Goodbye 2012 and helloooo 2013!

What’s been going on and what can we expect to see over the next 12 months?

So, in 2012 we saw some economic recovery and had some fun… We saw the rise of Pinterest, several IPOs and acquisitions, an aggressive political ad war, Facebook’s 1 billionth user, and (close on 1 billion at the time of writing) watched one Korean artist turn into a global phenomenon thanks to YouTube.

The media also saw a great deal of debates (outside of politics) that spread wide (globally) and quickly (in seconds), such as Facebook’s IPO, NASA landing a car-sized robotic science laboratory on Mars, The Summer Olympics in London, The Queen’s diamond jubilee, the sudden death of singer Whitney Houston, WikiLeaks saga continuing, British monarchy without clothes (Kate Middleton topless and Price Harry’s Las Vegas romp), Hurricane Sandy and gun control following the senseless Newtown, Connecticut shootings.

The actual media saw changes, Newsweek had to do something to ensure its survival – they stopped their print copy and went virtual.  Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. phone hacking scandal resulted in closures and restructures, and Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway company strengthened it’s position in print media while pulling in a profit.

How has social media changed our society?  Well, its not all good – a study by OnlineCollegeCourses.com tells us that social media is harder to resist than sleep and sex. Sleep! And sex! And 1 in 3 under 30 year olds who are looking for work value social media freedom over salary…. Yes really!  In fact 56% of this demographic would not take a job if it did not allow access to social media.

That all said, what do we at NettResults think we can we expect in 2013?  I’d like to say we can see 13 trends for 2013, but we’re not that insightful.  Instead, hare are our top three:

LinkedIn is going to move from personal networking to marketing. More companies will use LinkedIn to monitor conversations and connect with customers and influencers. New and enhanced features on the site, such as its "endorse" capability and new profile and company page designs are encouraging users to spend more time building their personal brands with LinkedIn's tools. Companies, particularly in the B2B world, will increasingly recognize its marketing potential. Also, as adoption and activity on LinkedIn surge, journalists will spend more time using the platform for research, identifying sources and breaking stories.

A picture is worth a thousand words.  We’ve long promoted that every press release and every news media push should have imagery.  We think this trend will continue and strengthen. The rise of infographics, photo sharing, and visual storytelling will push companies to deploy messages visually in order to compete in a crowded content market. All Things D reported that in August, smartphone users spent more time on Instagram than on Twitter for the first time since Instagram launched in 2010. This is indicative of a broader shift toward visual content in the digital space.

Who controls social media?  Well the PR department of course! The debate over which corporate discipline "owns" social media is practically as old as social media itself; PR, marketing, branding, advertising, and customer service (just to name a few) all have skin in the game. As more businesses recognize the opportunities (and threats) that social media present to their corporate reputation, and the demand from stakeholders for direct engagement, they are reaching out to PR agencies and practitioners for support. PR pros, who have long been responsible for managing the dialogue between an organization and the public, will emerge as trendsetters in the social space by providing valuable communications counsel and achieving results that directly impact clients' bottom lines. 

14 Press Release Pillars - Writing Tips for Effective Press Releases

Whether you are writing a press release for the domestic or international media, some things are just the pillars of good press release writing.  These need to be considered in the first round of press release writting and then developed for each of the international markets.

Writing a press release can be daunting for some and confusing for others.  As an agency we can get push back from clients after we write a press release because they don’t understand why certain things are written in a certain way.

Our friends at PR Web have a useful little tool that helps remind us all what a great press release encompasses.  We’ve taken that writing and added our own spin to it here.

Start Strong: You only have a matter of seconds to grab your readers’ attention, so you want to capture it with a strong opening. Your headline, summary and first paragraph should clarify your news. The rest of your release should provide the detail.

Remember the simple who, what, where, when, how rule for your summary.

Identify Yourself: If your release does not identify the source of the information within the first few paragraphs, you may lose the promotional value your release can provide.

One should also consider the importance and relevance of the voice.  If it is not strong enough, consider a joint release to increase.

Write Professionally: If your release contains hype, slang, excessive exclamation points or some other common mistakes chances are it will be viewed as an advertisement rather than a news release, which may hurt credibility. Or worse, a media outlet may pick up your release and publish without modification, opening any sloppy writing to a larger audience.

