I got some follow-up questions on the PR Interview Q&A blog post. Here they are:
Rodrigo: What do you think about the PR’s team that send, all the time, press release to a lot of journalists? In your view, this should end?
Jerry: I’ve spoken to journalists about this and it’s not a black or white question it seems. Surprisingly many news reports originates from press releases still. And some journalists say that press releases are a pain in the ass, but it places the selection process in their hands, and they like that. If the selection process ends up elsewhere, they loose that influence.
What we should do as an industry, is to stop sending shitty press releases. They should be highly engaging, spreadable, and targeted, as well posted intelligently on the web for pull purposes. There’s information overload for sure, and we’re responsible for our clients not adding to the information pollution.
Rodrigo: In your opinion, messages for the mainstream media must be unique?
Jerry: No, most news stories are just variations of classical stories. We have the hero, the challenge, the conflict. The enemy, often. Therefore, no matter if I work with traditional media (is there any difference these days?) I always go for newsworthiness rather than uniqueness. A good “new” story, preferably with some sort of clear conflict. And with social media, I go for the engagement factor, the conversation “stickiness”.
Rodrigo: Can you please give some examples of successful projects of PR in Social Media?
Jerry: The Swedish PR agency Prime ended up in some trouble themselves a couple of weeks ago, and started up the PR platform primegate.se in order to get ahead and to get a voice in the conversation. Great for directing traffic and for optimizing search engines on key terms.
I also think it’s good PR to listen and more and more companies are doing that. Check out Mission Control, a Youtube clip from Gatorade. But here’s the point; you just don’t listen. You crunch the data, that’s the key. That’s why the Obama campaign leveraged social media so succesful; they crunched the data bigtime. They knew how to engage before engaging.
The postings on Twitter or wherever was just a little something on the side. It was the data mining that really did it for them.
On the campaign side, I like campaigns where the individual can leverage the campaign in order to become more popular in their own personal networks. Like when Spotify gave out invitations to key bloggers so that they in turn could benefit from the huge demand on these invitations. As a blogger, I’ve never had as much traffic as when I got those invites to treat my readers.
I also love corporate blogging or well-maintained corporate Facebook Pages or Youtube-channels in general. Such powerful tools - and they don’t have to be campaign-based either, you can use them continuously. The good ones discuss subjects and interacts with their community rather than pushing their own brand messages.
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