About 30 seconds. That’s how long it takes for a reader or journalist to decide if your press release is worth their time. And that’s of course an average! In other cases they get bored after 15 seconds. Unfortunately, it’s often not about the quality of the story you’re sending over email or publishing online. It is more often about the information overload we have to deal with everyday.

Hundreds and hundreds or emails, articles and newsletters are received by journalists, employees and business owners every day. For the unlucky ones, it’s thousands, including the 20-30% of it that’s spam managing to trick their filters. Getting 30 seconds of someone’s time is a privilege and you need to make the best out of it. If you succeed, they they will spend an additional minute on your news release and maybe decide to write about it or buy your product. Continue reading

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The journalists vs. PR professionals war has been going on for decades. It is fueled by frustration, impatience, beginners in both fields, moral high grounds being taken over every day and powers beyond your imagination, such as trends, traffic and boredom.

The two opposing armies

Journalists – mostly overworked, tired, frustrated, bored of seeing the same announcement and questions and mistakes over and over again. In control of powerful mass destruction weapons (revealing dozens of spammers in their magazines) or targeted, refined technology (taking it out on a certain individual).

PR professionals - a joint force of company employees and agency staffers; mostly overworked, tired, frustrated, bored of seeing their story dropped for hard to grasp reasons. Wielding powerful weapons such as exclusives, hot stories, tips and inside information Continue reading

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Regardless of the line of business you’re in, you’re bound to run into a few customers who will put your patience and communication skills to test. Some need you to spend more time explaining what you’re doing than actually doing your job, others think they know your profession better than you do, some will take too long to respond when there’s an emergency at hand. But when it comes to public relations and nightmare customers, these are the ones we fear most.

1. The DIY customer

When something’s going on, why bother talking to the PR guy in your company or to the company you pay to handle such issues? Go ahead and make your own statements, release them and then have the people you initially ignored clean your mess. Think of the Cleavland Cavalier owner who decided a post attacking LeBron James was a good reaction to the player’s decision to choose another team. Continue reading

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I have crossed paths with quite a few companies lately that have taken the DIY approach when it comes to PR. Although they had no real team, no real expertise, and the people specifically hired to handle such tasks had nothing to do with the job at hand, they felt they could do it on their own. Later on, they decided hiring an agency was better suited for them. They of course could have saved a lot of time, effort and ultimately money by hiring the experts to begin with.

Why did they choose not to at first? It’s simple, when companies calculate costs, they usually don’t pay attention to details. They believe that if an employee has some spare time, that time can be used in any way. Effectiveness, ability to learn, natural talent, they are all disregarded, as of course we are all good at promoting ourselves. Much like the physicists in The Big Bang Theory who were supposedly marketing geniuses as well…

A company has three choices when they take the in house approach: use existing personnel, hire someone new with little to no experience and have them trained, or hiring a PR expert. Continue reading

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A lot of PR agencies or corporate PR departments still believe spam is the way to go. They have built or bought quite a data base over the years, they keep expanding it and then shoot an email to everyone on the list. While they might have had some common ground when starting to develop the data base, over time names and emails just keep being added without any further checks. Who cares if you’re interested, we’ll email you anyway.

I am not talking about asking for permission, or allowing people to unsubscribe, I’m talking about at least making sure they are remotely interested in what they’ll receive. For example, why would I be interested in a debate held in Beverly Hills between a Rabbi and some woman I know nothing about on dating in a material world and if money can or cannot buy love?

If you’re gonna spam, at least be wiser than the average spammer! You should be able to at least do that if you’ve ever read anything, even a tiny article on PR and/or marketing. If you’re going to take your chance and spam, at least make sure people won’t delete your email because they simply don’t care!

I’d advise you to refrain from spam alltogether. Sure, contact someone to introduce yourself and ask for their permission to send press releases. But don’t start out with an attached PR and a one-liner asking them to call you for details!

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