Why content is still king in good PR - part 2

Thanks to social media, I often get that quesy feeling of being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information in my inbox.
2.0 allows anyone to post whatever they like on blogs, Twitter and discussion boards with no quality control whatsoever. Twitter is the classic example. The advice from Twitter pioneers to the uninitiated who couldn’t understand why they would want to be bombarded with hundreds of messages every day from random strangers they had decided to follow, was essentially that you have to jump and experience it before you will get any value from it.
No one can possibly read all of these messages so why would you want to receive them? The answer, ultimately, is content. Amid the avalanche of dross from the morons who will follow anyone on Twitter and post meaningless trivia about their lives and their pets, there are real nuggets of extremely valuable information. The reason it is valuable is because the sender has put some thought into and decided it would be of interest to like-minded people.
Some examples. Mashable, the Social Media Guide, tweets like crazy all day. The last time I checked this afternoon they had posted 17,243 tweets and they have 1,187,803 followers –it will no doubt be more by the time you read this. The reason so many people follow them is because they are delivering a really valuable service sharing with the world everything they are finding out that might interest those of us into social media.
Andrew Ballenthin is another social networking guru who is worth reading. He has more than 500 LinkedIn connections and his blog attracts between 4,000 and 7,000 pages views every week because what he writes is worth reading.
Dublin Airport has started Tweeting as well. What a fantastic idea to send instant messages to those who are interested about flight delays. I follow BBC Scotland because it gives me regular news updates all day. A restaurant in New York tweets table cancellations. That way, regular customers might get a last minute reservation, and chances are the place is full every night. That’s a sensible business use of Twitter and those who follow that eatery value the information they receive.
Bit of a conflict of interest here, but my partner in Breen Media’s specialist insurance and reinsurance public relations firm rein4ce, Mairi Mallon, tweets as reinsurance girl. In just over two and half months of tweeting, she has attracted 99 followers (and it would be many more if she didn’t delete many of the nutters who follow her at random). It’s not an astronomical amount, but she is very successful. Why, because in her tweets she regularly shares information that is of genuine value to those in the industry and rein4ce is communicating regularly with influential people in our market.
That, at the end of the day, is what separates those public relations practitioners who are using social media innovatively from the pests. Those who perform a real service to their online community by trying to help out by posting high quality content are worth reading and following. Their reputation as experts among their peers grows, traffic to their websites increases, and the long-term effect is more contacts and more business.
So the lesson for PR people remains the same: even in the fog of social media, content is still king.

Why content is still king in good PR

As a former journalist , I’ve come across my fair share of pointless press releases that would never in a million years make it into the paper. You know the type. A blatant piece of self-promotion or a tedious release that has absolutely no news value whatsoever.
It really makes you wonder what on earth that company’s PR team were thinking about sending this stuff out. Or, what is probably the case, the public relations department doesn’t know what it is doing. There is one school of PR practitioners that journalists really hate – the type who think their job is simply to keep saying nice things about their clients. Wrong. While there is undoubtedly a place for good news stories – especially these days – the basic point remains that if you want to get publicity for your client, you have to have a story to tell in the first place.
The best PR people are those who think like journalists. Newsrooms in Scotland and across the UK are under more pressure than ever to produce more content with less staff. The advent of social media and the need to upload quickly onto the internet means reporters are drowning under a tsunami of information and are having to churn out stories at breakneck speed.
This means that intelligent PR operatives have the chance to be a real friend and resource to reporters. Rather than wasting their time firing out the sort of self-serving guff that has spike written all over it, good public relations consultants can make life easier for overworked hacks by giving them proper stories – preferably backed up with a decent picture.
That means good PR people need to manage the expectations of clients and have the courage to tell them that some of their ideas are simply too boring to get any coverage.
News and information is being distributed through a bewildering array of digital and traditional platforms, but one thing that hasn’t changed is that content is still king. It’s surprising how many PR professionals haven’t got that.
To see more of my blogs, go to the Breen Media website

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Public Relations - a vital tool to beat the recession

In tough economic times, it is tempting for businesses to cut back on the things they believe are dispensable - like training, advertising and public relations.
This is a big mistake. During recessions, businesses in Scotland and throughout the UK need PR and advertising more, not less. Too often, with revenue declining businesses can slip into panic mode, paralysed by fear like the proverbial rabbit in the headlights. If your business is thinking this way, chances are, so are your competitors.
With your rivals distracted and their confidence shot to bits, now is the perfect time to move in and steal a bigger share of the market. By hiring a public relations specialist, you can start to dominate media space by spelling out why you are doing so well, thus stealing a significant march on the competition.
Think of the message it sends out. Your business appears like a confident player in the marketplace so you stand out from the crowd - and confident businesses attract customers. Remember the story of Kellogg's? During the Great Depression of the 1930's when his rivals were slashing back their advertising spend, the visionary WK Kellogg doubled his advertising budget. As a result, by the time the good times had returned, Kellogg's totally dominated the market, as they still do today.
The phenomenal growth of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace where millions of consumers are talking about brands in real time means businesses simply cannot afford the option of not having a PR strategy to keep abreast of these conversations and trying to shape the discussions.
Finally, the conditions for raising the profile of successful businesses are good right now, because the media is desperate for good news stories amid all the doom and gloom.
At Breen Media, we recognise that many businesses are struggling and counting every penny, but now is also a time of great opportunity for those companies that are innovative and forward-thinking. These are the types of businesses that need to have a well thought-out PR strategy offered at a competitive price.
For that reason, Breen Media will soon be unveiling a cost-effective public relations offer that can get them started.
Stay tuned for more details.