipedia may suggest I am; my mother was born in Yorkshire but I, alas, was not, and while I suppose the Nonjuring Schism is a part of my heritage, I never went to Charterhouse and therefore cannot claim to be an Old Carthusian, let alone a notable one.

Still, given the amount of airbrushing out, and bland self-hagiographic rubbish one does find among biographies on Wikipedia, it's probably as accurate as any other entry on a living person in the otherwise excellent online tome. In any case, it kind of captures the kind of person I sometimes wish I was: an artistic scrum half Yorkshireman playing notably in the Charterhouse First XV , not averse to a Schism or two so long as it's Nonjuring and doesn't leave any stretch marks. Now that kind of entry I would like.

 

Technorati tags: wikipedia, hagiography, pr, biography

Seasons' PR Greetings

It's that time of year: Lots of Christmas greetings messages from PR folk. I don't want to sound like Scrooge, but I'm never quite clear why they bother with these things.

Nokia sent me a link to a flash message with lots of phones doing stuff and thanks for "my continued support for Nokia". A nice sentiment, though I've never thought of what I do in those terms, and I suppose I'd much rather have an answer to my now six-week old request for Nokia to do something about the piles of angry comments left on my blog from customers in India. Some of them are poignant, like messages from the afterlife or some terribly tragedy being played out online.

Yesterday I got one from Veena Meksol, who from her IP address is writing from Bangalore, and writes "sir, pl give me nokia service centre in bangalore, my hand set is just 5 months old but from 2 days i am not able here," and then the message ceases. Heaven knows what happened to Veena, but I'd happily sacrifice a Flash-based Christmas card or six if Nokia could track her down end her agony.

 My problem is that I can't really distinguish between a PR greetings card and spam, especially when spammers' subject fields look remarkably similar . Is there any difference? And what is the correct protocol when you receive one? PR turnover is so high, most of the names mean nothing to me, which is presumably why some of them attach photos to them. They're all extraordinarily good-looking, I have to say:

 I'm just not sure I've actually met any of them, or even communicated with them. The problem then is that I feel guilty. I don't want to be one of those hacks that treats flacks like, well, flacks. On the other hand, who sends Christmas cards with pictures of themselves looking, well, great, if not to lure the recipient into some sort of trap?

Anyway, I knew the season had hit a fresh low when I got a box from the PR of a certain company which contained a card (thanks, guys!) and, buried amid the packaging, a small box of chocolates from Norman Love. The mouthwatering blurb that accompanied the chocs was impressive -- "Norman Love Confections welcomes you to your first step in a delectable journey into the world of fine, handsome chocolates," it began. All this may well have been true -- including the assertion that each of the six chocolates was "an edible work of art" -- but the effect was somewhat spoiled by the fact that the chocolates had not weathered the 10,000 km trip from Silicon Valley to Indonesia that well.

Frankly, they looked as if someone had sat on them, half eaten each of them, spat them out, sat on them again and then sprinkled the contents of their computer keyboard over them before putting them carefully back in the box and retying the ribbon. Maybe that's the message the PR company intended to convey? If so, I'm surprisingly cool with that.

Bloggers Bash Into Chinese Walls, Part XVI

Once again, the non-journalist end of blogging is finding that its world is surprisingly like the old world of media. TechCrunch, a widely read blog of things going on in the social media world of Web 2.0, has run into the kind of conflicts that traditional media grappled with (and are still grappling with) since time immemorial (well at least since last Wednesday.)

The story, in a nutshell is this: TechCrunch sets up a UK version of its site. TechCrunch, itself heavily sponsored by Web 2.0 startup advertising, co-sponsors a Web 2.0 conference in Paris. TechCrunch UK editor attends said confab, which ends in controversy and accusations that the organiser, one Loic Lemeur, messed up. Organiser lambasts TechCrunch UK editor's own accusations. Sparks fly, one thing leads to another, and TechCrunch UK editor is fired by TechCrunch owner and the UK website suspended. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth within blogosphere and talk of raging ethical debate.

