Remember when we were little and were playing and we’d somehow end up locked on the outside? The other kids would ask us: “What’s the password?” and they would not let us come in unless we guessed it? Sometimes it would go on and on cause we had no idea what the password was…Well, back then it was funny!

Protecting your media section with a password? Not funny anymore! I have ran across several websites lately that had such a marvelous strategy, but this post reminded me of it and of my needing to address the issue.

First off, why on earth would you need such a password? We’re usually talking logos, hotel photos, press releases, company overview, management and team profiles. How exactly would these be misused.

Secondly, any business needs the press, blog or social media coverage they get. And journalists, bloggers and social media users don’t have the time or urge to apply for yet another account that they might not use for more than once! Plus, if the deadline is today or tomorrow, no one will change an entire newspaper layout for you. No one will just wait in the high-seed online news world of today!

As their covering your story is something that helps you a great deal, why would you make them jump through hoops? Why would you make anyone who wants to know more about your company jump through said hoops?

As a PR specialist, I can’t find any way to explain this. If it’s to fish for email addresses, this is bad! Better create a special emailing list for the press and ask them to subscribe to it AFTER they get in the Media section of your site!

The past couple of weeks have brought in quite a few articles and blog posts about driving traffic as the new leverage of PR professionals. Pitch the story and have the traffic to back your pitch. But is this practice really new? Haven’t PR professionals already been driving traffic to online stories? I know I have and I doubt I’m the only one.

What stories do we drive traffic to? Well, almost anything showing up online.

Product/service reviews – all independent reviews, neutral and positive, are a gold mine for PR and Marketing pros. They are seen as objective points of view by customers and the bigger the publication, the more valuable the endorsement. Reviews are usually posted in a special website section, added to newsletters, used as literature to close new deals, twittered and blogged.

Interviews, press release coverage, other articles – these are also sent out to partners and customers. They are a great way to support the company’s image and the team’s values, and their being made public through media coverage gives them more credibility. If CEOs are interviewed and also have twitter streams or blogs, they will be advised to mention them and link to them. If not, the corporate blog will do. There are also media sections on most business sites linking to all these stories.

Blog reviews – these are sometimes promoted as much or even more than the magazine/newspaper reviews for a simple reason: they are personal. They are sometimes more vivid and describe a real life experience, sometimes with much detail, less focused on steps and stages than those written by journalists who have done dozens of reviews in the past month alone.

The reasons to drive traffic to all stories published online is simple: it helps build trust, it helps position products and services in a certain way, it boosts your partners’ efforts to promote your offers as they are definitely reliable and well received by the media (and they surely see a possibility for local media to cover their company’s stories if their valued partner is such a hyped up topic). Other than that, all interviews make the company representatives identifiable and thus make the business look human. It’s no longer a faceless entity; there are people all customers can approach, even if only in theory.

As I said before, this is definitely nothing new. Some of us have been doing this for a while. But I doubt we have properly used it when reaching out to journalists. Saying something like “publish my story and I’ll get hundreds of readers who are genuinely interested in the topic for it” sounds a bit like forcing their hand. Yet is it so? If the product is no good, if the story isn’t interesting, they won’t bother. But if they incline to publish it, the idea of incoming traffic might just suddenly make the story more important. The more words they publish, the more chances it would be an important enough coverage for the PR professional to promote it.

It sounds devious. But is it? Journalists and bloggers alike already publish stories based on what they can bring to their websites. Would the story interest readers, would it bring new ones? They have a clear picture of what there is for them to gain from each story they run. They are not in the business of making anyone favors. The bigger your brand, the bigger the coverage, even for lousy stories (and I can give you a few examples if you’d like), just because readers are interested in such brands, not to make said big corporations happy. So why not finally admit what a company can do for a certain medium, old or new, is important? Why not be open about it and state you, as a PR professional, can and will drive traffic to a published story?

