The Luminaria Media Blog

If you follow PR through blogs, you might have run across these three posts in the last few days — What PR people should know about journalists, and this companion piece, and this response. I concur with Thomas Lee, who makes the point in the response post that good PR practitioners know how journalists operate and act accordingly. I also like that Lee points out how it’s a two-way street between journalists and PR people — we depend on each other to a large degree, especially in the current economic climate.

My latest round of befriending some of my favorite media contacts on Facebook reminds me how much I genuinely like the people I’m contacting. I’m certainly not the only PR person to have come through journalism school to get to PR. I’m watching the Seattle P-I’s struggles, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s recently-declared bankruptcy, and the #journchat tweets on Twitter with genuine concern. While I think it’s useful for PR practitioners to be mindful of the climate under which journalists and producers operate, and while I think online dialogues about them can be instructional for new PR practitioners, I find most of my contacts with journalists to be respectful exchanges between colleagues and even, in some instances, friends — all invested in a common goal of telling stories and providing information and insight.

I literally did PR at 70 miles an hour several weeks ago — driving over the Atchafalaya Swamp on I-10.

And from the parking lot of a Wendy’s somewhere in the middle of Louisiana.

And from a deck at one of my favorite Houston restaurants — which was unfortunately overlooking some rather loud construction, but the deck was big enough for my kids, who were stir-crazy and needed some good old fashioned running around and screaming time.

Part of this speaks to the amazing technology we can access in the name of keeping in touch with one another. I have a Blackberry, and without it, I couldn’t do PR in 2009. On my family’s trip back home from New Orleans — the Monday after Christmas — I was getting calls and e-mails and text messages about First Night Austin, the amazing New Year’s Eve event that allows more than 800 artists to wow 100,000 people in downtown Austin to celebrate the New Year and the arts.

In an earlier era, I would have been incommunicado for the length of that trip. Depending on what earlier era you’re talking about, calls or faxes or Usenet message boards would have been unattended as I drove home. The good news is the rules have changed. You’ve no doubt heard or even contemplated the pitfalls of being in Blackberry Nation — you’re never really “off” work, we’re addicted to information — but I’d much rather be where we are than back in the ’70s wearing out my dialing finger on a rotary phone.

As a PR practitioner, it’s great to have technology that makes information arrive instantaneously. It helped immensely leading up to First Night, and on the day of the event, it was a lifesaver more than once. (I’ve used walkie-talkies for event management before we all had cell phones, and believe me, I much prefer cell phones with text messaging ability.)

It’s not the easiest thing to coordinate interviews and generate coverage from a moving car, but I embrace any new innovation that allows me to connect media with good stories. Seeing this report about in-flight wireless makes me believe that sometime soon, I’ll be pitching journalists from a plane, and that will, even with the advances we’ve made up until now, completely blow my mind.

One of my friends and trusted PR confidantes, Cyndi Hughes, is currently director for the Writer’s League of Texas. Last month, I did a Book PR class there, talking to authors with book projects in various stages of completion, looking toward how they’d get word of their books out there. We’re talking about another class geared specifically toward what authors can do for themselves.

It’s a great topic. I encourage my clients to jump into social media to connect with new people and to strengthen ties with people who already know them. One of the tools I point them toward is Technorati — it’s a powerful resource for finding blogs around certain topics. Just yesterday, I was looking for Texas Travel blogs for a project I’m doing for the City of New Braunfels, and tracked down two excellent travel blogs now interested in letting their readers about Christmas in New Braunfels (which includes Schlitterbahn’s complete Winter Wonderlandification courtesy of more than one million lights, an ice skating rink, and a snow machine).

Blogs aren’t the mysterious entities they once were, but it’s still helpful to have a resource like Technorati available to figure out who’s covering what. And it’s a very easy, intuitive, and powerful tool to show clients who want to improve their social media (and overall PR) IQ.

One of my friends recently pointed me to a hilarious site called Cakewrecks, full of examples of “when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong.” It’s a really funny site. Then again, I find that store-bought cakes are kind of chuckle-worthy even when they turn out exactly as they’re supposed to.

