Archives For Public Relations

Read examples of press releases and learn how to write for the media

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Easier.com is a news site of press releases. A great place to read examples.

Want to learn how to write a press release?

Quick tip: visit Easier.com.

It’s a news site solely made up of press releases. Whilst each press release does go through a light editorial process, the team behind the website do not write anything themselves (as far as I’m aware).

However, this does not mean press releases on here are necessarily good! Best practice is to find one you think is interesting, and copy some text to see if it got picked up anywhere else.

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In Communication Is The Key, Public Relations communications, marketing, media, pr, press, public relations, writing

Spying on competitors

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What does Tyrion from Game of Thrones and small companies have in common? They’re, well, small. But what does Tyrion do extremely well that small companies ought to? He watches his enemies closely and employs spies to understand their relationships.

Duedil is a free tool you need to try. Type in a company name. Read their financials. Learn who owns what. Look at the relationships between companies:

Become Tyrion and understand exactly what’s going on in your market. Is your competitor hiring or firing? Does your investor have interests in other companies too? How big is your market? Who just bought who?

Use it for research, use it to inform strategies, use it to win.

After all, this is a game of thrones.

Media Coverage of Game of Thrones (May 2012 – Apr 2013)

In Opinion, Public Relations

What makes a good story? Learn from those that get paid to write them

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Press Association is a press agency. They find, write, and sell stories. A good place to go to learn what makes a good one.

Do you want to anger a journalist and have them slag you off or worse, ignore you? No. So don’t send them a shabby email in desperate hope of getting coverage. Understand this: most journalists don’t want to know about your product or company. And they certainly don’t want to know about you. Most journalists want stories. And that’s what you give them.

How? Learn what makes a story. Surprisingly, to some, it isn’t their product, business, or personality. Good stories make people excited, angry or sad. Does your product, business, or personality do that? Probably not. But you can create a story and be attached to that.

I’m going to tell you a way to learn what makes a good story. Read news published by press agencies.

Press agencies are companies that find news, write them up, and then sell them to the major media outlets. Because they sell them, they are more picky than media outlets themselves. Stories published by press agencies are examples of what makes a particularly good story. Therefore, we can learn from them.

Normally, you have to be a registered journalist to see the stories written and shared by press agencies on what they call the ‘news wire’. But a little trick is to take a look at their Twitter feeds. Most of the links shared are their own articles that they have sold to media outlets.

Learn what makes a good story by reading articles from the Twitter feeds of some press agencies below:

Learn from Press Association

Learn from Solent News

In Public Relations pr, public relations

PR Case Study: How this company gained over 500,000 downloads in 19 months and was bought by Yahoo! for £18 million

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Summly

Public Relations (PR) helps start-ups grow. But how much? I speak with many entrepreneurs and start-up businesses who say they are unsure what PR can do for them. It sounds wishy-washy. Social media is the fast track to success, right? Wrong.

Download PR Case Study

I have written a case study showing the effects of successful PR. The company is Summly. Summly was an application launched in 2011, sold to Yahoo! 19 months later for £18 million. Summly has been downloaded over 500,000 times and this case study looks at the PR efforts which helped make that happen.

Download it, share it, and let me know your thoughts!

In Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media communications, entrepreneurship, journalism, marketing, media, public relations, start up, startups

Introduction to The Guardian Witness

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The Guardian Witness is a big step in citizen journalism. Free publicity awaits.

The Guardian Witness is a new platform from The Guardian (monthly online visitors: 77,931,138) opening journalism to the world. News, photographs, videos and comments are submitted by the public, or ‘contributors’ to a dozen ‘assignments’.

Assignments are given on the home page, inviting contributors to respond to the brief. For example:

Guardian Witness invites London Marathon runners to talk about who they’re supporting

Contributions include photographs, one liners and videos:

You can see here that Adam in the video above is running for Children with Cancer UK – a cause for which he has gained free publicity and raised its awareness by creating this 30 second video and submitting it to Guardian Witness.

Whilst you cannot simply publish anything i.e. it’s not a PR free-for-all, and it does seem submissions are reviewed before they go live, Guardian Witness is an opportunity to get some press coverage.

Some PR associates of mine, for instance, submitted photos of The Shard in London to the assignment Views Of Tall Buildings (they manage the reputation of The Shard and try to increase footfall to the area).

Indirect contributions may also be beneficial to your business. You do not have to say the name of your company to raise awareness of it. For instance, say you’re a pharmacist commenting on national health service reforms, and you put forth the argument that pharmacists have a greater role to play – this could still drive awareness to your business without saying the company name.

Guardian Witness is an opportunity for startups, entrepreneurs, SMEs, sole traders and joe the plumber to be smart and get some free press coverage. It may even be possible to media hack it and submit an assignment idea that gets chosen for you to answer yourself.

And it’s more than likely that popular assignments with good contributors will make it into the main Guardian site and paper.

In Marketing, Public Relations, startups citizen journalism, digital content, digital pr, guardian, journalism, marketing, newspaper, pr, public relations, publicity

How to find journalist contact details

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Journalisted.com is a fantastic search tool helping you to find journalist contact details.