Two months ago I published a post about the switch PC Magazine made from print to fully digital. Two months later, I get an interesting email on LinkedIn from a friend who works for Business Review, a local magazine. Business Review will go digital as well, along with another two magazines in of the same publishing group.

To make their transition smoother and get more visitors to their websites and of course subscribers to their digital issues, the three magazines have started a campaign on Twitter and LinkedIn Groups. Seems like a good idea, but I have to wonder, wouldn’t it have been a lot more effective if they created the social media profiles before the switch, so that they’d have time to get more readers, followers and group members?

We can’t really tell, but at least having reporter profiles already online and their having quite a few connections did help. As for their shift from print to digital, it’s not really a surprise. Sales of copies and ads have decreased significantly everywhere. How many will follow this trend? I know for a fact Ziarul Financiar (daily business and financial newspaper) sells subscriptions that include both online and print editions. Will the rest of the Romanian papers follow? Will it be only those in Bucharest? What will happen to the local newspapers and magazines? Whatever the future holds, it’s an interesting field to watch!

Update

Apparently, they’re switching back to print starting March 1st…They thought about it, rendered some publishing costs more efficient, and are going back to print. Good news or bad, it tells a lot about what strategy means for Romanian print magazines of the BMG group!

This is the kind of news that makes all those predicting the end of print media go “Aha!”. Starting February 2009, we’ll have to say goodbye to the print version of PC Magazine. It will be changed into a digital format, with similar subscription options. I’m looking forward to see how advertising options will change, but even more curious to see how many of they readers switch from paper to downloadable format.

How did they announce it? Well, it’s all posted on their site, the CEO emailed their contacts and, just in case that email was lost among others, account managers also contacted their clients. From what my contact shared with me, before this move, a large part from the magazine’s income was generated by their digital branch. This leads me to believe the complete switch was a pretty smart move.

What do you think? Any predictions you’d like to share? Will other magazines follow the same pattern? Is this easier for a tech magazine? I’d love to read your thoughts.

A couple of years ago, if you told someone you didn’t own a TV set or, worse, you had one but did not watch, they would look at you in disbelief, wondering if you were plane crazy. What else could you do in the evening and during weekends? Things have now changed. You can see admiration in their eyes – you broke the evil circle, you know longer have to plan everything around commercial breaks! No more stupid news getting you through to the weather broadcast!

I rented apartments were there wasn’t a TV and I was happy. No temptation, more time. Then I moved and was faced with the evil box once more. For about a month and a half, once I got home, I just had to watch it for a short while which turned into hours. And of course we needed to listen to the news in the morning, while drinking our coffee!

I then realized the madness I was allowing myself to be dragged into and stopped. Don’t get me wrong, there are series I still love and watch, but on the computer, not on TV, and here are the reasons why:

• TV is quite addictive. It’s an easy way to let yourself be lazy while thinking you are doing something fun. But what’s fun about detergent commercial, dark and useless news worth to throw at the garbage bin, or about the boring movie you decide to watch until the one that actually interests you starts?
• It is extremely time consuming: a 20 minute episode gets to 45 minutes because of 15 minutes of commercial breaks and because you can’t really skip the intro.
• It can easily get you angry: you see people exposing their twisted way of thinking that makes you wonder if the world around you is still sane. Do they actually expect anyone to believe there’s a ghost haunting the TV crew LIVE?!?
• It alters one’s sense of what’s important – given the dozens of false critical happenings being poured into our brains during the news bulletins, there are increasing numbers of people believing in false fashion gods and in the greatness of self-imposed famous lives. The political scene is a circus and everything really important is lost as such facts get a quick mention.
• It’s old news! Everything they broadcast: movies, music, news, have already been posted online. Especially since there are quite a few frequently updated, domestic online newspapers.

And I can assure you I am in the target of quite a few commercials I decide not to watch. The downside? I never see the funny ones. But I can live with that, everything extremely funny is said to get uploaded on YouTube and are then forwarded through emails.

What do you think of this? Do you watch TV? Why, why not?