Maybe, just maybe, hype, slang and excessive explanation points are the way your reader thinks and communicates (I guess not though).  My point is that you need to think about the writing style for the reader.  For example, IBM’s and Apple’s writing style are different.

Limit Jargon: The best way to communicate is to speak plainly using ordinary language. Using an abundance of technical language and jargon limits your reading audience.

Or worse still, the editor will not be familiar with your jargon/acronyms and will incorrectly use them in their reporting.

Make sure your Information is Informational and Timely: Think about your audience. Will someone else find your story interesting? Answer the question, “Why should anyone care?” Make sure your announcement contains information that is timely, unique, highlights something new or unusual, and provides useful information to your audience. In other words, don’t make it an advertisement for your business.

This has to be the number one reason a press release does not get past an editor.  News has to be exactly that – newsworthy.

Avoid Clichés: You don’t listen to clichés. Neither will your audience. Avoid phrases like “customers save money” or “great customer service” to announce or describe. Focus on the aspects of your announcement that truly set you apart from everyone else.

In our multi-cultural world, clichés do not translate well.  Just avoid.

Pick an Angle: Make sure that your release has a good hook. Tying your information to current events, recent studies, trends and social issues brings relevance, urgency and importance to your message.

The media loves controversy and sells their publication on it.  Use this power.

Communicate beyond words: Use multimedia files like images, video, links and other features that will capture the attention of your readers and highlight your news. Attach logos, head shots, product shots, photographs, audio files, video files, PDF documents or any other supplemental materials that build up your release. Use anchor text and hyper links to point readers back to your site ensures both your Website and your important keywords receive simultaneous promotion in your press release.

A picture is worth a thousand words. A video is worth a million words.

Illustrate the Solution: Use real life examples to illustrate how your company or organization solved a problem. Identify the problem and why your solution is the right solution. Give examples.

Case studies and testimonials are vital for building credibility.  Without credibility your press release is a dead duck.

Don’t Give Away All the Secrets: If you’re running a new promotion this season, tell readers where they can go to learn more. Provide links in your press release directly to the page on your Website where readers can learn the specifics about your news and then act upon it. If you give your readers no reason to click through to your site, they’re not necessarily going to.

You want to create traffic, engage the audience (part of the road to a sale) and measure your success.  Links do this for you.

Stick to the Facts: Tell the truth. Avoid fluff, embellishments, hype and exaggerations. If you feel that your press release seems sensational, there’s a good chance your readers will think so too.

The truth always comes out – maybe today, maybe tomorrow or maybe long in the future.  The press live to find the truth. The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists’ number one stated oath is to report the truth.

Use Active Voice: Verbs in the active voice bring your press release to life. Rather than writing “entered into a partnership,” use “partnered” instead. Do not be afraid to use strong verbs. For example, “The committee exhibited severe hostility over the incident” reads better if changed to “The committee was enraged over the incident.”

Strong is good.

Economize Your Words: Be concise. News search engines sometimes reject news releases with overly long headlines, excessive lists and high overall word counts. Eliminate unnecessary adjectives, flowery language or redundant expressions such as “added bonus” or “first time ever.”

Enough said.

Proofread: Write your press release in a Word or other text document instead of writing it directly on the online submit page, so you can print it, proofread, rewrite and proofread again. The more time you take to do it right, the better your company’s impression to the world.

If you are proof reading your own work, then we highly recommend you don’t proof read the same day that you write. Better still, use the four eyes principal and have two separate people proof read the release to check and double check all of the points above.

PR Multiplying or Dividing?

There was an interesting story we tweeted about a few days ago originally written by our friends at PR Newswire that suggested there is some disagreement about the skill set PR pros need to succeed in today’s environment, and there are three points of view emerging:

• The traditionalist, who values the ability to write, build relationships, isolate and convey key messages and build publicity strategy above all else.
• The digital enthusiast, who values social media acuity, digital content production and editing and coding skills highly.
• The quant, which focuses on data, analytics and how PR integrates with business processes.

At NettResults we like to think of it as multiplying and dividing.

If you have a list of 1,000 subscribers or 5,000 fans or 10,000 supporters in a social media world, you have a choice to make. You can create stories and options and benefits that naturally spread from this group to their friends, and your core group can multiply, with 5,000 growing to 10,000 and then 100,000.

Or you can put the group through a sales funnel, weed out the free riders and monetize the rest. A 5% conversion rate means you just turned 5,000 interested people into 250 paying customers.

Multiplying scales. Dividing helps you make this quarter's numbers.

So it is with PR.  You want to ever increase your sphere of influence, or put another way, you want to increase the number of journalist you can call up.  At the same time you want to concentrate your time on the 5% (or is it another 80/20 rule?) that don’t just passively receive your news stories, but actively read into them, converse with you and find the story they can report on.

This is why an intellectual rivalry between traditional PR pros and digital enthusiast PR pros is a loose/loose battle.  To be good at PR in today’s rapidly evolving media market, you need to be both a traditionalist and a digital enthusiast.  Gone are the days when having one Millennial digital evangelist in your PR agency’s office was enough – today each of your teams need to be made up digi-traditionalists.

Oh, and they better be able to measure that success. Results are king.

PR pros and journalists - conjoined twins that constantly squabble

Public relations and journalists have always had a love-hate relationship; simultaneously relying on each other for their professional livelihood while at the same time holding untold (and sometimes voiced) resentment.

They are like conjoined twins that constantly squabble.

Both professions are miss-understood by the general public, but well understood by the other.  Today, the facts are that there are becoming less professional journalist and more public relations professionals. And the trend is getting more dramatic.

In their book, The Death and Life of American Journalism Robert McChesney and John Nichols tracked the number of people working in journalism since 1980 and compared it to the numbers for public relations. Using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, they found that the number of journalists has fallen drastically while public relations people have multiplied at an even faster rate. In 1980, there were about 45 PR workers per one hundred thousand population compared with 36 journalists. In 2008, there were 90 PR people per one hundred thousand compared to 25 journalists. That’s a ratio of more than three-to-one, better equipped, better financed.

Oh, and that was 2008 – in the USA.  One can only imagine how those stats have multiplied in the past 4 years taken at a global level.

The researcher who worked with McChesney and Nichols, R. Jamil Jonna, used census data to track revenues at public relations agencies between 1997 and 2007. He found that revenues went from $3.5 billion to $8.75 billion. Over the same period, paid employees at the agencies went from 38,735 to 50,499, a healthy 30 percent growth in jobs. And those figures include only independent public relations agencies—they don’t include PR people who work for big companies, lobbying outfits, advertising agencies, non-profits, or government.

Traditional journalism, of course, has been headed in the opposite direction. The Newspaper Association of America reported that newspaper advertising revenue dropped from an all-time high of $49 billion in 2000 to $22 billion in 2009. That’s right - more than half. A lot of that loss is due to the recession. But even the most upbeat news executive has to admit that many of those dollars are not coming back soon.

So, do PR folks and journalists even need to play friendly.  My father was a serious journalists having worked in several countries and eventually settling in the UK writing for The Times and The Sunday Times.  I’ve been involved in public relations (both client and agency side) for over 15 years, so maybe my view is bias, but even in the day of citizen journalism and hyper blogging, the scope of a PR pro and a professional journalist rely on the skills, contacts and reach of each other.

Assuming they have to play in the same sand box, how do PR and journalist folks reconcile the difference in number and budgets to hand?

Well, the number game is not so difficult.  With the ever-increasing efficiencies of technology, there is not only the ability to communicate with multiple people at once (it was only 15 years ago when the best way to do this was to print and envelope stuff your press release), but we can use these tools to understand and build stronger relationships.

One of the age-old truisms for a PR pro is to understand the media and the journalist’s contributions before pitching.  Only ten years ago a PR agency would have piles of newspapers and magazines going back at least a year.  Of course there in no reason for this any more.

So we can speak quicker, to more people, with more meaning and at a deeper level then ever before. This goes for PR pros and journalists equally.

What has caused the budget differences?  In other words why the increase in PR?  I think that is relatively simple.

1 – Globalization.  More companies are conducting business outside of their home city, so need to have a PR strategy in place to speak to their potential and existing customers.

2 – The cost to offer PR services has decreased.  Therefore more PR agencies can offer the service (it’s still a relatively low cost business to start) and more companies can afford to use these professionals (or carry the function in-house).  The fact that there are less traditional media outlets doesn’t really matter – the fact that are so many non-traditional media available just increases the requirement of the PR agency.

