Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
Congratulations to Communiqué PR client Medio on their acquisition by Nokia’s HERE division! The companies announced the acquisition plans June 12 and since then the news has garnered nearly 100 articles from outlets including TechCrunch, Bloomberg, PC Magazine, Wireless Week and GeekWire, to name just a few.
HERE, a leader in navigation, mapping and location experience, plans to leverage Medio’s expertise in real-time predictive analytics to bolster its location intelligence capabilities. As a result, we could soon see contextual maps and location services that change according to the situation to provide highly personalized and predictive experiences for people and businesses.
We’ve had the pleasure of working with Medio since 2012 when Communiqué was brought on to undertake a number of initiatives to boost awareness for the company including analyst and media relations and thought-leadership programs for its senior executives.
Medio is the seventh company in our portfolio to have been acquired or sold and we’re proud to have played a part in helping each of these companies grow their profiles in their respective industries:
- Medio (acquired by HERE in 2014)
- Twisted Pair Solutions (acquired by Motorola in 2013)
- Melodeo (acquired by Hewlett-Packard Co. in 2010)
- Open Interface (acquired by Qualcomm in 2008)
- SnapIn (acquired by Nuance Communications in 2008)
- Tegic Communications, a subsidiary of AOL (acquired by Nuance Communications in 2007)
- The Shops at the Bravern (purchased by Ashkenazy Acquisition in 2012)
These liquidity events are great examples of how a focused approach to PR can help organizations build buzz, elevate their perceived value, and in turn fulfill an exit strategy or close a strategic sale.
Congratulations to Rob Lilleness, Brian Lent, Beau Ross and the rest of the Medio team!
As PR professionals, we love the adrenaline rush of landing that big interview for a client with the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg or the New York Times, and yet few outside of the industry actually understand the myriad of factors reporters consider when deciding whether or not to open up our emails, respond to our pitches or put pen to paper. As someone with experience both on the sending and receiving-end of story pitches, I can tell you that successful PR comes in keeping reporters informed about company news, providing the right sources and then knowing when to get out of the way to let writers do what they do best.
It’s not to say that journalists don’t appreciate all the hard work PR people do to keep them informed – they just have so many other demands on their time and are under tremendous pressure to constantly research ever-changing industries, meet deadlines, follow breaking news on Twitter and TechMeme, conduct interviews and of course, write!
Journalism is indeed an art form and reporters respect PR pros who share the same love and respect for the craft and the profession. The most successful public relations representatives have a knack for writing that can be communicated through email pitches, understand the industries reporters cover and have an innate desire to help writers do their job better and more efficiently. Demands on reporters’ time coupled with the erosion of traditional publishing channels have forced journalists to compete with global news cycles, weighing the speed and accuracy of the stories they publish with the timeliness of breaking world news events.
In order to help reporters get what they need to write their stories, PR practitioners should use the following basic principles to make an impact for clients and build trusted relationships with journalists:
Know Their News Beats – Nothing is more annoying to journalists than receiving a pitch that is completely off base from the industries they write about. As PR professionals, it’s our job to constantly read their articles to understand what angles will resonate with a particular reporter and then package up client information to help build a compelling narrative.
Know What is News, And What’s Not – While companies and marketing departments want to constantly shout their news from the rooftops, what a company considers to be news may not always be perceived as newsworthy to a reporter. Business press typically never cover product or funding news while the trades are often more than willing to write about these topics as long as there is a solid hook. Savvy PR executives should examine upcoming company news with a critical lens to provide recommendations to clients about the newsworthiness of announcements and a strategy for effective media relations.
Understand the Right Times/Ways to Pitch – With hefty demands on reporters’ times, make sure to adhere to any specification as to the format writers wish to receive unsolicited content. While the more established generation of reporters don’t mind the occasional phone call, younger writers who have grown up in a world of texting and email often prefer email pitches over calls that may disrupt their day. When you do make call-downs, always ask if they have a few minutes to chat before going into your pitch, since many are on deadlines throughout the week.
Demonstrate Knowledge of the Industry – The role of a PR person can extend beyond simply offering up a source and scheduling interviews. Since we work closely within the industries we represent, there are opportunities to both educate reporters about trends we are seeing, and where the technology landscape may be heading. As such, it’s important to thoroughly understand a client’s products and services to accurately field questions and communicate where product offerings fit into the competitive landscape and how they are differentiated from others.
