Find the Story – PR Tip #18

One of the hardest jobs we have in PR is to find the story. Sometimes, the story is right there for everyone to see, other times it’s elusive. Sometimes we forget to look. We have all had times when we’re under deadline and a release has to get written and we just crank it out headline, subhead, quotes and boilerplate. But that’s not our job. Our job is to find the story.

Part of this is developing the story arc and helping readers easily navigate from beginning (the problem or trend addressed), the middle (the value proposition and how this announcement fits) and the end (how the market, customer and company benefits).  Most companies start looking for the story in the wrong place, though. They start with what they have made. Problem is, that’s like telling a story from the middle. The truth is, the story starts way before that and it starts with what the customer needs and the problem they are trying to solve. 

When looking for the story, start by finding what about the announcement appeals to you or--even better--to the person you hope will read it. Remember, people buy things (consumer goods, business technology, apps, etc.) because it has perceived value to them. It makes their life better, easier or more productive. If you can hone in on the “why this matters” to a specific person you will be way ahead of more press releases and other PR materials are written.

The story, or at least a compelling version of it, can be elusive. As mentioned above, we’ve had lots of clients that believed that the story started and stopped with the products they’ve made. They think that the world will know exactly why this technology matters and how it will change lives to their target customers. They are wrong. Often very, very wrong and then are baffled when a reporter isn’t as excited about their news as they are or the story comes out and it’s very vanilla.

We recently had a client announce a bit of new technology that was interesting from a purely technology perspective. We could have written the release and the pitch to focus solely on the technology and it would have been good. However, there was so much more that it could be and, as we peeled away the layers, we found a really interesting story about how retail stores were using the technology to help lure customers offline and back into the brick-and-mortar locations during the holiday shopping season by creating a better in-store shopping experience and helping to keep the retail store’s network secure. The technology was still a big part of the story, but now we’re focusing on the problem the customer needed to solve and how they are solving it.

Even if the story can’t be tied directly to a problem or challenge a customer faces, it can often be written to talk about how a new product or technology can change the market. It can be the first time customers can combine products to do something, or how it’s the first implementation of a new standard or even how it’s the first product to allow the market to better leverage a developing trend.  When telling a good story, a developing trend or market shift can be your best friend so take the time to understand what these trends are so you can tell a more compelling story. 

Remember, when telling a story, you can’t just say “innovative new technology will reshape the economics of blah blah blah.” You have to walk the reader through a compelling narrative that helps them understand why the story you are telling is important to them personally and professionally.  When writing your next press release, blog, contributed article or any other PR writing, you'll make it much easier for your client and the target reader to connect if you tell a good story. And if you find yourself, or your company in the wrong story, then get out of it. We've all been part of interviews that go sideways because the reporter has an agenda or your spokesperson says something they shouldn't. In this case, it's your job to try can get the story back on track or find a way out. This is my story and I’m sticking to it.  

Create a Story Telling Engine - Tip 14

Good stories just don’t happen. Like an engine, they need multiple components to work together in order to make something happen. The engine in your car doesn’t run on gasoline alone, it takes oil, coolant and a spark to get things started.  Just like a story.

Stories need to combine a variety of elements to get the reader from start to finish. Many companies forget this and try to build stories using only one facet of their company – their products. The problem is products are only part of a company’s whole story. Sure, products are often the protagonist in the story, but if that is the only aspect told, then the story is limited.

A better approach is to define a narrative that includes the marketplace, the customer and the company as a whole. Now, companies have an opportunity to articulate how a product benefits the target customer, how it offers something unique or fills a gap in the market, and how it fits in the company’s short and long terms plans to win.

The risk with only telling one line of a story is that it leaves a lot up to the imagination of the reader. Basically, the storyteller is asking the reader to connect all the dots themselves – why the product matters to customers, what are the competitive differentiators and where the company fits in the marketplace. That’s a lot to ask of any reader.

A good PR program should be, in essence, a story telling engine for the company. The market, customers, investors and other interested parties all need to understand where the company is going and how each move it makes fits in the longer, broader narrative.  To do this, PR needs to dig deeper into the company’s business and market objectives to understand the story in long form.

