The best way to learn about what works in PR is to get feedback straight from those with the most intimate knowledge of public relations practice. In other words, the media. So here’s a round-up of the valuable advice that journos have freely dished out to us PR folks recently on LinkedIn.
Some of these are moans about what frustrates journalists about the PR pitches and tactics they’re exposed to daily. In other cases, it’s just good-natured advice (to try and educate PR peeps about how we can better meet their needs).
1.) Want your opinion article to go viral? Make people angry!
According to the post below from tech journalist Jasper Hamill, editor of The Machine, opinion articles rarely reach a massive audience and go viral if everyone is happy when they read them. His advice? Your article needs to make people angry.
All the same, as a PR/marketer, you want to protect your brand from controversy and crises, so choosing article topics and angles that make people fume is tricky. The starting point, I guess, is to find a common issue (or enemy) that both you and your audience (and potential customers) can get all riled up about. Obviously, be careful not to say stuff that’s libelous ;-).
2.) Avoid ‘mansplaining’ in PR pitches!!
After posting a viral video on LinkedIn, Zoe Kleinman, the BBC’s technology editor, highlighted in a follow-up post that she still gets a surprising number of PR pitches that are nothing more than ‘mansplaining’ or spelling out what she’s already said online in different words. I wonder if this is partly due to PRs using Gen AI tools to create their pitches based on what a journalist has written about already. (?)
There’s little point in pitching the Beeb unless you have news that’s big enough to cut through. Failing this, you might possibly be successful if you are a subject matter expert or have some ‘inside’ information, which means you can provide quotes/insights that add value to an unfolding news story (a type of PR newsjacking or reactive PR). For example, I once got a client interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 evening news because he had specialist insights about what might have led to a tech glitch that impacted the London Stock Exchange that day.
3 Make your media contact details glaringly obvious
In the post below, Nick Huber, a freelance FT journalist, bemoans the fact that many company websites fail to prominently display contact information (email and phone) for their media contacts. This is PR 101. Journalists are working to tight deadlines, so you need to make it as easy as possible for them to contact the right person at your company (and to ensure that person responds quickly and efficiently to their requests). If you don’t, they might drop their story/feature mentioning you – and cover a competitor instead!
The media contact could be from your internal PR team, an appropriate person in the marketing department – or your external PR agency or consultant.
4.) There are certain types of PR story you shouldn’t devote time to
In her post below, Allison Cater of PRDaily advises PRs not to waste time and effort on low-level appointment stories, business anniversaries, or news about new client wins (unless they are well-known brands). While I do agree with Allison that if you have a small PR budget, there are better ways to get more bang for your buck than these stories, I do think there are exceptions to this rule.
For example, some trade publications still cover new hires and customer wins. I’ve even managed to get TechCrunch to cover an appointment story for a startup client, and I have landed plenty of coverage on customer win/roll-out stories (with customers that weren’t major brands) by focusing on bigger industry trends or issues those stories were able to highlight.
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash