PR Pitching Tips for NY Times Sunday Styles

 
If you heard my interview with DailyCandy.com Editor in Chief Dany Levy, you’ll probably also want to hear my latest podcast, which is an interview with New York Times Sunday Styles reporter Allen Salkin.

Allen shares his pet peeves about working with PR people, which magazines and TV shows he watches to keep abreast of style trends and why you better Google whatever it is you’re pitching before you contact him.

He also talked about how he uses the web to research and qualify stories his considering, how he feels about PR agency websites, and why distrusts a company’s Facebook page more than its online newsrooms. 

If that sounds interesting, I wrote a post about the strategic relationship between a company's online newsroom and their Facebook page you may also want to check out.

And if you’re using flash or PDFs in your online newsroom or in your website, Allen tells you why that’s a bad idea, and discusses why the first objective of your online newsroom is ease of use.

Please let me know what you think or who else you’d like me to interview in the future.

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Email Newsletter Tips from Daily Candy Editor Dany Levy

Email newsletters are among the most effective channels for online communications, because email is the only channel with a higher adoption rate than search, which is the second most popular online communication channel. As jazzed as we all are about Twitter and Facebook, email and search engines still have greater reach.

So if you’re curious about what it takes to publish a successful email newsletter, I spoke with DailyCandy.com Editor in Chief Dany Levy about the difference between writing for print versus writing for email newsletters, and she had some great advice, which I’ve summarize in this post, or you can hear her yourself by clicking on the preceding link .

According to Dany, here’s what it takes to publish a successful email newsletter:

• Short and to the point – As a writer, you’re up against huge attention deficits on the web. Keep it terse. Don’t waste the user’s time. Brevity is the name of the game.
  
• Relevant and entertaining – It isn’t enough to be informative. Reward the readers attention with compelling information that really matters to them, instead of you. Give them just the essential facts, and nothing more.
  
• Think before you link – If exclusivity is your edge, but you’re writing about websites and linking to them, it’s going to be tough to differentiate your email newsletter over time, because people can get to those sites from other sources as well. This is an interesting counterpoint to Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow’s assertion that $125 million dollar acquisition by Comcast by selling ads alongside ultra-hip, lifestyle email newsletters. And even today, while everyone else is focused on Twitter and Facebook, DailyCandy.com remains hugely profitable with a series of local and global email newsletter editions.
  

So if you’re under the impression that Twitter is wired and email is tired, think again.

Later on this week I’ll be releasing an interview with NY Times Sunday Styles reporter Allen Salkin, with PR pitching tips and information about what he expects to find in your online newsroom. You can subscribe via RSS or Twitter.

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PR Pitching Tips for DailyCandy.com

If you’re a public relations professional looking to score coverage with DailyCandy.com, I just uploaded an exclusive podcast interview with their Editor-in-Chief Dany Levy that you need to hear.

She talks about how she trend spots via international lifestyle news, says which two countries she watches closest and how she decides what to cover.  She goes on the record about the different editions she publishes, and what her editorial mission for each.  She also tells you which editions she needs to have a cool site to link to for.

Dany gives out her personal Twitter ID (which you’ll never be able to guess), the best email address to send your pitches to and talks about what makes a perfect DailyCandy pitch.  And as an added bonus, you’ll also find out where actress Scarlett Johansson lunches in L.A., and learn about the hot new lip gloss color from Chanel.

For those new media marketing buffs interested in advertising, Dany is joined in the interview by her CEO Pete Sheinbaum, who talks about DailyCandy’s advertiser attrition rate as well as their email open and click-through rates, measured against the internet advertising industry averages.

Please let me know if there’s anything you wish I’d asked that I didn’t.  I hope you find it interesting!

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Facebook Pages as Stepping Stones to Online Newsrooms

Facebook pages and online newsrooms are inherently unique communications channels, but they can be used together effectively. Facebook is a great place to “socialize” your brand. But it’s the wrong place to steward your organization’s public record. Here’s why:

Credibility - Your website is the only corporate communications channel *more* credible than a press release on a paid wire service, according to a study [PDF] by PR Week and PR Newswire. If it lives on your website, people are confident that it really comes from you. On a third-party site, the source can be questionable. It could be an unofficial page established by the community, rather than the official company line.

Conversion Leaks – Effective online communications are not just about getting the message out. They’re about leveraging information to drive measurable transactions. And it’s far more difficult to convert awareness into a measurable transaction on a third-party site. On your site, you control the user experience.

Check out this screenshot of the online newsroom iPressroom built for the LA Opera.

The podcast lives on their *own* site, increasing the likelihood that a listener can be converted to ticket holder. On a third party site, best practices like this are impossible. Furthermore, with newspapers and magazines going belly up weekly, using podcasts to drive traffic reinvents the value of PR against clicks instead of clicks, a strategically wise move as the influence of the fourth estate wanes.