Help Assemble the Story – While many reporters may already have a particular story angle in mind when agreeing to an interview, as PR pros it’s important to provide quick snippets of information in pitches, often through metric-driven bullet points, trends, additional customer sources, case studies and multimedia. If you are pitching television outlets, make sure you have compelling visuals that can help supplement the story. For radio segments, think about audio storytelling and how sound, music and background ambient noise can help drive a story forward.
The field of journalism is essential for our society to function properly, for without the freedom to write, report and express ourselves as individuals, we go about our daily lives without context. PR colleagues, don’t get discouraged by the occasional rejection, take pride in the services you provide for your clients and know you have a valuable role in helping provide the one thing that fosters a more educated society – knowledge and the free flow of information.
Recently, I wrote about publishing capabilities on LinkedIn and the social media giant’s plans to invite all its members to contribute articles via long-form posts. Since that time, I began thinking about the implications of this new capability as it pertains to copyright, other forms of intellectual property, corporate guidelines and staff education.
For instance, every person with Communiqué PR regularly contributes to our blog. Communiqué PR owns the copyright for those blog posts because the articles are prepared by staff as part of the scope of their employment with Communiqué. Nonetheless, my colleagues and I also want to distribute our posts via our LinkedIn pages leveraging LinkedIn’s long-form publishing capabilities. And Communiqué sees value in having our work republished in other forums, such as LinkedIn long-form publishing. After some consideration, we decided to create a policy letting employees re-publish their blog posts as long as the individual includes the statement: “This blog post was originally published on Communiqué PR’s blog,” with a hyperlink back to the original content.
However not all employers have the same objectives and they may need to carefully consider if they want their employees publishing employer-owned articles. For many organizations there are other, more serious implications beyond copyright to consider. Miller Nash partner Kathleen T. Petrich, who practices law in the area of intellectual property and patent and trademark prosecution, has an interesting perspective on the challenge that long-form publishing via LinkedIn may open up for companies.
Consider a situation in which a medical institution hires a physician to assist in expensive research to discover a new drug treatment or procedure. If the physician blogs about the drug treatment or procedure and explains how it works, it may become problematic for the medical institution to file a patent, as some extremely strict rules exist around timing and disclosure in U.S. and foreign patent laws. This could pose some thorny problems for the company and physician.
Another issue is liability. If an employee publishes information on LinkedIn that is harmful or wrong and causes damage, liability issues could face that person and his or her employer. Also, the LinkedIn long-form publishing agreement is between LinkedIn and the owner of the personal LinkedIn profile and not with the employer that may own the copyright in the specific article.
Given there can be copyright, other intellectual property and even liability considerations when sharing information on LinkedIn, Petrich strongly suggests that companies create or update their social media guidelines and policies to include a process for vetting work and granting permission to employees so they know what they can safely, and legally, share on social media platforms such as LinkedIn.
“The bottom line is that many employers agree that employees’ LinkedIn profile are theirs,” explained Petrich, “but they also want to be sure that, if you are posting content that is owned by them, they have some control over that in the form of permission or with other terms governing its publication.”
Finally, for those executives who are submitting essays or articles for publications on news sites like the Huffington Post or Re/Code, it is important to remember that just because you authored the work, you do not necessarily own the copyright. If you signed a contract, make sure you look at it to see if you can legally share your article via LinkedIn long-form publishing.
Have you ever experienced the sinking feeling of seeing a typo in something you wrote—whether it’s a published article, a press release or an important email—and realizing there’s nothing you can do about it? Once the email has been sent or the article has been published that typo will live on forever. And if the mistake is big enough to warrant fixing it, you endure the embarrassment—and ire from your editor—that comes with running a correction.
Everyone makes mistakes, which is why proofreading is so important. Following are a few proofreading tricks that have effectively helped me avoid making cringe-worthy errors.
Give it a rest. If time allows, set aside your finalized piece for a few hours or even days before proofreading it again. Seeing it with fresh eyes will make inadvertent mistakes stand out more clearly.
Print it out. You’ll catch more errors if you print out your text and proofread it on paper. The human eye reads onscreen material much more quickly and, consequentially, less carefully.
