• Legal Issues
• Legal issues–especially investor-related legal issues–generally have specific requirements for what you can talk about, when you should discuss it, and how you need to distribute the news. If your lawyer advises you send a press release, don’t quibble.
• Corrections
• If you made a mistake in a previous public statement, it’s probably best to issue the correction in the same manner. No one likes eating ‘umble pie, but own up to the mistake and try to move on, and you’ll be better off than if you let the impression that you’re dishonest fester in your audience’s minds.
• Urgent news
• If your disaster is a real-life honest to goodness breaking news disaster of the “we need to recall our product before it kills someone” sort, alternative measures of PR may not be the solution you need. The wire services work hard to get your news out to journalists as quickly and accurately as they can, so you might as well make use of that skill set and stick by the traditional method.

Those are the three big areas of disaster where you definitely want to make sure that you’ve put a lot of thought into your decision before ruling out a press release as your method of communication. So when is it more appropriate to look at alternative measures?

• Community Management
• There are times when you’ve done nothing illegal and you don’t have immediately pressing lifesaving news. Maybe you’ve made a mistake less in the “we issued a factually incorrect statement” way and more in the “we screwed up” fashion. Press releases are a very impersonal tool to try and repair a relationship with your community. Look at a more direct means of communicating, then. One example I may talk about in a later post is using an open letter to repair community relations.
• Customer Service
• This is related to “Community Management”, but with a key difference. One of the nightmares that social media has brought to the average executive in a company is that social media means that if one of your customer-facing employees is having a bad day, you can quickly find yourself having a social media-driven PR nightmare. An example of this is the recent Ocean Marketing meltdown that more or less illustrated the perfect storm of “employee having a bad day” and “social media PR disaster” I’m talking about here. This wasn’t an example of a mistake made at the corporate decision-making level, and issuing a press release (which N-Control, the company represented by Ocean Marketing, did end up doing) isn’t going to fix the problem. When you’re trying to correct a customer-centered issue, take a customer-centered approach and talk to them in the same arena that they’re already in.
•  When Another Company is Involved
• Disaster management PR is tricky enough when one company is involved; when you have two or more, it gets even trickier. In that respect, whether you’re dealing with a public disappointment over an announced contract that fell through or you’re trying to put some spin on the fact that one of your big clients just elected to not renew a long-running contract with you, using channels other than press releases can help you maintain some control of the story without escalating the issue into a press release war. Those may be kind of fun to watch from the outside, but they look anything but professional.

At a macro level, it comes to this: public-facing disaster PR is frequently handled best via methods other than press releases. When you have other outside issues influencing your method of discussion, though, you would be ill-advised to ignore them.

It sounds an awful lot like social media PR to me.

It’s something I have to get off my chest. I run a social media marketing firm, sure. But many of the skills that I use, either in advising clients or in using the various channels, reads like what you should do when you’re being a responsible public relations representative who’s reaching out to a journalist to pitch a story.  Everyone’s a potential source of a sudden massive Twitter revolt, so you need to treat everyone you encounter online as if they had the potential to direct the attention of a hundred thousand potential clients at your brand. With that thought in mind, here’s a quick primer on how to convert those traditional PR skills into social media marketing ones.

• Participate in the dialog: Don’t try to hijack it.  In the social media world, you can’t try the old “interruption marketing” techniques.
  • Think of it like: Don’t be the guy who tries to pitch how your company has a useful slant on every story that’s trending.  When you’re using social media monitoring tools, only enter in conversations that your brand can be expected to engage in.
• Be useful: Posting the same link a dozen times a day? Not useful. Posting a dozen links a day to insightful articles & commentary? Useful. Just make sure that you know what your following considers “useful.”
  • Think of it like: Don’t pitch off-topic. Journalists hate it and the general public hates it, too.
• Be respectful: Everything you say on social media channels can be read, quite possibly, for the rest of your brand’s life. Make sure that you’re not saying things that you might regret in a week, a month, a decade, or even later.
  • Think of it like: Being respectful.
• Nurture relationships: There are thousands of people out there who are crucial nexuses in the ebb and flow of your industry’s conversation. Find them. Friend / follow / verb them. Nurture the relationship, because you never know when you’ll need it.
  • Think of it like: How you develop relationships with a good reporter. Citizen journalism is where a lot of the conversation’s moving to, so be prepared.
• Establish authority: Your brand needs a single voice that everyone knows that they can go to when there’s an urgent question. Social media is a slippery beast, and you can easily have eight different employees all messaging on your brand from different sources. Make sure that it’s obvious which outlet is the official one, and let your employees know when they should feel free to answer questions about the brand and when they should refer the questions to you.
  • Think of it like: Every company that’s large enough needs a communications policy. This is just an extension of that. Think long and hard about limiting all communications on social media channels; they’re rapidly becoming as essential to whole swathes of the population as email is, and surely you don’t think that employees shouldn’t have email?