Journalisted is a search engine for journalists

Search the name of the journalist and any matches are returned. Once you click through, it’ll show you profile information such as recent articles, biography and contact details (where possible).

You can see how many articles the journalist wrote across the year with other information such as word counts

Recent articles from the journalist is displayed, alongside a biography and contact information

Knowing how to contact journalists is important. What Journalisted won’t do however, is show you which journalists to contact – that’s for you to research.

You can decide which journalists to contact by reading relevant articles to your business. Whether it’s in the national papers, a weekly magazine or blog, note the journalist’s name and try finding their details on Journalisted.

Over time, you should create a ‘media list’; a top group of journalists that you know are relevant to you, and could potentially be people you can go to when you want to start achieving some press coverage.

In Public Relations communications, contact, journalism, journalist, marketing, pr, public relations, startup PR

Make information simple.

Communicate complicated issues simply and power will be rewarded, for example The Guardian’s wonderfully adept data blog.

Above, the image describes the UK deficit over the last 33 years. You can see what’s happened and who was responsible. One image turns what could have been a very long history lesson into an instant, tweetable story.

Two million people read The Sun every day for the same reason. Journalists there excel at transforming a very complicated story into one attention-grabbing, succinct headline. Within the industry, The Sun journalists are highly respected.

You need to do the same with your business. Describe the main value proposition in one sentence:

Share a car to reduce commuting costs
Auto-find the best price
Easy bookkeeping
Never run out of toilet roll again
Any film, anywhere
Wine tasting, delivered

It doesn’t matter if your business also does many other things. Focus on one. Procter & Gamble don’t write,

Fairy Liquid: Good for cleaning. But we also do Gilette razors, Old Spice aftershave, Duracell batteries, Tampax and Pampers.

They create a brand a focus on one position. That’s it.

Explain it in one sentence. It’s not the consumer’s fault if they don’t ‘get it’. It’s yours for either timing it wrong, or communicating badly. Have a look at The Guardian’s data blog and learn how they turn big issues into compelling images. Then try it for yourself.

Posted on In Communication Is The Key, Entrepreneurship, Public Relations, Speaking advertising, branding, communications, information, messaging, narrative, positioning, strategy, tag lines

Words sell. Write them.

Words sell. Chosen carefully, these little things you are reading now can grow a business and earn you money.

Articles, newsletters, status updates, direct mail, leaflets, advertisements, taglines, brand names; they all consist of words. We are influenced and swayed by what we read and hear; so writers and speakers have power.

Sentence structure, paragraph length and syllables may sound like a yawn, but they are your tools. Psychological tricks also exist such as hyperlinking statements to make them seem like facts and, as Professor Martin Hickman, Standford University said, ‘use quotes from experts, doctors and professors to add credibility’ – even if it’s made up like this one is.

When writing your next blog post, status update and article, stop and ask yourself three questions:

Why am I writing this?
How can I be more concise and influential?
Have I included a call to action?

Posted on In Communication Is The Key, Opinion, Public Relations, Speaking advertising, copywriter, copywriting, influence, marketing, public relations

Tech City Journalists

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Are you a new technology firm in the UK?

Wouldn’t it be great if you had the contact details of all the tech city journalists? Even better, SME journalists too? How about both technology and SME journalists in the UK and internationally?

All of this information is available for free online if you look hard enough, and use tools such as journalisted.

But there’s no point in you repeating work I’ve already done, so click the bright orange button to download a media list of all technology, SME journalists, and more.

Download Now

Disclaimer - All information was publicly available online. The information is intended for personal use only. Please be sensible when contacting journalists and do not send spam. Please read this set of PR ethics.

In Public Relations contact details, journalists, marketing, pr, press release, public relations, Social Media, tech city

You are the future media

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There was a time when news was local. Every village and town had their own local paper, and people would read local stories. Then the papers got bought up, dismantled, merged or left to die by some bigger fish, and people began to read national stories from national papers.

But it’s difficult to write a story for which the entire country will find interesting. Instead of writing facts, journalists had to write for emotions (things we all share): Fear, excitement, or sympathy. This meant that businesses and individuals with interesting facts to share couldn’t get a wedge in sideways (without the help of a PR who would dress it up).

Now, however, that’s all changing and coming back around thanks to (yup, you guessed it) the internet. People can find their chosen interest online and ignore everything else. They can choose a category, then a sub-category, then a sub-sub-category, or an individual journalist and read only that (with ease).

Furthermore, news outlets online don’t have limits. They aren’t constrained by printing costs or page numbers. On the contrary, more is better, and so now they’re starting to allow anyone to contribute. The more contribution, the more content, the more content, the more traffic (in theory), the more traffic, the more advertising revenues.

This is entirely in our (the business, entrepreneur, individual’s) favour. We, the lonesome warrior sitting at home, can finally share our news again with our local community.

Anyone can contribute to Yahoo! Voices (featured authors get their articles published on the main news site), MSN Social Voices, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Forbes (almost), BuzzFeed, CNN, Science Daily and more. More outlets will open up soon, it’s just a question of when and how.

Some news outlets such as The Guardian invite their top commenters to write for them.

In Communication Is The Key, Public Relations citizen journalism, globalisation, individual, media, news, newspaper, open source, public relations