An Inconvenient PR Truth

Claire Thompson, freelance PR consultant, Waves PR

Realwire has today launched a campaign ‘An Inconvenient PR Truth’.  Their research shows the huge amount of poorly targeted press releases hitting the inboxes of media:

78% of press release emails are considered irrelevant by the recipient

55% of recipients have taken action to block a sender of news

It’s a complex problem, and I do believe strongly that there should be some sort of standard/voluntary code to adhere to, although perhaps one that’s a little more practical than the Realwire suggestion. We have a problem that is hugely damaging to the PR industry.

It’s easy to say ‘press releases are dead’ (or should be), but they can be a valuable point of departure/background information to a story. You can dress them up in other guises, give them all sorts of acronyms, but if they are done well they should be useful places to find accurate information rather than heresay.

And simultaneous disclosure is a legal requirement for any story that has an impact on market share. (Try ringing 50 journalists simultaneously without disclosing the story and you’ll see why this isn’t feasible and would cause far more irritation than a misplaced email.)

However, digging down, there are are several reasons why the spam keeps happening.

1. Junior staff being given the job of ‘sending out releases’

Deciding where a story should go is a really important role. But filtering through a media database is tedious, time consuming and boring. It gets delegated. This should be done by someone with experience, not someone who cannot yet be expected to have learned the nuances of different media or to know that a particular person has a particular relationship with the client or agency.

This can only get worse in the current ‘hire an intern for free’ culture, and where tight margins mean time is at a premium.

2. Businesses being told that PR = press release

A press release is a tool of the trade. Writing it and sending it doesn’t guarantee you anything. The stats in this survey show you why.

3. PR companies being unwilling to share information/work together

So you’re a PR consultancy working in the pharmaceutical industry. You know your publications/writers/bloggers brilliantly. I work in tech and telecoms. I need to make sure that my story, which has an angle that could well appeal to your usual media, goes to the right places. So I use a variety of tools, from Google through to an expensive media database to identify the people I believe will be interested. Chances are that I could get one wrong somewhere.

If, as PR people, we really care about the spam that our journalist and blogger colleagues receive, we should be sharing our information with the database providers and nagging them to make their information better. Now they have a duty to check it out and ensure accuracy, of course, but unless they can offer a granularity that helps those of us with no experience in a particular field, spam will continue to happen.

Why should you share your information which will go to other PR people? Because if you genuinely care about the people you work with, you’re offering a service to them, not to other PR people. It’s your relationship with them, and the strength of your story that will earn you client coverage, not the fact that someone else sent them a press release.

So how do you get the corresponding kudos and reward for having fed that info back?  Drop them an email to let them know? Sharing information and feedback to database suppliers is a really practical action that could be added to the code that Realwire has proposed as a start point, replacing some of the less practical elements.

So here goes, media colleagues:

Who’s up for helping Adam and the team at Realwire turn the voluntary code of good practise into something really workable and that genuinely means something to the journalists and to the clients that work with you?

And any journalist or blogger who wants to know how they’re listed on the media databases I have access to, give me a yell – you may be surprised to see which ‘pigeon-hole’ you’re in!

The research:

2 Comments

• 

  By Sean Hargrave, January 29, 2010 @ 2:28 pm

  there has never been a time when press releases weren’t mostly pointless, the problem is the occasional one might just catch the eye and so journalists have put up with them.
  i find them useful for reminding me of who looks after a particular company, so i can contact them, normally about something else.
  The really big problem at the moment is that journalists cannot control what they get as so much comes through massive intermediaries of email lists that are increasingly being used by one man bands who’ll spray their releases everywhere and anywhere.
  ultimately the issue is that they’ve also been taken over by crazy clients who have no idea what a story is and spend the first four paras listing stock tickers, cities and acronmys in some odd way of telling a journalist what the comapny does and doesn’t do, rather than convincing them to read on as there’s an interesting story.

• 

  By admin, January 30, 2010 @ 11:58 am

  Hi Sean
  Thanks for taking time out to respond.

  I’ll access my media databases over the weekend and get you you details of where you’re listed. We can see if we can help control it for you that way.

  Claire

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