Here are two tidbit’s from yesterday’s Bulldog Reporter PR University audio conference on email/online pitching (which I moderated):

• Dave Satterfield of Sitrick & Co. said that he has texted reporters to answer questions and make clarifications  during major announcement events, while they were all in the room together
• The Vatican has been send text messages to followers and the media since 2003. Kevin Dugan of the Bad Pitch Blog said one of the reasons was to reduce the possibility of Vatican-related hoaxes being picked up by the media as legit.

Part of my media training curriculum is explaining to people that the media covers only a set group of topics — they are broad, but they are really all you will find in American mainstream media, so if you want coverage, you better figure out which buckets your story fits in.

They are:

• Novelty: things that don’t happen everyday
• Familiarity: things that DO happen every day, such as the weather, the City Council and the stock market
• Big money and winners: the ups and downs of public and private institutions are always grist for news stories; everyone loves a winner
• Risk-takers: people who put their money, reputation, health or safety at risk
• Cat-fights: want coverage? Pick a fight
• Your wallet: everyone likes to learn more about how to make money, save it or spend it
• Sex, celebrities and scandal: because they have universal appeal

The story that prompted this post is this: cute blond female twins who want to work in journalism. This story appeared in the New York Times. Seriously.

Bucket analysis of this story:

• Cute blond twins = sex
• Want to work in the media = the media’s favorite big institution, itself.
• Killing themselves to get a job = risk-takers, esp. if you are a cute blond twin
• And don’t forget novelty! They’re cute young blond girl twins! How unusual!

Here’s another story making the rounds: Rush Limbaugh’s desire to become a minority owner of the St. Louis Rams of the NFL. It has generated, for sure, the most publicity ever for someone who wants to buy a non-controlling interest in an NFL team. Limbaugh knows exactly what he’s doing — here’s an interview to that effect.

Bucket analysis:

• Limbaugh = celebrity
• NFL = familiarity and big money
• Wants to buy small piece of NFL team = catfight!

See how easy it is!

If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about PR, it would be this: to make all press releases and PR pronouncements about the interests of readers, users and editors, not about the organization issuing the press release.

Think about it: aside from pronouncements from the White House, how often are news stories just verbatim press releases from an organization? Virtually never, right? Instead, all news stories are broad stories about a particular situation, with many elements, possibly including you, your boss or your organization.

Yet to this day, the vast majority of press releases are written in that stilted, third-person style (“So-and-so announced today”) as if we were contributing an article to an imaginary media outlet.

Why, just today, I surfed over to PitchEngine.com to check it out — this is a site that intends to help PR people shift from issuing stilted old media-style press releases to new style press releases that are supposedly more user-friendly for the social media environment. But they don’t apparently have editors stopping users from taking their old third-person perspective and jamming it into the SMR format.

A couple of today’s PitchEngine headlines, plucked fresh from the site:

• THE WILMA THEATER Announces Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo as the final selection for its 2009-2010 Season
• Paws Unlimited Foundation Holds their Open House to Raise Awareness and Funding for their No-Kill, Ten-Acre Animal Shelter in the Greater New York Region

Do you care? Why should you?

But, there was a ray of light in this headline:

• Revenue Sharing Cuts from Governor, Legislature to Trigger More Crime, Layoffs Statewide

It’s about Michigan (should have been in the headline) and was posted by the Michigan Municipal League. But at least it’s about other people and not about them!

Being a spokesperson is hard — seriously. And being the spokesperson when you are also the CEO of General Motors in 2009 must be close to impossible. But hey, that’s why they get paid the big bucks, right?

GM’s CEO inadvertently used the phrase “bankruptcy…could work,” at a media breakfast with the Wall Street Journal in attendance, and they didn’t miss the opportunity to write the following:

General Motors Corp.’s chief executive, once a staunch opponent of bankruptcy as a way of reorganizing the ailing auto maker, has softened his view, suggesting the company could possibly emerge from a Chapter 11 filing.

This interpretation of Wagoner’s comments so disappointed GM that the company posted a rebuttal on its blog called “Never Let the Facts Get in the Way of a Good Story.” Tom Wilkinson, GM’s Director of News Relations, takes the Journal to task for taking Wagoner’s comments out of context and making more of his reference to bankruptcy than Wilkinson says Wagoner intended.

In the blog post, Wilkinson posts the entire exchange [as transcribed from a recording of the session], and here’s what Wagoner said”

A lot of people who write about bankruptcy, I don’t think have ever been in bankruptcy. And what I have learned after studying it in detail is that it brings significant risk on… what I have learned is that it could work. And it might not work.

After vehemently complaining that the Journal was out to write a pre-conceived story and that Wagoner didn’t mean what he was quoted saying, Wilkinson ended his post with this query:

Did The Wall Street Journal ignore what Wagoner really said so it could write the headline and story it wanted? I’ll leave it to you to decide.