Compared to someone with a background in broadcast media advertising or in outdoor sales, a PR pro has a huge leg up when a client or member of your business is looking for someone to ride herd on social media. Make use of your people skills, communications expertise, and dive right in!

Related articles by Zemanta

• G5 Social Media Best Practices (slideshare.net)
• How to measure your social media marketing campaign ROI (mediapress.co.za)
• Social media advertising comes of age, gets regulated (thenextweb.com)
• The 9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing (slideshare.net)
• Time and ROI are the greatest social media marketing concerns (smartblogs.com)
• Racepoint Labs Sets New Standard for Integrating Social Media into PR Programs (eon.businesswire.com)
• StrongMail Takes a Measurable Approach to Social Media Marketing with Industry’s Most Comprehensive Solution (eon.businesswire.com)

Since the holidays, I’ve been on the South Beach diet to lose some of those 20 extra pounds that magically appeared on my midsection this year (wonder how that happened!). That’s inspired me to start providing my social media clients with a lean, mean regimen for their social media program. It’s worked for them, and you can use it, too. While this is a post that’s more appropriate on my social media business blog (where it will get to eventually), it’s valuable PR strategy, too. It is lean, mean, and anyone can do it to get more out of their social media efforts.

Here’s your new social media workout plan:

• Hit up your social media services 3x a day for about 10 minutes each time. Identify which services are most effective for you and use those more often. I generally say 10 minutes before work, 10 at lunch, and 10 minutes after the day is done.
• If you’re using an analytics program like Google Analytics, use your natural search queries to tell you what phrases people are finding you for. Are those phrases you want to be found for? Then use them in your social media. Is your audience coming from keywords that don’t convert? Use better keywords in your social media.
• If you aren’t measuring analytics, go to Google.com/analytics and do so.
• Basic morning routine for Twitter:
  • Identify two or three twitter personalities that always have something interesting to say. Each morning, retweet something they’ve posted.
  • Find a blog or two that writes in your space. Tweet links to the interesting articles that they’ve written
  • Write a blog yourself? Make sure that you put your content in your tweets.
  • Look over your replies and DM’s and answer all appropriately
  • Finally, using a client like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop, set up searches for words or phrases that are pertinent to what you do. Reply to other twitter posters who post using those terms.
  • This should take 10 – 15 minutes every day, once you get it to a system.
• Basic afternoon routine for Facebook;
  • Check out your wall. Have you gotten new fans? Welcome them with a quick message.
  • Have you had any kind of event recently? Post pictures / video / whatever on it.
  • Run Facebook searches for terms that are pertinent to your organization. Have your fan page become a fan of other organizations that have similar interests.
  • Look over your wall for comments and reply; empty out inbox and reply as well
  • Post 2 -3 links to interesting information that is related to your organization
  • This takes 10 – 15 minutes when it’s done
• LinkedIn Evening routine
  • Look for questions on the groups that you belong to. Answer two that you can legitimately offer an interesting and informed opinion on.
  • Been to a networking event? Run searches on people who’s cards you have. Find them on LinkedIn and follow ‘em.
  • Has anyone in your network changed job positions or posted another important status update? Drop ‘em a note commenting on it.
  • This is 5 – 10 minutes of work.
• Blogging / Internet Evening routine
  • Set up Google Alerts on keywords that are pertinent to your interests. Get emails daily and check the links that Google sends you out. Generally, I recommend an alert on your brand, on your market, and on yourself as well.  Read the alerts for links / ideas for the other social media outlets and click through on the interesting ones.
  • Leave comments on any blog post that you actually read. Yes, every single one. They have to have something interesting to say, but don’t need to be Shakespeare.
  • This takes 10 minutes or so.

There’s your daily workout. Stick to it for 3 months and come back for a checkup.

In “The Right and Wrong of PR Pitches“, he discusses what is probably the perfect example of what good PR should be from the journalists perspective. Since it’s Yelp that did the PR work (and they get social media) it doesn’t shock me to hear that they impressed John. He talks about what he liked from the PR outreach side, there, but let me go into a little detail one of the points that he quickly sketches over because he probably assumes that you know what he’s talking about:

First PR lesson – track, filter, and engage brand mentions.

