Tomicide Solutions September 2006: Befriending The Media

By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

Isn't it amazing how much technology companies spend on marketing and advertising using the traditional ways, while blissfully ignoring almost free opportunities like the media. They mistakenly believe that working with the media is some kind of black magic, and don't even try. And most of the ones that try use self-centred puffery to gain the media's attention.

Now imagine an editor. She receives hundreds of press releases every day. As she is ploughing through these releases, what does she find? She finds releases like...

And these releases are all fine, except that they are all self-centred and have a very little chance of drawing the editor's attention. Editors are looking for information that is valuable to their readers, and the fact the Rintin Eaglebottom of Courageous Coffin Carving Inc. has won the precious Gold Coffin Nail award is not exactly valuable for readers.

Month after month I receive newsletters from web designers who brag about what sort of contracts they have won and with whom. Never once have I received valuable tips or advice from them regarding building websites or making my websites better. Their messages feel like they are saying, "What are you waiting for you dumb bastard? Look, all these people (testimonials) have already hired us to build websites for them. When do you finally make up your mind?"

The interesting thing is that I haven't met many webdesigners who brag about how successful their websites are in terms of generating new business for their owners. Well, we know that some 95% of the websites are financial disasters. Interestingly the most lucrative and most client-magnet websites are built by folks who barely know what HTML is.

I've always thought that selecting webdesigners and other professionals based on their portfolios with no regard to the financial improvement in their clients' businesses is just as retarded as selecting surgeons based on their portfolios of incisions and stitches with no regard to the fact of how many of their patients died during the process.

The Conventional Wisdom About Public Relations

In days of old,
When knights were bold,
And condoms weren't invented,
They tied their socks,
Around their cocks,
And babies were prevented.

~ Author unknown

Similarly to the bold knights of the 20th century, many technology companies mistakenly believe that today's media works the same way as it did in the previous Millennium, and they make some basic mistakes. They believe that...

In contrast to this belief, today's press releases work according to the...

New Rules In Public Relations

With the widespread application of the Internet, the rules of PR have changed quite drastically and we have to adjust our way of thinking about PR.

But here we have to consider former GE CEO Jack Welch's words, "When the pace of change outside your organisation exceeds the pace of change inside, the end is near."

So, we have look at the new ways of using PR in business. And these rules say that...

But Why Learn The New Rules At All?

Savvy marketers have learnt that, with the Internet, news spread differently from how they used to spread in the off-line world. Many marketers understand the off-line media word but don't have the web savvy to fully implement PR strategies with the web in mind. They just don't understand how the web works in terms of PR. They fail to realise that due to the web, buyers directly read press releases and the no longer have to rely on reporters to deliver the news as they did years ago.

Your primary media audience is buyers not journalists. And keep this in mind.

Some New Press Release Considerations

Both Submitting Your Releases and Publishing Them On Your Website

Create a "Media Room" on your website, post your releases there and keep it alive as long as the topic of the release is valid. Obviously, if you change profession from a spiritual healer to a hangman, from a midwife to a gravedigger, or from a butcher to a surgeon, you may want to re-assess the validity of your releases. Not all of them may apply to your new career.

According to web statistics, the Media Room is one of the most visited section on websites. Since Google is becoming more and more content-centred, good, well-written releases get quickly indexed and ranked on the engines. In order to achieve great ranking, above and beyond the words and phrases, pay attention on other search engine optimisation techniques.

What To Write In The Press Release?

One of my mentors over the years, marketing genius Jay Abraham often says, "People are silently begging to be led." This phenomenon is what we can use with the media. People are hungry for valuable information but don't care much about other people's successes. So, your release had better be client-centred.

A well-written press release can be more effective than any kind of advertising, and it's almost free. It's important that your release gets editors' attention and they get back to you. Editors are skilled at reading releases quickly, and they quickly decide the fate of your release. If they don't find anything news-worthy in the first paragraph, then your release is toast. Off it flies straight into the gaping mouth of the rubbish bin.

So, even though your release doesn't have to be earth-shattering, it has to be client-focused. But first, let's create a rough...

Press Release Outline

Step 1: Establishing the Newsworthiness Of Your News

Well, to me the news is newsworthy if it has an impact on the marketplace. Winning an award, winning a new contract or appointing a new technical director sounds great but the market couldn't care less. Think about how these news items impact the life of the editor's readers. How are readers better off by knowing all this. And even if you announce a company-related news, try to present it in such a way that you show the benefits for the market.

It can cause a bit of a problem to announce that the executives receive a 200% bonus increase, and to accomplish that the company triples its prices. This reminds me of the previous (communist) government here in British Columbia. They kept the budget in constant deficit, and wasted money on anything they touched (typical communist behaviour) but never shied away from awarding massive pay increases to themselves.

Step 2. The Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How of Your Release

All right, you have a newsworthy topic and want to develop a skeleton for it. Write down the six key words of PR, the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How under each other, and next to each work elaborate on each word. Describe who does what, when, where why and how. And after that keep working on each description to make them short and concise. They have to fit into one sentence in the headline and very first paragraph.

Step 3. Understanding Your Market Audience

Write your release with the editor's mindset in your mind. Is the editor technically savvy? How much jargon can you keep in the release. If you write your release for an engineering magazine, most probably the editor is an engineer. Many medical magazine's editors are doctors. Using a certain level of jargon, well trade terminology, you also demonstrate that you know what you're taking about.

Step 4. Grab the Reader's Attention the Headline

I prefer headlines with three criteria...

  1. Problem-based
  2. Question
  3. Raises curiosity

Let's look at the "Why Do Single Mums Keep Making These Seven Mistakes And Raise Troubled Kids?" headline.