Use big font. If you have to proofread onscreen, increase the font size to make errors easier to identify. It also helps to double-space the document. In addition, turn on the show/hide feature on the Microsoft Word toolbar to highlight extra spaces between words or paragraphs.
Use Microsoft Word’s proofreading capabilities. Consider turning on proofreading capabilities in Word. These features can act as a safety net that catches obvious errors. Make sure you select preferences from the advanced options menu such as checking spelling as you type, using contextual spelling, marking grammar errors and identifying when you are using passive or active voice.
Cross-check every fact. Even if you’re almost positive something is correct, double-check it just in case. This applies to names, titles, places, publication names, statistics, addresses and dates. Pay close attention to dates and times when sending meeting invitations, particularly if the participants are in different time zones.
Refer to your AP Stylebook often. All documents related to journalism and PR should adhere to AP Stylebook guidelines. If you’re unsure, look it up. Keep in mind that the most common AP style mistakes are related to abbreviating state names, capitalizing titles or deciding when to write out numbers.
Create your own proofreading checklist. Develop a list of mistakes you commonly make and check each piece of writing for those errors in particular.
Use a ruler. As you proofread, put a ruler under each line in your hardcopy to keep your eye from jumping ahead to the next line.
Ask for help. Always have someone else review your work before submitting it. A new set of eyes can catch errors that you overlooked.
Although there is no foolproof formula for catching every error, tips like these can help improve your accuracy. Are there any other proofreading tips that you find useful?
Google recently began implementing a new update to its search algorithm known as Panda 4.0. Google created this update in order to help remove “thin content,” or low-quality search results, from its search rankings. Low-quality to Google means duplicating content, key word stuffing, content that’s not useful, or poor engagement metrics, such as low time on site or high bounce rates. Panda 4.0 will sit on top of the previous Google algorithms, but this one will filter through results to uncover these low-quality pieces. With this new algorithm in place, there will be some PR implications that will be important for PR pros to note as they seek traffic and visibility for their clients.
Barry Schwartz, founder of SERoundtable.com and news editor at SearchEngineLand.com, found that major wire services have experienced a large decrease in visibility and traffic to their sites. On Search Engine Roundtable he reported PRWeb, PR Newswire, BusinessWire and PRLog are all losing between 60 and 85 percent of their SEO visibility, the results of which appear to have come right after the Panda 4.0 update.
These numbers prove the importance of Google’s update and the need for PR pros to take action. Carrie Morgan of B2C has some tips for PR pros to help mitigate the effects that may be felt by the launch of Panda 4.0.
First, watch carefully for duplicate content. Panda will penalize content that is too similar to past content, so it is important, now more than ever, to create fresh and creative pieces.
Morgan also emphasizes the importance of never publishing blog posts that you find on other sites. Duplicating content, once again, will be penalized. Instead, summarize the article and include quotes, putting an original spin on the piece.
Another suggestion is to create long content opposed to short content. Longer pieces allow for better understanding of the content and will help Google have more to work with when it comes to their search engine quality ratings, which determines where your piece will be placed in the search results.
Finally, writings should be focused on quality and not quantity. Instead of trying to push as much as possible onto the Internet in the hopes of more hits, focus on creating quality pieces. Quality pieces will be rewarded with Panda 4.0.
Google’s desire is for websites to produce high-quality and relevant information that is worthwhile reading for users. Panda 4.0, they feel, will help create the best user experience by preventing low-quality information from ranking well in search results. It essentially creates a quality scoring of the content. Therefore, PR pros should focus on assisting their clients in creating fresh, high-quality and helpful content. Higher search result rankings should follow.
Who are your most trusted media sources? A recent survey by Cision and PR News overwhelmingly found that print media and their online equivalents are still the go-to outlets for PR pros.
That’s probably not very surprising, but it is telling that despite shrinking newsrooms, changes in journalism and our increasingly social media-driven world, tried-and-true news outlets are still held in high regard. Noticeably missing from the list of trusted media sources was broadcast media.
The survey, which gauged PR and marketing pros on their view of the social media landscape, also found that less than half of those polled had successfully pitched media via social media. This seems to correlate with the results of another survey which found that email and phone are the top methods preferred by journalists to receive pitches.
For more findings from the survey, check out the infographic below.
Credit: Cision and PR News.