A deeper understanding of what is happening in the market is needed so the PR team can maximize how announcements fit into events that are shaping the respective industry. PR must also be willing to take the time to understand the company’s products and appreciate what goes into bringing a specific product to market. Finally, PR needs to understand what is driving customers to look for the products and technologies a company sells, so they can match their company’s narrative to the story a prospect wants to hear.

This takes time and can’t be done on the fly. This idea of creating a story telling engine is fundamental to transforming public relations from passive to active and into a program that creates real, long-term value for a company and not just quick hits that few remember.

52 Tips for Strong PR – A 2014 Users Guide Tip 12: Find the Current

One of the most interesting aspects of public relations is how it, if executed well, can enable a company to leverage current trends and market developments to its advantage. PR can help companies latch onto emerging market drivers to help boost awareness, demonstrate thought leadership and drive interest. It can preset expectations ahead of big product launches and defuse the actions of close competitors.  

This current can also be very effective in helping shape a market by your company’s strengths and the competitors’ weaknesses, by articulating how your features and functionality better match where the market is going and how it is better suited to help customers get there. To be most effective with this, you should leverage a broad range of communication channels from media interviews, analyst discussions, speaking opportunities, customer events, blogs, social media and probably several others I’m neglecting to mention.

Finding the current can also help elevate a company that seems to get stuck talking about what it makes and not what is driving the need for its products to market. With this granular level of focus with its media relations, a company can miss out on opportunities to demonstrate thought leadership. Given how many stories are written each day about trends shaping the market, the pending impact of regulation or even what the next season’s trends will be, these are great opportunities. These forward looking opportunities don’t focus on what a company makes, but demonstrates that your company is thinking about how the market is changing as it designs, develops and brings new products and services to market.

Companies can also link to current market trends to explain how a business was negatively impacted by events outside its control. This is not to suggest that outside market forces can become the complete scapegoat, but they can help shade when something didn’t go as planned.

Regardless of how you want to leverage market trends and shifts, it’s important to know what they are so you can position your company effectively. Social media, conversations with key industry influencers, reading analyst reports and blogs, are all good ways to keep your toe in the water to feel which way the current is flowing.

52 Tips for Strong PR – A 2014 Users Guide Tip #1: Be the Calm

PR is an ever-changing, swirling, mess of a profession. It can be the calm before the storm or the tempest that sweeps everything out from under you. You’ve got to keep up with a thousand different details that might change at any given moment. And part of your job is to be the calm in that storm.

When the reporter is screaming about a deadline or the client is going ballistic over a story he’s not in, your job is to stay calm and rise above. When the conference room isn’t packed before your client’s session starts or the reporter includes that juicy bit someone said but shouldn’t have, you need to remain calm. Storms swirl, all boats rise, calm. 

You want to be a resource when needed, a conspirator when required and a voice of reason when everyone else in the room has drunk the Kool-Aid. But you can’t be anything of these things if you don’t remain, you guessed it, calm…and rational.

There is a time and place for big ideas, for amazing campaigns and PR stunts that wow the world (crop circles anyone?), but there is more often a time for being the PR person that folks can count on. Reporters count on you to pitch an interesting story, to understand the details enough to help them get back the first blush of interest, and to ensure they have the access they need to write something unique and interesting and a story that other people want to read and share.

Your clients want to know that you have things handled when they go off the rails, or just seem to. They want to know that you can fix things, even when you can’t, or that at least you’ll make sure they don’t happen again. Because things will go wrong, events won’t turn out as expected, coverage won’t always be favorable. I remember an event we were part of a few years ago that had an unfortunate choice in venue and some of the attending press didn’t like it. I talked to a couple of the irked media and helped smooth things over, but the PR folks from another vendor went for Option B: they were “outraged” and “embarrassed” and unabashedly “apologetic” and built what could have been a molehill of a problem into a mountain. They even hosted, at their headquarters thousands of miles from the event, a six hour crisis situation meeting for something that was solved with a change of venue and a few soft spoken words at the airport bar.