3 – Those larger companies that were already implementing an integrated marketing program have spent the past 10 years shifting their expenditure within the marketing functions – money coming from the advertising line item and flowing to the PR and social media line items.

4 – More media is now consumed by more people.  So what if there are less newspapers in existence? How many people did actually read multiple newspapers who were not directly involved in the industry? If you were the type of person who read a newspaper in yesteryear, there are still plenty to choose from. And the number of people logging in online to news / views from newspapers, blogs, twitter, facebook etc etc far exceeds newspaper subscription rates in the past. Oh, the fact that so much media is actually free to consumers doesn’t hurt either.

So yes, the PR pro needs the journalist, and for a journalist to act professionally and profitably (they are of course producing and writing more stories, quicker, than ever before) they need the PR pros.

The technology allows for greater communication and sharing of knowledge.

Now all we need to do it get the remaining children to stop squabbling in the name of better media for all. 

SOPA, PIPA & PR

There has been a lot of noise around SOPA and PIPA in the past three weeks so lets break this down and see what this really means, as while there is a lot of noise, there seems to be little real understanding, of how that effects online users and those of us in the PR business.

The chief protagonists in the story that is SOPA and PIPA are getting a bit full of themselves. If you haven't been following this saga, these two bills, prompted Google, Wikipedia, and a bunch of other sites to black out their logos or temporarily shut down in protest January 18. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act, the House version) and PIPA (Protect IP Act, the Senate version) are said to threaten free speech, the future of innovation, the technical infrastructure of the Internet, and the economic foundation of the global economy. Wrote one wag: "Big content is quite literally trying to foist its own version of the Great Firewall of China on to the American public."

For another example of the overwrought reactions, consider the public statement from blog site Boing Boing, which shut itself down on Jan. 18 to protest the two Congressional bills: "We could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we'd have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren't in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits."

For more background on the SOPA anti-piracy legislation, see SOPA: 10 Key Facts.

I'm not going to defend SOPA or PIPA. If, as their critics maintain, the bills effectively give ISPs, search engines, and payment services carte blanche to cut off foreign websites that U.S. movie, music, and other content creators merely claim are profiting from their stolen goods, then the legislation is outlandish. On the flip side, if the SOPA and PIPA language is so broad as to invite such flagrant abuses, then the bills' authors need to start again.

Question is, are they up to the task? An argument making the rounds among the digerati is that SOPA and PIPA are 20th century answers to a 21st century challenge, that the movie, music, and media industry lobbyists and their Congressional puppets just don't understand the dynamics of the Internet. If that's so (and maybe it is), then it's up to the Internet industry stalwarts opposing SOPA/PIPA to rally support for a meaningful, 21st century alternative to stopping online content piracy. Most of them pay lip service to the notion that such piracy is a serious problem. It's time for them to stop grandstanding--stop stomping their feet and holding their breath--and start showing the 20th century studios and record labels and media companies and their clueless lobbyists and Congressional supporters a much more effective way to address this issue.

To its credit Google, whose YouTube is a dumping ground for pirated material, is behind an alternative bill--The Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade, or OPEN, Act and is seeking industry comment and collaboration. That collaboration must include movie, music, and media companies.

And from a PR point of view – why do we care?  Well, as with most discussions/arguments that prompt emotions in the public domain, it is PR that can fuel the fire or bring parties closer to find a resolution.  Inevitably one side or another has a stronger PR strategy and that often leads to the majority of media aligning.

We’ve said it a million times – we live in a new digital age… and that is somewhat upsetting the public domain apple cart.  With so much personal publishing (yes, I’m talking about the blogging and micro-blogging world) we see loose groupings (non-corporate) of individuals creating power. I’m thinking of the Occupy movements in cities round the U.S. and Spring Uprisings in the Middle East. So here’s the million-dollar question – how can these groups really integrate a coherent media relations program?

They don’t have the structure, resources or full time dedication of most organized businesses, charities or public offices, but they still have the power. They have a need to push public debate and while they are very good at using social media to do this, they need to work out how to use public relations to further develop their power and to reach those luddites that don’t spend 3 hours a day on social media platforms (apparently there is a massive population around the world that doesn’t – who knew?). Or maybe they don’t.  Maybe a successful PR agency will find a solution…