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PR guide What I will do for you I will:
What you can do for me Without wanting to teach PR people to suck eggs, the two most most important thing you can do to work with me are:
Why proactivity? I work from home and combine my work with toddler care. So I seldom get out to industry events. This leaves gaps in my education and expertise, and those gaps mean that when I work I may overlook something about your clients. If you are genuinely proactive and consider educating me about your clients, you might reduce the chance of this happening. This is especially important because I write mainly features and generate a lot of outbound e-mail to research them. I may not be sending you those emails! But of course proactivity is not sending me a stream of press release (I ask you not to anyway) in the hope I digest every word written about your clients.. Relations? Do you like getting telemarketing calls? I bet you don't. Now, imagine that telemarketing at work as well as at home, and in your email as well as on the phone. When telemarketers call you know you're just one person on an amorphous list. When PR people call me, they do the same. They often assume they know a lot about me because I have been identified as a journalist. But very often they know nothing about me and don't bother to ask. That's the same irritating lack of service you get from telemarketers ... except journalists get it from people who claim to be professional communicators and specialise in public "relations"! So here's my answer. If you want to interest me in your clients, don't treat me as a disembodied Inbox to "hit and hope" like a telemarketer. Treat me like you want to be treated when someone goes after your business. If you make the effort to think about how you communicate with me (which seems a reasonable thing to ask of communications professionals) instead of treating me as a random target, you have a better chance of success for you and your clients. What I write about I tend not to write about technology per se, but about the business value of technology. A good (if I do say so myself) example is this article. Here's another example. About half of the ideas for these stories are my own, the remainder come from my editors. But they are all about ideas, so the best people
for me to talk to are
your clients' most industry focused people, so that I can learn about
what business wants: well-rehearsed boasters or robotic reciters of key
messages get short shrift. The nature of my work means my requests to
speak with these people will often come from out of the blue on short
deadlines.
Features The bulk of my journalism is feature writing, which involve me writing a lot of outbound mail and placing a lot of outbound calls to gather the information I need. If you have not been proactive in educating me about your clients, there's a chance I will not know enough about them to understand that they should be considered for inclusion in a feature. During my time in PR I had the "why weren't we in that feature' conversation with clients more times than I care to remember. So the way for you to work with me and make sure that does not happen is simple:
News While the bulk of my work is features, I also write news. But that news is seldom the "Company X launched product Y at a press conference today" kind of news. Instead, I glean news as I talk to people about other matters and sell it to zdnet.com.au or APC. This means I am highly unlikely to attend a press conference or meet a visiting VP unless I know in advance someone wants me to write about it for them. (Although if your visitor happens to be the world authority on something else I am exploring, bring them on!) If you are proactive, you may want to suggest to editors who reject your invitations on the grounds of staff shortages that perhaps they could ask me to do it. With dollars AND education as twin lures for an event, I'll probably be there. If I have the time I will always try to attend your events to educate myself. But client work comes first, something I am sure all PR people appreciate. Junkets I love a junket as much as the next undeserving scumbag who isn't really important but connects with a desirable readership. But sadly parental responsibilities make it almost impossible for me to travel overseas. It just isn't fair to my wife and kids to disappear for five days at a time, no matter how many frequent flyer points are at stake. And it makes no business sense: it is highly unlikely I will make the money my family needs to survive while sitting in business class sipping cocktails. (Avarice warning: A trip to Japan is the only possible exception here. I would LOVE to go to Japan and might conceivably convince my wife it is important.) Parties I love my kids, but bath time starts just as you pour the first cocktail .... so please invite me, but I won't be there 'til after eight. Something else If you want to know more, please just call or e-mail and ask. This small act of proactivity will pay off much more than second guessing my work ever will. |
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