In my articles on the sidebar, I go into using Google Alerts to track mentions of your brand (and that’s a great start), but you should also look into using some other services on top of that now.

• TweetBeep or TweetAlarm are both  good services for keeping on top of Twitter mentions of specific phrases or words, but I’m personally fond of the Seesmic Desktop to keep running searches of the phrases and words that matter to me.
• If you’re like me and follow roughly a hojillion different blogs, a service like FeedRinse can be invaluable, letting you search and organize your feeds so that you only read what interests you.
• Filtrbox is an excellent paid solution for someone who’s looking to maximize his or her brand engagement across blogs, Twitter, and other social media.

That said, I promised you 5 ways to use these tools to slow pitch to the media as John Jantsch recommends. Here you go:

1. Keyword-Based Searching: Pick out keywords that your brand (or yourself!) can speak on with authority. When people write about those words or phrases, respond to ‘em. (That’s more or less what John Jantsch recounts in the above blog article)
2. Brand-Based Searching: Not quite the same as “keyword based”, since you’re looking for any instance of your brand being mentioned on the ‘Net, instead of people writing about a topic. Whether they’re rants or raves, you should make sure to engage the consumer when they talk about you; it will frequently turn an unhappy customer into a happy one, and a happy customer into a thrilled one. Just knowing that someone’s listening is a big help for many consumers.
3. Information Gathering: Once you’ve found media outlets who write about what it is that you have to say, you should still make a point to contact them with more information as you gather it. Keep it timely, of course, but if you find out something about a new product or initiative that’s launched recently and which is applicable to a recently-covered topic, then go ahead and pass it on.
4. Trending Topics: Through Twitter and Technorati, it’s easy to keep on top of what’s breaking on the ‘Net. If your brand has a legitimate stake in a trending topic, sending out a friendly note to journalists & bloggers with whom you’ve previously corresponded with both an overview of information as well as a note on what it is that your brand has to offer as commentary will help you get ahead of trends and keep your brand in the news.  (Note that your brand needs to have a valid opinion on a trending topic lest you find yourself mocked on something like the Bad Pitch Blog)
5. Identify New Influencers: Using your keyword and brand-based alerts, you’ll obviously see who’s talking about you. Something you should be taking notice of, though, is how often you’re seeing a particular blog or twitter profile posting about your subject or brand. Notice who’s got a growing following (which you can check on Twitterholic or Technorati, depending on whether you want to see someone’s twitter following or blog reach, respectively) and cultivate them as a contact. When they’re looking for a new quote or a topic idea, they’ll turn to you. And that’s really what the slow pitch is about achieving: a relationship with journalists and bloggers where they come to view you as a source for information and a person whose emails or calls they know will e valuable to them.

The “slow pitch” builds over time and increases your reputation and reliability with news outlets until they are happy to hear from you. It takes time, but ask yourself this question after reading John’s article: the next time Yelp sends John Jantsch an email, what do you think the chances are that he’ll open & read it? Pretty good, I imagine.

Now go out and find the people who are having conversations you care about and start a dialog.

Further reading:

• Ten Free Tools To Kick Your Social Media Cynicism to the Ground (nettiehartsock.com)
• Three Best Ways to Use Social Media (online.wsj.com)
• What’s In Your Twitter Toolbox? (twitterrati.com)
• Managing Your Reputation Online: 5 Essential Tools (computerworld.com)

This two part article series discusses some of the basics of structuring a web site to help with Search Optimization, and then applies these optimization tactics to two different CommunityMX JumpStarts, Siberia and Stelvio Pass.

This is Part 1 of 2, and discusses the theory of search optimization, keyword research, buying a domain, and structuring a web site. Part 2 brings this theory and prep work into practice using some of Community MX’s excellent JumpStart templates. We’ll be including and editing little snippets of these JumpStarts in this article, but you’ll be best served if you download both of the JumpStarts now.

Take a moment and check it out. CommunityMX has a lot of resources, the membership’s pretty low cost, and, well, I’m not above driving traffic to the site to show them that my articles are worthwhile.

Image Credit: Follow The Leader by KaCey97007. Licensed through Creative Commons on flickr.com

If you’ve read my previous articles (How to Follow-Up in particular), you’ve seen the OvernightPR way to follow up on your press release. I’ve said this before a few times, but I’ll mention it here again: your press release is a tool for you to use to get PR coverage, not and end-goal of your PR efforts. In order to maximize your return on the investment of writing a release (or paying a writer to do it for you) and distributing it, you need to have your all your ducks in a row.