I can't pretend to have read all of the raging ethical debate (as raging ethical debates go, you want to set aside a good chunk of time for one that rages in the blogosphere: Harrington's post on the subject currently has 78 comments, a few dozen more here before its suspension. Even Journalist.co.uk and The Guardian wrote about it, although judging from the headline I don't think it was for the front page.)

Now there's plenty of fodder for good debates here, and it's not only Arrington who is getting a fair amount of flack for all this. But there's an easy way of looking at this: Arrington is the publisher of TechCrunch. He's Murdoch, Maxwell, whoever you want. TechCrunch is his brand. Anything that damages that brand, or appears to be damaging that brand, needs crushing, and that trumps everything else. You can't blame him for that; if the editor of The Guardian starts damaging the brand of the paper you'd expect him to come in for some flak from the owner.

It gets complicated further in, however. Arrington is also an editor and writer. He's also in the advertising and circulation department, since he's out there drumming up business (often with the people he writes about, but that's another story). So his role as publisher clashes with his role as editor, since a good editor will demand the independence necessary to criticise anyone, whether it's sponsors, advertisers, even (and we're talking theory here) the owners or publisher. Arrington in his role as editor was in conflict with his role as publisher and owner.

This is why traditional media separate these functions, and why, inevitably, TechCrunch and its ilk will have to too, as these kinds of crises occur. Editorial departments in traditional media have little or no contact with other departments, so oftentimes have no idea whether they're sponsoring an event they're attending. That's how it should be, although it does perhaps contribute to the notion that journalists occupy their own little dreamworld.

Who knows where the truth lies in this particular mess, but if it awakens the blogosphere to the need to have Chinese Walls between advertising/sponsoring departments and the editorial side then that can only be good. In this case, if I were Arrington, I would start building them quickly. TechCrunch has at least 144,000 readers, a very respectable circulation, and that, whether he likes it or not, puts the publication into the realm of an outfit that needs to clearly demarcate the boundaries of its interests.

What Probably Won't Happen in 2007

The BBC has asked me to make some predictions about the coming year, something I'm always loath to do because I seem to get it wrong. Anyway, here are my notes. They're based in part on my own bath-time musings, and partly inspired by the thoughts of others (tried to credit them where relevant.)

1999 just took longer than we thought, that's all

Web 2.0 is not just about AJAX, mashups, blogs and all that. It's about building a platform. That's now been done. All we need to do now is let people use it. That is already happening, but it will REALLY happen in 2007:

Delivery will get better

RSS will stop being something we have to keep explaining to people, because they'll be using it. It will be seamless -- a way for anyone to join something, whether it's a newsletter, a service, a MySpace group. It will stop being known as Rich Site Syndication or Really Simple Syndication and be Really Simple, Stupid.

Content will get better

The real improvement in computers will be the rise of the dual- and four-core processor, i.e. one that uses more than one chip. Think of it as the computer having more than one brain. This will speed up, and make easier, the editing of video and other multimedia content. Our computer, in a word, will no longer be an expensive typewriter. With faster connection speeds, too, video will be the thing that really makes the Internet compelling to people who were previously uninterested. What we watch on YouTube will get better. Individuals will have their 15 megabytes of fame. But this will couple with a rise of content generated specifically for the Internet, further blurring the lines between TV and computer viewing. Silicon Valley is no longer a tech center, but a media one.

The demise of big software

The rise of online applications will in turn blur the distinction between what is going on in your computer and what is going on at the other end of the line -- the server. Vista will seem more like a farewell than a big hello, as big software from big companies locking in users to specific ways of doing things will give way to open source alternatives like Ubuntu. Microsoft will fight this tooth and nail, but I'm sure they already know it.

The mainstreaming of social media

 Web 2.0 is really all about breaking down barriers by making it easier to do stuff, and to mix it up with other people doing stuff. In a way what the Internet has always been about. Expect the influence of blogs to further pervade those last few citadels that have been resisting it, breaking down walls within organizations -- internal blogs that flatten hierarchies and build up feedback mechanisms for employees to talk back to their bosses. Think government departments. Think universities, schools and anywhere else where hierarchies exist. This won't be a one way street: anonymous bloggers in places like Microsoft and China may find themselves outed and lynched.

