Last week I presented on a panel at the Boston University Communications School. Chris Brogan, founder of PodCamp, was on the panel, and I was thrilled to sit next to him. We talked about the role of technology in Public Relations.
Speaking of PR, Cory Doctorow has a good article in Information Week about making it easy for bloggers to link to you. I am posting this in the hopes that the PR people who are responsible for promoting their dating site clients will adhere to at least some of these rules.
Why do I care? I get a ton of press releases. The majority go in the trash. Sites based on interesting concepts often get the nod. Another niche site usually won’t. This blog isn’t Tech Crunch, and being mentioned here isn’t going to get you your initial 50,000 members.
I should remove “news” from the headline of the blog, because this is all about commentary.
This week a woman emailed myself and 300 journalists (not to confuse me with a real journo) about a company. Problem is, she didn’t use the bcc: field in her email client, so I got, free of charge, an incredible amount of email addresses for reporters at the New York Times and other high-value contacts. Oops.
I mentioned the speaking engagement at BU because a lot of what I talked about wasn’t technology, but story telling. Press releases need to tell stories to be interesting to reporters. Most, sadly, do not.
A new site launch is usually not much of a story. You’ll get a few mentions in small town papers and a few websites, but that’s not what your dating site needs. You need massive amounts of inbound traffic, as cheap as possible.
PR doesn’t do that. Many site owners get excited when their traffic spikes after sending out a press release. Then they are crestfallen when the traffic drops back down a few days later.
If you have a great story to tell, your story will go viral. Bloggers will pick it up, people will mention you on Twitter and other social media channels.
That’s where the buzz starts. I can’t tell you how many times I see articles in the NY Times that talk about topics I saw on blogs Twitter or Google Groups 4 months earlier.
Start with the early-adopters, maybe shoot a marketing video for YouTube, the opportunities are endless, the only limit is your imagination. Not everyone needs a video, but believe me, after reading 25 press releases, anything to stop the boredom is welcome.
Regarding sending press releases as MS Word documents, PDF’s or 100 MB videos. It’s 2008, use html. If you do send html releases, don’t write the release in Word and then export as html. Microsoft Word leaves in a ton of proprietary crap that makes pasting into a blog post a 15 minute affair. Into the trash it goes.
Tell me who else is talking about your company. Links to other blogs and news outlets are helpful and give you added credibility.
Learn from your experiences. If nobody is talking about your company, find out why? Don’t email me and say you are following up on the release you sent me last week. Ask me why I haven’t written anything. There could be 10 reasons why. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know.
I’m off to read some press releases.
