Facttactic
Corporate and technical writers
Getting your company’s stories and views in the news is one of the best ways to quickly and freely get a high and positive PR profile.
But chief reporters and news editors can be a fickle and gruff bunch especially with stories they see as ‘just a free ad’ or PR for your business.
So how do you get past the gatekeepers with ‘news’ stories that are essentially PR or advertising? [Read more…] about how to ‘make headlines’ and get positive PR
Following on from our previous post on PR measurement, here’s a great piece from 2009 from American PR guy Don Bartholomew on five things to forget and five things to learn when measuring PR work.
Didn’t make the just-completed PRINZ annual conference this year, but this conference take-out is a useful reference: Six golden rules for media and PR measurement.
Here’s a very nifty postal gimmick … great for customising envelopes: the Google Map Envelope.
Simply enter a location in the box and get back an envelope ready to print with a Google map picture of the location you chose. Nice!
What price publicity?! A small UK design firm that has seen about half its staff made redundant recently has encouraged the rest of its staff to go naked in the office, with the managing director reported saying he thought it would be good for business.
Staff say they weren’t forced into it, but — while we can’t deny the publicity success of the stunt — it seems that people who had just seen half their colleagues lose their jobs would be unlikely to say no to the boss!
And group nudity … it gets everyone looking I guess; but 12 years after The Full Monty (and 22 years after NZ’s own Ladies’ Night), it’s about time for a new idea.
With blogs fast becoming authoritative sources of news in their own right, the avenues you need to reach to get comprehensive publicity coverage can sometimes appear infinite. But you do need to communicate with far more than just traditional media outlets.
Spend a bit of time online researching who is writing the most authoritative and informed blogs on topics relevant to your business. You will easily be able to find the blogs you should be talking to.
People in your industry will be aware of leading blogs. The Technorati website shows who the most popular global blog sites are. Google’s Blog Search works well if you type ‘New Zealand’ after whatever topic search you are after.
What is news on a blog?
How does news develop and grow in the online age, where blogs are taking on papers in the news-breaking game and often winning? American journalist and new media expert Jeff Jarvis defines it as “product versus process journalism.”
“Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning.”
The way blogs work include “collaboration, transparency, letting readers into the process, and trying to say what we don’t know when we publish – as caveats – rather than afterward – as corrections,” Jarvis says.
Traditional news outlets like to project the impression that their story is the definitive version .
Whereas, as the Irish Independent reports, journalism – as practised by bloggers – exposes the workings of a scoop. “[High-profile technology blog] TechCrunch, for instance, publishes the beginnings of a story that may only be a rumour. The responses to that rumour, often from reliable sources, generate updates to the story, which is polished with the help of readers to get closer to the whole truth.”
“This is journalism as beta,” Jarvis writes. “Every time Google releases a beta, it is saying that the product is incomplete and imperfect. It’s a call to collaborate.”
And that call to collaborate is drawing millions of blog readers and comment writers. If you want your company to be where the word-of-mouth action is, you need to be noticed in the blogosphere.
… And, lastly, just to add to the proliferation of news sources you need to pay attention to: Is Twitter the news outlet for the 21st century?