OK Tom, I’ll take the bait and answer your question: No. I will grant you that the Journal may have unfairly taken Wagoner’s comments out of context and written a story that GM didn’t want written and one that may prove to be inaccurate, but I’ll also say that Wagoner should never have said what he said and essentially got what he deserved for uttering the words “bankruptcy… could work.”

No one forced him to say what he said. Every media training always includes the admonition, “don’t repeat a negative.” Meaning, if the question is, “Could bankruptcy work for GM?” you DON’T say, “bankruptcy could work.” You say something like, “that’s your word, not mine. We are focused on getting GM back on solid footing, etc.”

Even if the question wasn’t as simple as the above example, it’s the job of the spokesperson to avoid using negative words. Journalists are listening for the most controversial thing you are going to say, and they are going to lead with that. Your job as a spokesman is to make those words the LEAST controversial you can.

If you’re Rick Wagoner and you’re sitting at a media breakfast, it’s no time to get informal and utter the word “bankruptcy” if you absolutely don’t want that word to ever come out of the mouth of GM’s CEO.

Another thing: I’m guessing Wagoner has had to answer some form of this question 1,000 times, and on the 1,000th time, he finally let the words “bankruptcy could work,” slip from his mouth, even though he added “it might not” afterward. I’m sure he’s tired and under incredible stress, but again, it’s not the media’s job to look the other way. It’s the spokesperson’s job to keep repeating their talking points 1,000 times if necessary, not 999 times.

Be concise. Tell the journalist how your pitch will help them do their job, in the crucial first words of an email pitch. Customize your outgoing email address, if you have to, to make it more recognizable and user-friendly. Bottom-line: every character counts, and you have zero to waste.

That is the key-takeaway from today’s Bulldog Reporter PR University audio conference on email pitching: make every character count.

LA-based journalist Gary North of Variety had a couple of key tips: your subject line should contain an active adjective, a noun and a verb that your recipient might care about. As in, “Doctor Wins Nobel Prize.” Contrast that with: Interview opportunity with Dr. Frederick Smith, M.D., on New Research into Cancer Treatment.” Which one would you open?

North also suggested that senders make sure their email addresses mean something, too — that just like we all do when sorting our postal mail, he and other journalists look at who sent them something as they decide how much importance to give it.

A few other takeaways:

• Think about the recipient — you are filling space in their life with your email. Are you adding value or just spamming them? (from Richard Laermer, BadPitchBlog)
• No client names in the subject line — it’s a dead giveaway that you are seeking publicity rather than offering a story to the journalist (from Heather Hamann, Dr. Dean Edell radio show)
• Every email pitch should answer this question: what can I uniquely offer that no one else has? (from Kim Metcalfe of Weber Shandwick)
• Write for the Blackberry! Meaning, short and pithy, not wordy! Example: “Inventor Helps Seniors Plug In.” (from Nancy Brenner, MSL)

I finally got around to seeing “Thank You For Smoking” last week — my bad. It’s an absolute must-see for anyone in the PR industry and if I was a university PR professor, I would use this film in my course and devote a couple of weeks to watching and analyzing it. It is a pitch-perfect study of the role of PR in society.

Even though I may be the last person in the industry to see it, I don’t want to recount the plot here and spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. But I did want to comment on one of the key turning points, when the main character, Nick Naylor the tobacco industry spokesman, lets his guard down (among other things) and tells a journalist a lot of information he thinks is “off the record.”

When the information becomes the basis of a blockbuster expose about him, Naylor complains to the reporter that he thought their conversations were “off the record.” Wrong! No conversation with a journalist is off the record unless you get specific buy-in from the journalist before you start talking! That’s when you have the leverage and can negotiate the terms of the interview. And furthermore, some of the best times for journalists to get candid information from you is in the informal exchanges you might have in the elevator, sitting down for the interview, or making small talk over lunch, when you think they aren’t taking notes.

Here’s another area that PR needs to get right yesterday if we are to survive or grow as a business over the long-term: meeting the needs of journalists via our corporate web sites.

All too often, our sites are repositories of incomplete or merely promotional information, rather than the facts and figures that journalists need to do their jobs. As I’ve always said, the easiest way to get in the media is to be available and cooperative when the media calls (or emails, or searches your web site).

Jakob Neilsen, the guru of web usability, recently released an update to his report on how journalist use the web for research. If you have the budget and you are responsible for the press area of your company’s site, you must spend the measly $248 Neilsen charges for his 287-page report.

If not, you can read the summary here.

