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

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

See how many fake Twitter followers someone has

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Social media allows anyone to look popular and credible. You can buy 5000 Twitter followers for $5 (or Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube friends) and this makes it difficult to see who you can really trust.

Fakers @ Status People is a tool to help. It lets you see how many fake Twitter followers someone has:

How to use Fakers to find out how many fake Twitter followers someone has

1. Sign in for free with your Twitter account

Click ‘Connect to Twitter’ to sign up for free

2. Click to authorise Fakers to login with your Twitter details

‘Authorise app’ to login to Fakers using your Twitter account. No Tweets shall be sent from your profile.

3. Wait as Fakers scans your own Twitter account to see how many fake followers you have

Watch a pretty blue spiral spin as Fakers calculates how many fake profiles you have following your Twitter account

4. Either sulk or celebrate your score

If you have a good score, share it to show off and boost credibility with your followers

5. Try someone else’s Twitter profile

Take a look at some other Twitter profiles – maybe people you follow or tend to recommend. Are they who they say they are?

Future of social media influence scores

Future social media influence scores such as Klout may take fake followers into account. There’s no reason why Fakers cannot share their APIs with third-party applications and make their fake-scanning technology available for all.

What does this mean?

Being found to have fake Twitter followers tinges your reputation. For example, Tim Ferriss above has 11% fake followers – that’s over 44,000 profiles.

Yet before rushing to judge, this does not mean he, or anyone else with a similar score, added these themselves. To look legitimate fake Twitter profiles follow real people. They also use computer bots to re-tweet real Twitter users. If a fake Twitter profile is trying to look like they’re interested in outsourcing, book publishing and lifestyle design, it’s only normal that they’d follow someone like Tim Ferriss who is an author on all those subjects.

Should I, or should I not buy fake Twitter followers?

Large Twitter followings do give instant credibility to onlookers, but not influence. You’ll be Tweeting to a wall. Best Twitter practice is to find real and relevant Twitter users and build your following slowly over time (read my eBook, Tom’s Twitter Blueprint).

I’ve bought thousands of fake followers, what should I do?

If you’ve already bought thousands of fake followers and want to reduce your risk of being caught out and receiving negative publicity, there are a number of options you can do:

1. Confess – Write a blog post outlining exactly what you did and why – you were experimenting with digital marketing to see what would happen. Describe the results (if they’re positive i.e. drove organic growth, then you were smart and it’s a win for you. If they’re negative and nothing happened, then say you’ve stopped and are sharing the insight to others – a win for you.) Now, if anyone does raise the fact, you can point them to your blog post and show them that it’s old news.

2. Reduce the proportion – Win real Twitter followers quickly by advertising on Twitter, engaging in popular #hashtag conversations and conducting large quantities of legitimate Twitter action.

3. Block your followers – You can block your fake followers (follow WikiHow instructions) one at a time. This might take a while.

4. Delete your account – Delete your Twitter account and start again.

In Marketing, Social Media digital communications, digital marketing, fake profiles, online influence, online marketing, public relations, Social Media, twitter

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

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

Behind the scenes of a new campaign I’ve been working on

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Behind the scenes of a new campaign I’ve been working on

Recently I’ve been working with the Industry Trust, increasing copyright awareness. You can read about the campaign here on The Drum, and watch behind-the-scenes of a photostunt we did with Gemma Atkinson.

Look out for the man with the flat cap! Video produced by Terry Church PR (my brother).

In Case Studies, Communication, Communication Is The Key, Marketing, Public Relations advertising, campaign, case study, communications, film, marketing, pr, public relations, tom church, video