I’ve given dozens of tips away on how to line those little guys up to make sure that you don’t miss your opportunity with your press release, but I’ve also received a few requests from readers of past articles asking how exactly they should phrase their follow-up email. That’s largely a matter of personal taste, but I’ll share with you my template that I use when I’m doing follow-up emails.

The Template:

Subject Line: Pitch based upon your recent article [[HEADLINE / NAME]] or
Subject Line: Your recent article [[HEADLINE / NAME]] gave me the idea for this PR pitch or
Subject Line: I saw your article [[HEADLINE / NAME]] and thought that I’d pitch this idea by you

[[JOURNALIST NAME]],

I’ve been reading [[COLUMN, PUBLICATION, BLOG, ETC]] for a while because you write a lot about [[MY INDUSTRY, MY COMPANY, ETC]]  and your recent article [[HEADLINE / NAME]] sparked an idea for a press release that I’ve distributed about [[MY COMPANY, NEW TOPIC, WHATEVER]].  Your [[ARTICLE/ POST]] discussed [[IDEA, TREND, LEGISLATION, NEW PRODUCT, MARKET CHANGE, ETC]], and [[MY COMPANY /  ORGANIZATION]] is [[DOING SOMETHING SIMILAR, TAKING THE TREND FUTHER, BUCKING THE TREND]].

In case you’re interested in hearing my story–and maybe writing about it, too!–I’m including the first bit of my new release below. If you want to know more about [[MY COMPANY / ORGANIZATION/ THIS NEWS]], go to [[LINK]] or [[EMAIL / CALL / WRITE / SEND SMOKE SIGNAL]] and I’ll be happy to help.

Thanks for your time!

[[INCLUDE HEADLINE OF RELEASE AND FIRST PARAGRAPH, WITH A CLEAR LINK TO THE REST OF IT]]

[[CLOSING SALUTATION OR NOTE & CONTACT INFO]]

Using the Template:

As I said, this template is largely a matter of personal taste and circumstance. Unsurprisingly, there’s not a lot of text that I keep unchanged from follow-up to follow-up. That takes a decent amount of time, but it’s the only reliable way I’ve found of getting a release some attention. Do note: if you *haven’t* been reading that journalists’ column or blog and try to fake it in the letter, you will probably get caught out. They get a lot of pitches every day, and the main chance you have of standing out is to write a pitch that is truthfully related to what they write about.

Don’t try any linguistic gymnastics to explain how your story is related to a recent article. If you can’t pitch your release to a partricular blogger / journalist, let it slide. There will be other chances.

E*Releases.com states (and they’re not the first) that you can either look at your release as a shotgun or a rifle. I think that news releases are of more value to the company that they are released in behalf of when they’re targeted. Just blazing away at every journalist in sight gets you on black lists or–worse yet–mentioned somewhere like the Bad Pitch Blog.

There’s enough spam out there. You don’t need to add to it.

So what do you think of the template?  Got any questions? Leave a comment and let’s chat!

If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the seventh of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).

Start Your Own: You know who some of the most powerful authorities in most market spaces are? The guys who write about it.

Journalist Stand on flickr by Glass Window licensed through Creative Commons 2.0

You know that post I put up earlier today? The previous one? Where I said that “reaching out” was the best way to get your story told. I lied a little bit.

Well, pretty much completely, actually. The absolute best way to get your story told is to be the source that tells that story. This is a lot of work, and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise. Providing quality content that gets shared and talked about is brutally hard. Talk to anyone who’s a leading blogger and they’ll tell you that it is a lot of work to become a market leader in information about a big topic.

But that’s not what you need to become. Don’t look to be the biggest blogger on marketing and public relations. Be the guy who tells everyone how to make the most of a press release, a little budget, and a few hours of precious time out of the day. (Actually, um, don’t. That’s what I”m going for.) Don’t be the leading resource on machinery, just the ‘Net’s best blog on automated printing and folding machines. Is that sexy? Not really. but it’s what will bring in business, if your company makes those folding and printing machines.

So start your own blog. Nurture it. Feed it for two or three or five years.  Once you get in the habit of writing about your market space, informing others about the new trends, and generally becoming a resource for anyone who wants to know about your market, you’ll look around one day and realize that every post you write gets linked to by 40 guys and discussed in depth by another 10. You’ve become a mover and a shaker, somehow, when you weren’t looking, and now you find that the reporters come to you.

Is this an easy way to get your story told? Well, no. But if there’s no one else out there who writes in quite the right area that your business works in, it’s definitely one of the most effective.

If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the fifth of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).

Reach Out: Send out good tips about items in your field that don’t relate to you to influential media.

