Tuesday Marketing Notes (Number 34—May 23rd , 2006)

A B2B Marketing Newsletter for BMA Members
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This week, I’d like to share a great piece written by Hiawatha Bray, technology reporter for The Boston Globe, who has some practical advice for all us of running PR projects for our clients and companies. It’s a straight-shooting perspective from someone who’s on the other side of the PR and media process. You won’t go wrong if you read and heed his advice . . . Eric

Hints for PR People

by Hiawatha Bray

Technology Reporter, The Boston Globe

In certain circles, I have a reputation for being rather harsh to PR people. Well, sometimes. The ones with a proven knack for doing their jobs badly do get on my last available nerve. The good ones, however, are a joy to work with, and they make my life far easier.

So which do you want to be—a good ‘un or a bad ‘un?

I thought as much. That’s why I’m going to help you out, with information about what to do and what not to do if you want me to write about you or your company.

First and foremost, don’t phone the Globe at 5 pm with some bright idea for a red-hot feature. I work at a morning newspaper. By mid-afternoon, I’ve got better things to do than listen to your pitches.

In the morning, however, I don’t at all mind listening. Well, maybe I mind sometimes, but don’t worry. I’ll get over it. So if you want to call, do it early rather than late.

In any case, you’re far better off sending e-mail to bray@globe.com. For one thing, you can provide details that’ll help me decide whether you have an interesting story. For another, I’ll have a semi-permanent record of our interactions. I often forget about phone calls. I forget about e-mails too, but I can look them up and refresh my memory. So use e-mail. Don’t write it in HTML, either. Just plain old ASCII text for me.

And don’t phone me after sending me the message. I’ll get back to you, if it strikes me as worthwhile. If not…better luck next time.

Some of you send me snail-mail press releases. Who reads such dreck? Not I. In this business, a postage stamp is God’s way of telling me it’s not important. If it really was important, you’d have phoned or e-mailed or even faxed. (The number is 617-929-3183.) I usually throw away mail without even peeking, unless it’s a magazine.

So use e-mail. But don’t use attachments unless I’ve agreed to accept them. Just put your pitch into plain old ASCII text and send it along. From time to time, you may feel obligated to send something a bit bulkier. Write me a plain e-mail first and try to talk me into it. Attachments are usually a waste of bandwidth and time.

Especially if they’re really, really big. I’ve had people send me multi-megabyte PowerPoint slide shows once too often. I already hate PowerPoint—the focus of evil in the modern world—and PowerPoint slides glued to e-mail messages are even worse. Don’t you dare attach something like that to an e-mail addressed to me. It’ll go straight into the bit bucket.

You should include lots of contact information—phone, e-mail, pager, cell phone, preferably posted at the top of the message. If you can attach a vCard, please do. Some journalists don’t care for them, but I like ‘em fine. With a click, I can plug them into my address book for future reference. And if you’ve got sense enough to use vCards, I may well want to keep you as a future reference. I always did like people with brains…

By the by, why do so many corporate Web sites lack basic contact information, or bury it in an obscure spot? Time and again, I visit sites, hoping to write about a firm, only to find that their Web site has no phone number listed, or an e-mail address or even the name of a contact person. So I shrug, decide they don’t want any media coverage, and find a more informative firm to write about. Such a fate could well await your company if you don’t put this kind of contact info in an easy-to-find location on your site.

As a matter of fact, a good corporate site should include other goodies, like names and bios of the top execs and downloadable high-resolution photos of the firm’s products.

Now, about your pitch. If you don’t know what the heck it is you’re talking about, how will I? Understand your product or service, and explain it to me in a sentence. And be sure that sentence appears in the first paragraph of your message—or at least the second. Don’t waste my time with a cute lead-in, just get to the point. Remember, that’s how newspaper people write, by putting the key information at the top of the story. Go and do thou likewise.

And of course, don’t bother me with a pitch for a story that would never, ever appear in the Boston Globe. This is a newspaper, not a technical trade rag. Your hot new breakthrough in supply chain management may wow them at the next convention of the International Warehouse Logistics Association, but the readers of the Boston Globe won’t give a rip. So keep it to yourself, okay? Unless it’s that rare situation where an obscure innovation really would matter to our thousands of ordinary readers. In that case, give it a shot. The worst that can happen is that I’ll mock you and and make disparaging comments about your ancestors.

This guide to the perplexed is a work in progress. I’ll probably add more brilliant insights in days to come. But if you follow the advice contained herein, you won’t go too far wrong.

Hiawatha Bray (watha@monitortan.com). Reprinted with permission from www.monitortan.com.