The rise of the maven

As the Web gets bigger, Google will need to reinvent itself to keep up. Web 2.0 offers some great ways to find stuff through other means, leveraging the knowledge of others who have gone before. We will acknowledge the contribution, and marketers will acknowledge the power, of the maven: the person who seems to somehow know stuff, and is ready to share it. Tagging, blogging, and other social tools will be recognized as extremely powerful ways to do this.

The demise of the big computer

The cellphone will get better at what it does, and we'll grow to trust it more. We'll stop calling it a cellphone and just call it a wearable device, or something snazzier I can't think of right now. One day we'll think it quaint that we had to sit in one place to do stuff, or near an outlet, or within range of a WiFi signal. Cellphones don't have those limitations and this will start to hit home in 2007:

Teenagers will show us the way. Again

They're already sharing everything via Bluetooth, creating networks on the fly (that, incidentally, fly under the radars of commercial networks and marketers). They share videos, ringtones, songs, games, either by exchanging content or playing against each other.

Space-shifting

The cellphone has already redefined what space is, and that will continue. Sexual liaisons involving public figures will be recorded by one party as insurance against future hard times. Cellphone television will become more popular, not just because it's mobile but because it's personal, a time to be alone under the sheets, on a bus, waiting for a friend, stuck in traffic. Maybe not this year, but soon they'll be pluggable into the hotel TV. This is tied into the idea of personal space being something you control, either through presence, or through intermediary services where you only ever hand out personal details of your virtual self.

The End of the iPod

The iPod will decline in importance as the music-phone takes center stage. I didn't think this would happen because cellphone manufacturers mess up the software on the phone, but they're getting better at it. Even Nokia. So expect most people, starting with teenagers who don't want more than one gadget and probably can't afford them, to switch to one device. This will again throw open the mobile music/MP3/DRM debate, and iTunes will start to look a bit wobbly until Apple gets something sorted out so non-iPod users can download from the site easily and cheaply.

The downsides

It's not all fun and games. Bad things are going to continue to happen, and there's not much we can do about them. It's partly just the normal process of utopians being pushed aside by realists, but it's also about an ongoing debate about how to, or whether to, police a space that seems largely unpoliceable.

A dual identity crisis

Mainstream media's identity crisis will be compounded by an identity crisis among bloggers. The rise of pay-me blogging, where bloggers get paid for writing about specific companies or products, will lead to some scandals and make people explore more deeply the ethics of blogging, and how they're not that much different to the ethics developed by journalists over several hundred years. This won't however, lead to the demise of blogging, but the rise of a sort of online press corps, with its own associations and rules, both written and unwritten. Many bloggers will end up being journalists, and the best journalists will move effortlessly and happily through the blogosphere. Many already do.

Keep up, grandma

Things are moving so fast the slow will look like they're running backwards. If 2004-6 were anything to go by, 2007 will move quite quickly. Some folk I spoke to said that not much has popped up this year that's exciting, and that's true, in a boiling frog type way. It's the earth shifting that is changing, and we need to change with it. Young people just get it, but us digital immigrants need to not just learn the lingo but keep up with the fast-changing slang. Oh, and MySpace won't be the place to hang out in 2007; it'll begin to look like a sad school hall dance arranged by the teachers.

The Rise of the Snoop

We tend to make a distinction between these things, but they're actually all part of the same thing. Spam is getting worse, and it's not just an invasion of privacy but an invasion of our productivity (91% of email is spam.) Music and video files will also rise as vectors of trojans, malware and other PUPs. GPS devices married to phones will enable people to track their employees, spouses or offspring, and further empower stalkers. Cellphone monitoring devices like FlexiSpy will get better at distributing themselves, and will be powerful not just in the hands of eavesdropping acquaintances but identity thieves. The rise of virtual worlds will also lead to the rise of virtual identities and virtual identity theft, along the lines of CopyBot. Expect to see cellphone eavesdropping and data theft from cellphones to surge. And we'll start to realize that Google isn't as cuddly as it looks; it's a snoop, too.