My friend and colleague Jennifer Hill Robenalt, who has a great blog on PR and professional communication, once ordered a cake for a viewing party for the Survivor Season One Finale — you know, the season that brought rat-eating into casual conversation. Her conversation with the grocery store bakery went something like this: “Yes, I want a rat on it.” (Pause.) “Yes, I said a rat.” (Pause) “You know, like in Survivor?” The bakery worker was, of course, horrified that she was going to have to draw a big frosting rat on a cake, and had no idea why anyone would want that.

What’s funniest to me about the Cakewrecks site is the game of telephone quality to some of the cakes. There’s a miscommunication between the person ordering the cake and the person at the bakery, and the end result of that communication is committed to chocolate and sugar. This is my favorite one. As a bonus, “I want sprinkles” is a great catch-phrase — perfect for when you think you’ve been dealt an unfair hand and want to laugh it off.

As funny as it is, Cakewrecks offers a useful lesson for PR people about the media — you’re reliant on other people to transmit your message, and the responsibility falls to you to communicate that to the reporter or producer or host you’re working with. It’s good to remind yourself of that whenever you’re putting together a media advisory, or making a pitch, or as you’re coordinating with a client to make sure the website has pertinent information. Strive to make things as easy as possible for the media to transmit your information. Streamline. Read what you send out from a reporter’s point of view. And keep an eye out for social media press release templates — Shift Communications has a good one on PDF that you can easily track via Google. Though mainstream media is still used to seeing old-school press releases, with lead paragraphs containing the five Ws and spokesperson quotes embedded in paragraphs, I think there are some elements to a social media press release that are more user-friendly for the media than a standard release. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing some changes in the press release as we know it.

I was on a very interesting conference call last week set up by Peter Shankman, who is known in PR circles these days for his HARO (Help A Reporter Out) e-mail service. HARO is like Profnet in that it helps match PR people with media people looking for story sources, but it’s free and is a little sassier than Profnet. (And I mean that as a complement.)

The call featured a quartet of media people from high-profile news sources (think New York Times, AP), talking about what they liked and disliked about PR people. It reinforced some things we already know about media attitudes toward PR — they like us generally, they wouldn’t be half as informed without us, but we do some things that annoy them. We can be pushy. They really hate getting pitches on topics completely unrelated to what they cover. They can see when we’re calling them via the magic of Caller ID, and if we call them a lot, they tend to notice that. They obviously can’t get to every email, even though they’d like to respond. They all seemed to agree that if it’s been a week and they haven’t responded, it’s because they’re not interested in the story.

Principled PR practitioners know all this, but without hearing a “no” from a reporter or producer, we have to assume the answer is “maybe,” or we’ve sent them the rare e-mail that has fizzled into the ether before reaching its destination, or that they seemly have missed it in the barrage of e-mail they typically receive.

Why do we keep going until we hear the word “no?”

In a word: thoroughness. You want to honor your client. You have researched media outlets and media directories to come up with a list of people you believe will at least want to hear your pitch. You know that PR is sometimes beholden to the law of averages — many will hear the pitch and find it interesting, but only a few have the space and the editorial calendar and the gut feeling allowing them to move forward and transform your pitch into coverage.

I’m fine with “no.” I don’t take “no” personally. It’s disappointing to hear sometimes, especially when I see how happy my client and the media outlet would be together, but it’s part of the information I need to do my job efficiently — and perhaps more importantly, to help the media do its job efficiently.

I promise you that if I hear “no” on a story idea, I won’t come back tomorrow with some “fresh new angle” I didn’t think of earlier. I know that would land me in, as one of my colleagues coined it, the “bozo bin.” I don’t want to be there. No self-respecting PR person wants to be there.

It’s okay to tell me “no.” Of course, I’d prefer to hear “yes.” I’m even fine with “I’ll hang onto it and might use it later.” I’ll even believe you mean that! But hearing nothing is harder than hearing “no.”