Image Credit: Tippie Toes by Exquisitur licensed through Creative Commons

Sound counter-intuitive? Maybe a little. But it pays off, even if it does mean that the press runs a story that talks about a competitor or mentions a burgeoning trend without discussing you. How’s it pay off? In two ways:

1. Journalists are human, too: Make their job a little easier and they’ll remember you fondly. This means that you’ll have an easier time reaching them the next time that you want to get your own story covered, that they’ll be prone to call you for quotes when they need someone to weigh in on something they’re writing, and that they’ll feel (ever so slightly) like they owe you a good turn for the favor that you did them.
2. You’re keeping up with the trends: As I’ve covered earlier, there’s a number of ways that knowing what’s happening in your business pays off well for your ability to write news releases (and it’s a no-brainer from a general business perspective). It’s also something that you can legitimately budget a little time to each week as part of your media outreach and not feel like you’re a slacker for tooling around reading blogs or your RSS feed reader for two hours.

The best way–the very best way–to get a reporter or blogger to talk about you when you have news is to have already fed them news that they wanted to use before. So if you hear something that would interest one of those media contacts who you’ve been following around the Internet, send it on to them. Even if it’s not about your company. Especially if it’s not about your company.  Once a reporter or blogger knows who you are and that you care about getting good information out about your field, they’ll be more prone to open your pitches just to see what you’re talking about.

As always, a certain amount of restraint is necessary here. No, you don’t need to forward on to your blogger network the latest rumor about MacWorld’s next Developer’s Conference, or who’s going to win American Idol. But if you find a real tidbit of news that’s under-reported by a journalist that you read who might be interested in it? Go right ahead and pass it along.

90% of all press release story queries are form letters blasted to every reporter on the planet willy-nilly. It should not surprise you that this jades the media outlets quickly. It also means that they treasure the people who don’t randomly bombard them, but rather show some consideration for what it is that they write about and what interests them.

If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the fourth of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).

Provide Supporting Content: Post your release, photos, videos, diagrams, and anything else that you can think a reporter might possibly want on your website where it’s easy to get.

Image Credit: Didn't Shrug by Bitterjug licensed via Creative Commons 2.0

Yes, post a copy of the release on your website. But that’s the beginning. You also want photos, videos, company founder bios, product demonstrations, testimonials, and anything else that you can imagine a reporter could ever want from your company. Put it where it’s easy to get. A reporter on a 30 minute deadline isn’t going to email you for a quote, she’ll just find another source. You want it as easy as possible for a reporter who’s come to your website from your release to find the answers to any questions that she wants quickly and easily.

Good information design is tricky, but you can provide an easy option for a curious reporter by adding a search function on your press room and making sure your content is easily searchable. You may find that organizing your press room in a blog engine will make all this easier.

Traditional media press releases aren’t excellent at providing this kind of supplementary matierial right there in the release, which makes reporters go hunt for it. Social media release are great at giving a blogger or reporter a host of supplementary materials right there, but generally a social media press release gets a tiny fraction of the circulation that a traditional media release does. You’ve gotta take the good with the bad, I suppose, and play to the strengths of each.

PitchEngine (http://www.pitchengine.com) is one great example of a social media news release service. Upload additional images, embed video links, include supporting links and documents, all right there in the link of the release. If you’re subscribed to Help a Reporter Out, you’ll be receiving a coupon from OvernightPR in the next few days that will let you try out a social media release on me, because I think that they’re such a useful, if under-utilized, tool.

Not a member of HARO? Then go and sign up, for heaven’s sake. You’re missing out (and on a lot more than just a discount with OvernightPR)!

Do keep in mind though that, just like a wire release, a social media release is a tool; you need to use it to get media coverage. It won’t get you noticed all by itself. Read my article on “Following Up on Your Press Release” for tips on how to do that.

If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the third of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).

Keep Current: Make sure before you send out a release that you’ve been reading who’s been writing about similar topics  recently.

Image Credit: Run Stella Run by Laertes licensed by Creative Commons 2.0

Before you write that release (or before you talk to your writer about it) look at the twitter streams and RSS feeds of your media people.  What are they talking about right now?  Figure out how your story applies to the current news. Sometimes this is easy. Everyone’s talking about an expo or event, and you’re going to be there. Your headline just about writes itself, then: “ACME Inc. to showcase new widget at WIDGETCON Convention in San Diego.” Sometimes this is more of a stretch. Everyone’s talking about an expo or event in your industry, and you want to announce that you’ve just introduced a new product. “ACME Inc. debuts new widget that compares with/contrasts with/supersedes WIDGETCON theme,” for example.