The Luminaria Media Blog

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.”

Yesterday’s Austin Business Journal included an article on the future of PR in Austin during these unsure economic times. It led with a quote from Melissa Anthony — one of the first PR professionals I met upon my return to Austin two years ago — who said her clients saw this as an opportunity to gain market share.

Obviously, that’s exactly the kind of attitude we PR people hope for clients to have. When I worked with Dave Beck from Frost Bank during my six years in San Antonio, he’d talk about the importance of recognizing business cycles. When you’re in an up cycle, he’d say, you want to make sure you’re saving money to prepare for the next downturn. And when you find yourself in a downturn, that’s the time you most need to let people know about your business.

The ABJ article goes on to talk about the cost-effectiveness of PR compared to advertising, citing some of my other PR colleagues in town. I do think the article misses a key point about PR, though — it’s truly at its most cost-effective when there’s strategy involved.

When you’re building a PR plan, you should let your PR team know your wish list of where you’d like to be covered. That leads to some key questions: Who is your audience? Who are the potential new customers you’re trying to reach? What are the needs of those customers being met by your products and services?

And then that should lead to your strategy: Who will you try to reach? Which people at which media outlets will be most receptive to your story? What are all the stories connected to your company and your products or services? How does your company relate to what’s happening in the world right now?

For PR to work effectively, it needs to be integrated with everything the company’s doing as well as what’s happening around it. The rules for PR don’t change during tough economic times, but the storylines certainly do. Think about how you can demonstrate you bring value to customers when they’re looking for that. Think about how you meet an essential need or provide a much-needed reward when people are looking to cut what they feel are unnecessary expenses. And no matter where you’re at in the cycle, think about what makes you different and better than your competitors.