Problem-based: People don't care about your solutions until they know you understand their problems. So, in the headline I want to demonstrate that I understand their problems. In the above headline, the "Raise Troubled Kids" is the problem element.

Question: Questions hook the mind and require answers. The brain hates incomplete tasks, and an unanswered question is an incomplete task.

Raises curiosity: Curiosity is one of the greatest unexplored emotions. Here the word "These" is the curiosity element. Personally I hate using guilt, greed or fear-based headlines. I hate it when they are used on me, so regardless of how good they allegedly are, I stay away from them. There is one exception: When you present a statistic.

For instance, In Canada 19% of the population is "mentally deranged" and 4% (1.2 million) are clinically "asylum cases" (Statistics Canada). They roam the land because there is not enough asylum space available.

Although this is a fact, I would never use a headline with a pointed question, "Is your child one of the 19%-ers? " But I would start with a headline like, "Do You Know That 19% of Canadians Are Mentally Deranged?". The first headline basically says, "Your Kid Is An Idiot!" The second one merely spells out a statistics and lets the reader connect the dots.

Step 5. Organising Your Information

Start with the biggest gun in your arsenal that is expected to make the biggest bang. Start with the most impactful piece of information.

Step 6. Being Accurate, Watching Your Facts

Stay with the facts and stay clear of platitudes, superlatives and exaggerating subjective statements. Keep your adjectives like flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry standard, or cutting-edge to the bare minimum. Most of them are subjective, thus have no place here. Instead of...

Step 7. Including Some Quotes

You can be assertive to a certain extent but support your assertions wit some quotes from different sources, such as analysts, customers and executives from your company. Quotes can make your press release exciting, while also giving meat to your written facts.

Step 8. Including Your Background

Here you can talk about the broader implication of your press release. How is it likely to impact your industry? You clients? Your marketplace? Put your announcement into context. If you announce your new drill, speak about the impact on the hole-making industry and the improvement on those people's lives who have holes. And talk about the benefits of your gizmo or service.

Step 9. A Corporate Summary

This is small section on your company in general. You can talk a bit about the company's values, mission and vision, and how it wants to make a difference in the market.

Step 10. Contact Information

Standard contact information. For email give your email and stay away from the commonly used "info@" or "sales@" lunacy. People contact people, not "info" or "sales". Also stay away from "@yahoo.com", "@hotmail.com", "@gmail.com" or other free emails. They can have a negative impact. Use the email with your own domain. And if you don't have a website, then get one. Nowadays you aren't taken seriously without a website.

Step 11. Corrections

Proofread your creation several times. Let several people in among your friends and colleagues read your release.

Ask someone to read it for you and check the tone of the release. How does it sound?

A Little Twist

I love submitting not standard press releases, but announcements of free reports and tip sheets. Editors put higher value on these freely available valuable pieces of information than on company announcements. So, instead of bragging about its new award in a chest-beating fashion, Courageous Coffin Carving Inc. could issue a press release entitled "Ten Deadly Mistakes People Make When Selecting Coffins For their Oversized Loved Ones."

Or...

"The Sausage Guide: Five Vital Questions You Have To Ask Your Butcher When Buying Sausages. And you can mention fro credibility that this report is issued by the Canadian Hot Dog and Sausage Council. Hey, allegedly there is such an organisation. I've heard it on the radio.

Internal Links In Press releases

Since your release is delivered all across the cyber universe using various methods, make sure you link all important elements. All these elements point back at your site which increase your search engine ranking. The search engines, especially Google uses incoming links to evaluate the site's importance.

Your Content's Ability to Invoke Specific Action

Even before you start writing decide what action you want readers to take. I prefer to invoke an action that brings them to my website to download free but valuable information in the for, of an article special report. With this action they come into my sales funnel. And here is the twist. Although it's called sales funnel, I stay in touch with them not through pitches, but valuable information. I let them decide when the are ready to buy something, be it full-blown consulting or just $30 ebook. I'm not in a rush. Some people are always coming through the funnel and are ready to buy something. With this approach I have a steady incoming traffic.

But there are some differences here. in the B2C word, you put out a "buy" button. Buying B2B services is a bit different, so you're better off using the "Contact us" ot "Fill in this form" buttons.

Daring To Be different

This can be a huge challenge for some. There are certain "stupid" industries that refuse to bang their heads against the wall regardless ohow much it hurts. A few weeks ago I met the financial officer of a construction company. He told me they awere losing truckloads of money in bidding wars, but when I told him that they could completely eliminate bidding by marketing better, he said, "That's okay. The whole industry works this way. They all suffer equally, so we're on equal playing fields." And construction is the typical "lowest bidder wins" industry.

I believe it's vital to be a renegade. You must be different. Not for the sake of being different. Earl Nightingale once said, "The majority is always wrong." That's why you have to listen to the minority. Listen to people who piss you off. Listen to people who suggests that you do something that goes against the fundamental grain of some of your business practices. Do something scary. Step out of your standard operating procedure.

Distributing Your Press Releases Using Some Neat PR and Media Resources

All right. You've written your press release, and now what? Well, now you have to submit them. Again the Internet makes life a lot easier in this area too. If you want to, you can submit your releases one by painstakingly one to various magazines and newspapers, but you're better off, even if you have to pay a little, using one of the available press release distribution services.

There are both free and paid submission sites. Try to go for the paid services, because free is free for a reason. Something may happen, and someone may pick up your release, but you've got a better chance with using the paid services.

Attribution: "This article was written by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan who helps privately held information technology companies to develop high leverage client acquisition systems and business development teams in order to sell their products and services to premium clients at premium fees and prices. Visit Tom's website at http://www.varjan.com.