Simplify Life

I recently attended one of our clients events called MediaConnect Kickstart. About 150 IT journalists, PR companies and presenting vendors got together for 3 days at the Hyatt Coolum in Queensland. The event covered future directions in the IT Industry. One of the sessions had some very interesting PR tips from the IT journalists on the panel. I’m sure some of these would translate well into blogging and other social and new media approaches. Here’s my notes:

1. Stories/articles seem to work better when you write for the mass audience and then finish the content with more advanced tips to give advanced users something.
2. Online components and multi-media components for stories/releases are really important. So consider providing content to journalists in light of this.
3. Readers often use the journalists article as a 3rd party check on a product before buying so it’s critical to get your message across properly to the journalists.
4. Look for an entertaining take on a product or service particularly if it’s a bit boring. This could mean the difference between getting a 3 paragraph versus 3 page of writeup.
5. Never send a journalist a large image file via email. They hate this! Load them to a server and link to the image in your email.
6. Good images will get prominence and are more likely to lead to coverage.
7. Products/Services won’t get into page content if there isn’t a “fun” or “better” element.
8. Don’t dumb down press releases. More is better, let the journalist filter. They never know when their editor will say “add another 80 words” to an article. If your press release isn’t detailed enough then the 80 words will go to another article.
9. Don’t waste journalists time on the phone, get to the point. Don’t take it personally if you get rushed as they may have deadlines.
10. Make your press releases easy to get. They can easily lose them given the quantity of inbound email they receive.
11. A deadline is a deadline. When a journalist says to get something to them quickly they really do mean right now!
12. Make sure you communicate price changes before they go to print if any. Magazines/websites can get lots of negative consumer feedback and inquiry if it’s wrong. That doesn’t help you and it really annoys them.
13. Editors will often hold back printing something if it’s not yet available to consumers except where reporting on a technology in a “future” type of article.
14. Exclusive and value add content will tend to get to the online version better than the print version.