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Wonder what journalists think about you for spamming them with every poorly-written, unremarkable press release you can think of? Then check out Angry Journalist. It’s a bitch-and-moan site for the press which, nonetheless, can give you some insights into what they are so angry about. Check out this tidbit…

I have 400 emails and my inbox is yelling at me that i am over the size limit. Don’t send me your stupid emails with this: please see attached. Please see my delete button. And what about: I am calling to see how I might go about getting press for my company. Please call me at 555-1212. Please kiss my ass. Hire someone, preferably someone who doesn’t send the first type of emails. And don’t forget to visit our web site: http://www.angryjournalist.com. Screw you. We make it up anyway.

The latest disappointment from baseball comes with the release of the Mitchell report, which names names of alleged steroid users, including heretofore hall-of-famer-to-be Roger Clemens. Henceforth to be known as Clemens *. Baseball sure has problems. It’s boring, the players don’t resonate with the general public (aside from spoiled millionaires, but there aren’t enough spoiled millionaires to fill stadiums all summer), and now this… cheating through drug abuse rumored for years, with baseball doing essentially nothing about it. Compare that with professional cycling (which certainly has PR problems due to drug abuse)– cyclists are tested every time they win, randomly during training, and pretty much any time the powers-at-be get suspicious. How about baseball?

 It seems like a clean sweep is called for to get the public back on baseball’s side. Doesn’t the 12 step program begin with acknowledging you have a problem?

There are various types of PR and publicity stunts you can pull off to promote your product (although shutting down Boston with a terrorism scare probably shouldn’t be counted among these). But a good one, if well-designed and well-executed, can be running a contest. I’m working on something along these lines right now for one of my sites. I was glad to come across this post Blog Contest Tips which covers some good ideas on putting together a successful blog contest.

Public Relations (PR) should be a component of most any company’s marketing plan. Many companies overlook PR, perhaps because they don’t know how to pursue the press, or perhaps because they don’t think they are newsworthy. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, however (and good writing certainly can play a role in making the beholden more beautiful).

While the press you get from PR is free, the PR effort itself is not free. It’s either going to cost you time or money (to buy someone else’s time). But PR is valuable because the press is a disinterested, and thus trustworthy, source of information for many people. What the press says about you is taken much more at face value than what your ads say about you.

How to Write a Press Release lists a whole bunch of different activities and events which could warrant a press release. Some of my tips on the actual composition of the release:

• You need a great headline. It has to leap off the page and make the reader want to read more.
• Get to the point fast. Writers are busy, and don’t have time for your life’s story.
• Spell check. You are writing for an audience of professional writers. Don’t insult them with typos and misspellings.
• Keep it brief. One page should be adequate in most all instances.
• Provide your contact info, so someone can reach you to ask more questions if they wish.
• Post the release on your website. You went to all the trouble to write it, get it up on your site– you build out your site content, and also provide more info for all of your visitors.

One of the things I learned growing up was that you can’t pick your own nickname. In fact, any effort to do so will probably backfire when your friends turn it around on you. I had a friend who announced he wanted to be called Goldfish. Within 15 seconds he had been christened Buttfish, and it stuck for a few years.

In the same way, you can’t write your own PR, and you can’t control what people say about you. The best way to control what people say about you is to do good things. The sure-fire way to have it backfire is to demand that people say certain things about you.

Consider Cingular’s idiotic attempt to control how other sites choose to use hotlinks to its website. Cingular apparently had a team of web-ignorant lawyers put together a policy that a) you’re only allowed to link to the home page, b) Cingular can ‘revoke’ your ‘limited right’ to link to its site at any time, and c) you can’t portray Cingular in a derogatory manner.

The sure-fire result of this silliness is web posts tooling on Cingular filled with hot links using keywords such as Cingular Sucks. For example:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070503/095003.shtml

You would think Cingular would perhaps instead concentrate on operating a good business and maybe establishing customer friendly policies which would cause its customers to WANT to say positive things. It sure worked for Apple.

What goes up comes down. Taking a little shine off the apple. I’m just about ready to start writing headlines for the Daily Show, aren’t I?

In any case, even anointed holy ones like Apple occasionally take some flack:

 Greenpeace takes issue with Apple’s environmental policies.

On a lighter note, The Best Page In The Universe would like to tell you about One thing PC users can do that Mac users can’t.

 I spend a good part of the weekend writing and sending out a press release. As often happens, I got side-tracked into thinking about what I was doing, why I was doing it, and whether it was worth the effort.

Whereas the press release used to be primarily aimed at the press, these days it has numerous purposes:

• promote to the press, in hopes of getting some ink (actual or virtual)
• web site promotion - anywhere the release appears online with a link back to your site, it (in theory) increases your site’s significance and raises your search engine profile
• promote to customers and vendors all of the wonderful things you are doing

These various goals lead to a somewhat contradictory task for the PR person. Journalists want facts. Websites want keywords. Customers want the fluff (well, perhaps they don’t want it, but it’s going to influence their opinion). So how do you capture all of that in one page?

It turns out a few people are agitating for change. Check out the article Die Press release! Die! Die! Die! by Tom Forenski. He maintains that it’s time to change the whole nature of the press release.

Another article from a few weeks ago, Social Media Killed the Press Release Star, Brian Solis promotes the Social Media Press Release, something I had never heard of until now. We’ll look into that in near future. But he also suggests that you recognize the 3 different audiences for a press release, and respond appropriately by writing 3 different releases, each one aimed at the specific target. A just-the-facts version for journalists, a keyword-laden version for the search engine spiders, and the customer-targeted version for your customers.

A third post titled Long Tail PR: how to do publicity without a press release (or the press) has another interesting approach– recognize that journalists don’t want to talk to the PR flack. They want to talk to the cool people who are creating the interesting products and services that the release is being written about. So make them available– but first, recognize that many of these people may not be well-suited to speak to the media. (I can’t imagine that being true of any engineers or programmers I know). In this view, the role of the PR guy becomes to teach and train internal people how to deal with the press.

It’s all interesting food for thought, especially if you’re one of those people throwing buckets of money into PR, and wondering if there might be a way you could get a better return on your investment.