Basically, in our world, everyone has the right to ride the madness but us, because going off the deep end doesn’t buy us anything. Doesn’t give us more credibility with reporters or gain us more respect from clients or executives. It doesn’t win you points with conference and award organizers, or gain you followers on Twitter.

Just so we’re clear, I’m not saying we can’t get mad or be direct, firm or contrary. It just means we should do it calmly, in a rational manner. This is especially true when a real crisis hits your company or client. One thing that will help it to have contingency plans in place long before a crisis hits but as important as that pre-planning is, you'll go a long way in helping your company resolve, overcome or weather a crisis if you're the calm voice in the storm.

 

 

2012 – Fast Forward to the End

A friend of mine, Neil Rock (www.neilrockgroup.com) is a fantastic motivational speaker whose primary message is based on the simple principal that you have to visualize your goals, write them down and then physically post them somewhere visible so they can remind you every day of what you hope to accomplish.

As we start the 2012 planning process, it’s important to remember what the goal is for the year and put programs in place that make it accomplishable. The goal can be operational (demonstrate the value of a professional services organization), geographical (show relevance of products in new markets), financial (articulate revenue growth, vertical market relevance and/or channel development), leadership (ensure the market understands how the company is impacting the industry), or any one of a dozen other legitimate goals that a company, and its marketing department, might develop.

Many times, these goals are set within a company, shared internally and never spoken of again until December rolls around and executives want to see how the company performed against these goals.  It’s easy to get caught up in the next news release, trade show, conference or webinar and forget that all of these items should be vehicles to help your company achieve one or more of its objectives. 

For PR, the goals could be as simple as cultivating 10 new “champions” within the press and analyst community. To us, a champion is a press or analyst that follows the company regularly and understands what it’s trying to achieve and, at some level, believes your company will be able to achieve these goals. They understand how all the pieces of your company fit together and how each part plays a role in your company’s ability to win. These are reporters and analysts that don’t just write about your company when you have announcements, but also include you in stories they create about market trends and they view your company as an influencer in the industry.

Let’s take a look at that goal and break down how it can be achieved.

·         Identify 15 press/analysts that you’d like to convert from passive to active followers of your company.

·         Create a matrix of their recent coverage to understand what they cover specifically and how they treat information about your type of products and/or services within their coverage.

·         Invite them for a deep dive or “lunch and learn” where they get access to company executives (CEO, CTO, COO) that normally aren’t part of your briefing team.

·         Create pitches that are relevant to what they are writing about, not just their beat.

·         When pitching or briefing, reference recent articles to show that you’re paying attention to their work.

·         Create a six month story arch that gives them unique access into how your company thinks and how it plans to win in the marketplace, and then update them as you achieve these metrics.

·         Offer to become a technical resource on issues they are covering, even if this potentially means interviews conducted don’t result in immediate coverage.

·         Check in with them regularly to ask what they are working on and make suggestions about topics they haven’t covered yet that apply to their beat.

When identifying the 15 prospects, you’ll need to understand which companies they are currently covering and if they have any existing biases or favorites among your competitors. If they do, go ahead and include them, but realize this is a harder objective to achieve but often much more rewarding.

At the end of 2012, review how this program went and make adjustments with certain press/analysts that you weren’t able to cultivate. If some just aren’t interested, then pick others that you can begin to work with during the following six months.

It’s important to remember that at the core of any press or analyst relationship is trust. That they trust you to give them honest, relevant information and that you’re willing to help them do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. Break that trust and you can lose these relationships forever.

No matter what category your 2012 goals lie in, developing a step-by-step plan to actually achieve them is critical. Successful PR programs require constant attention – once you’ve visualized where you want to be, remember to actively revisit and evolve the track you’ve put in place to get there and you’ll be closing a successful 2012 before you know it.