Here’s a taste of Neilsen’s report: the top-5 reasons journalists gave for visiting a company’s website are:

• Locate a PR contact (name and telephone number)
• Find basic facts about the company (spelling of an executive’s name, his/her age, headquarters location, and so on)
• Discern the company’s spin on events
• Check financial information
• Download images to use as illustrations in stories

Note that “buying into your promotional hype” or “watching a video of the CEO give a speech” are not among the things journalists are looking for on your site.

News wire services are still alive and reasonably well: AP, Reuters, Dow Jones, Bloomberg, and so on. They were never directly reliant on advertising revenue for survival (though their customers were/are), and they have found new life on the Internet, where their 24/7 service dovetails perfectly with the web’s insatiable need for news.

The care and feeding of wire services has always been one of the central strategies of any media relations plan I’ve drawn up, and it should be a central part of yours as well. Here’s why: because it’s a one-to-many tactic. One interview, one story, gets multiplied countless times as the story is picked up and spread around the media and the Internet.

One of my personal favorite aspects of pitching the news wires is that they are no-nonsense, get-to-the-point journalists. That plays well into my PR style, which is similarly fact-and-figure based and not reliant on spin.

In any case: the inspiration for this tutorial was the report of this memo from from MS&L advising its PR staffers to make a renewed push to land AP stories, in particular in Washington, where so many bureaus have closed to been downsized recently

Thinking about pitching an embargoed story to TechCrunch, arguably the top new media web site about emerging technology? Don’t. TechCrunch Supreme Leader Michael Arrington has decreed that the site will no longer honor embargoes and will, in effect, only accept exclusive stories from PR folks they trust.

In Arrington’s typical over-the-top egomaniacal style, he makes this case with maximum bluster. But when you boil it down, it comes down to these points:

• Arrington is sick of being hounded by PR people who would kill for a placement on his site, one of the top tech start-up news sites on the Internet
• He’s particularly sick of playing by the rules when it comes to embargoed stories, only to have others break the rules and break the news first
• So, he’s not going to honor embargoes anymore, even if he accepts some information under embargo
• He’d rather have stories exclusively, but only from PR people he trusts

Reduced to these points, his complaints and strategies are hardly new. TechCrunch has some power in the marketplace, so Arrington is trying to leverage it by demanding exclusives. The Wall Street Journal does this all the time. In turn, other bloggers are trying to gain market power by first agreeing to the same embargoes that TechCrunch does (or did), then posting first in the hope of climbing up the search rankings. So Arrington’s little game of accepting embargoed information and then breaking the embargo at some point afterward is an attempt to fight back against those who would challenge TechCrunch’s supremacy.

Read more

Great story in yesterday’s WSJ about the subprime mess — in classic Journal fashion, they looked at the intertwined relationships of players in the mortgage business, tracing the story from the misfortunes of a single homeowner up to giant multinational financial institutions that invested in mortgage-backed securities, including securities whose returns were dependent on the homeowner continuing to pay his mortgage. If you’re at all interested in understanding the subprime situation, I recommend it.

Buried about 75% of the way into the story, though, was a media relations “teachable moment.”

The story was about the tribulations of “Colorado truck driver Roger Rodriguez,” who over-mortgaged his home in Westminster, CO. After he took out his mortgage, it was packaged into a security and sold to investors, including James C. Kelsoe Jr., a senior portfolio manager at the asset-management unit of Morgan Keegan & Co., a Memphis, Tenn., investment firm and unit of Regions Financial Corp.

When the mortgage market was riding high, so was Kelsoe’s fund. But after the crash, his returns suffered, as Rodriguez and others started defaulting on their loans. “At the end of August,” the Journal wrote, “Mr. Kelsoe’s Select High Income Fund posted a loss of nearly 28% for the month — dead last among its peers for the year and for five years as well, according to Morningstar.”

Naturally, the Journal sought comment from Kelsoe. Here’s what they got:

A Morgan Keegan spokeswoman said Mr. Kelsoe wasn’t available to comment because he was focused on managing his funds.

Every moment of the day? 24/7? Of course not. This was just a way to duck the interview, to say “no comment” without saying “no comment.” In my trainings, that’s exactly the strategy I recommend, with one additional element: your dodge needs to be plausible. As in, “Sorry, I can’t help you, that information is confidential.” That wouldn’t have worked in this case, and in fact, I’m not sure there’s any plausible dodge in this situation. So the best strategy would have been to simply say, “Sorry, Mr. Kelsoe’s not available for an interview,” and hold your ground with that.

When you use an implausible dodge like the one above, the journalist will usually find a way to embarrass you. And they did a few grafs later:

In a letter to a Memphis newspaper, Charles Reaves, an attorney who had invested in one of Mr. Kelsoe’s funds, wrote that Mr. Kelsoe was “hiding under his desk” and “should have the fortitude to face the public and explain…what he intends to do.”

Bottom line: don’t hide, and don’t use implausible dodges. But if you don’t want to talk, just say so and hold your ground. That’s your right.