Industry Leader of…None

I recently did a search on PRNewswire for certain key terms that I know drive reporters crazy. Companies love to use these terms and PR writers often fall back on them as a descriptor when nothing else is appropriate.  That’s where the problem lies – these words are used as filler when nothing else comes to mind to make a more contextual or interesting descriptor.  So, a company launching a new product becomes an “industry leader” and launching an interesting new product is instead launching a “breakthrough” “innovation” with “advanced” capabilities.

These words might sound good on paper but, in fact, these words have become so ubiquitous that they actually mean nothing.  In my recent research through PR Newswire, I searched for these words in press releases issued on a specific day. The date I choose doesn’t really matter but for records sake, it was October 31, 2011 at 10:54 am. Bear in mind that the search ran was just for releases issued that day before 10:54 AM EDT. These are the results:

• 1,253 “innovative”
• 903 “advanced”
• 202 “global leader”
• 123 “breakthrough” or “groundbreaking”

We all know that there weren’t 1,253 truly innovative products or services announced on October 31, 2011, by 10:54 AM EDT. There probably weren’t 1,253 truly innovative products announced in all of 2011. So what does that mean for PR writers? It means using the word “innovative” to describe your company’s (or client’s) products isn’t that innovative anymore.

Every industry is packed with vernacular and buzz words that mean something to someone. The problem is when these buzz words go mainstream, they lose the original context that help define the meaning. Writing for PR should be about context, not buzzwords. You need to craft a story that helps readers understand how the announcement fits into their industry, their needs and their lives.

Mark Twain once said, “Don’t say the old lady screamed-bring her on and let her scream.” Translate this into PR writing and you get: “Don’t say the product is innovative, bring it out and tell us how and why it’s innovative.”

This is harder said than done because, let’s face it, not everything that a company announces is as groundbreaking as the company likes to think. That doesn’t mean it’s not news, it just means that you have to work a little harder to make it newsworthy.

Please Release Me

There has been a lot of talk recently about news releases and what should, and should not, be in them. This online conversation got me thinking about the dynamics of how news is consumed today and the role a press release has in the process.

In the not so distant past, the media was the filter a company had to go through to get their news into the hands of current and potential customers, partners, investors and distribution channels and the press release was a support tool to help the various reporters understand the news, its context and broader industry implications.

Today, people read news from a wide variety of sources including traditional print and online media sites, local and cable broadcast, blogs, RSS feeds and social networking sites. These changes have already changed the way companies communicate, but what it hasn’t done is change the way press releases are written and it’s probably time it did.

So what should a press release be? To me, a press release should tell the story that you want your customers to read. It should articulate why the announcement is important to the market as a whole, the company’s particular customer or partner base and what it means specifically in terms of the company’s progress and opportunity. And the current inverted pyramid style of press release just doesn’t accommodate this very easily.

Headlines should be clever and catchy to grab the eye and invite readers to read more. To use an example from today’s news, no more:
“Sprint Expands Environmental Leadership with New Initiatives and Debut of Eco-Friendly Samsung Reclaim”

And instead, something written to entice and engage the reader like the headline Saul Hansell of the New York Times used for his story about the announcement:
“What’s Green, Made of Corn and Has Buttons?” or the headline used for Ed Baig's story in USA Today on the news: "Samsung and Sprint Unveil Eco-friendly Cellphone."

Sprint and Samsung's PR teams did a great job telling this story. Original stories appeared in every level of publication: business, dailies, trade, blogs, social media sites, etc. My point is, though, that the press release itself was picked up by over 150 news and content aggregation sites. My question is, would a more engaging and entertaining headline in the news release have increased the number of "click and reads" generated by this pick up? My gut says yes.

With short-staffed newsrooms where reporters are required to meet the demands of an 24/7 news cycle, don’t you think they’d appreciate a release written to be engaging as well for those pieces of news that catch their eye? For some releases, earnings, acquisitions and other materials announcements, the standard format still works, but for other announcements, why not use a different spin.

My point here is not that the media isn’t needed. The media provides validation, perspective and insight that a company won’t have. But the press release, in its current form, isn’t really part of that process, at least in any meaningful way. And if the current form of press release isn’t really important to how an article gets written, shouldn’t it be updated to serve a different purpose? My two and half cents for today.