Measurable Transactions - As you wade through the waters of online communications, ask yourself, “If my online PR efforts are successful, what measurable transaction will occur?” In this scenario, just getting the word out or building buzz isn’t enough. You have to actually define what impact that buzz will have on your bottom line.

Which is what makes online communications so liberating for PR professionals. For the first time, you’re not dependent on the news media to achieve results.

There’s no way to draw a straight line between a print news placement and sales, but if someone clicks through your Facebook page to your website and converts, there is. Think about how you’re going to leverage social media to engage constituents, generate word of mouth and build awareness. If they discover your website through those channels and click through, what measurable transaction will occur? Here are some realistic objectives:

Think of social media as the bread crumbs that lead the right people to your organization. These are the stepping stones that let you make your web presence discoverable, and they can be a powerful alternative to shotgun, interruption tactics like email blasts or wire releases. Here’s my social media channel map, to give you a visual on the steeping stones to choose from:

Each channel has its own unique characteristics and benefits. Facebook is where people discover and connect. So use your Facebook page to solidify your existing relationships, make new friends and participate in conversations that matter to your constituents. Use your Facebook page to socialize your brand.

Your own website, in the other hand, is where conversion activities will most likely occur. If you’re in public relations, this is where you can drive conversions through original content, like press releases, feature stories, blog posts, images and video. And more likely than not, that information will be hosted in the online newsroom section of your corporate site.

If you are interested in leveraging social networks for organizational communications, Facebook recently changed their page offerings for brands and business with enhanced functionality that lets organization engage more socially online. If you’re looking to strategically leverage Facebook for organizational communications, C.C. Chapman’s Advance Guard new media consultancy has a free white paper you should definitely check out.

If you’re in PR, corporate communications or marketing, what do you think? For organizational communications, is social media a means to an end, or an end itself?

Stepping Stones Photo by Paul Stevenson

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Online Newsroom Strategy with Integrated Social Media

With the understanding and acceptance that social media may be the menu, but your online press room is the meal, here's a simple diagram for how even the most risk averse organizations can migrate their public relations and/or corporate communications efforts onto the web with social media channel extensions.

For the most conservative organizations, the online press room might be deployed initially as a way of extending the reach of its conventional media relations activities onto its website. In this case, and least from the get go, the online press room might consist of a simple press release index with bios, fact sheets, images and other press materials that are searchable and embeddable.

To the extent that the organization is prepared to constructively advance online conversations, Twitter can be used as a channel to establish the organization's presence within an existing community. If the organization uses the microblogging service to distribute links, rather than to send those links to Twitter users who are asking for that information, followers of the organization's Twitter feed will probably grow slowly.

If the organization chooses to leverage YouTube as it's exclusive streaming video provided, it may be ill-equipped to translate views into measurable transactions, since online engagement or interactions are further away than if someone is viewing a video on the organization's website. Embed codes do not achieve this function either, since the video can be viewed on the organization's website, or on YouTube, rather than using YouTube as the menu, and the video on the organization's online press room as the meal.

Rather, organizational communicators can tap into the critical mass of viewership that exists on YouTube and better engage constituents online by leveraging the free streaming web 2.0 service with shorter, interstitial-type programming, designed to shore up viewers for longer-form video content on their own website.

Of course, online conversations happen in real time, so identifying a procedure that can become the basis of organizational policy for online engagement is critical, lest communicators provoke vibrant discussions in which they cannot actively participate.

In addition to helping organizations like Toyota, UCLA and Target design, deploy and manage online news rooms, I have helped many others, inclucing Johnson & Johnson, The Government of Singapore, the Environmental Defense Fund and City National Bank, understand and appreciate the subtleties of effective online PR to accelerate successful implementations through new media training and strategic planning.

Is your organization risk averse? How are you integrating social media into your public relations, corporate communications or marketing outreach efforts? I'm always looking for guests to interview for On the Record...Online so if you have a case study you'd like to discuss, leave a comment here and let me know about it. Sphere: Related Content

Social Networking Overtaking Email Claim Misleading, Researcher Says

It seems Nielsen had their fingers crossed when they released a report yesterday that claims “Social networks/blogs now 4th
most popular online category – ahead of personal e-mail.”

Adweek reporter Brian Morrissey ran with it in an article titled “Nielsen: Social Networking Overtakes E-mail in Popularity” which is how I found out about it.

But according to Trend Stream CEO Tom Smith, author of the popular Universal McCann study “When Did We Start Trusting Strangers [PDF]” – and featured guest in the next “On the Record…Online” podcast – the claim is misleading because the Nielsen study only measures webmail.

No desktop email or mobile email usage numbers are considered in the Nielsen numbers. Tom says he’s also skeptical of their definition of social networks, calling it “pretty broad.” You can download the Nielsen study and make up your own mind here [PDF].

“It's not trendy but I still think email is the most important, immediate and utilized communication and influence tool particular in the developed web markets such as US and UK,” said Tom in an email. “That said long term social networks will become core communication platforms to rival email. I just ran some research in the US on video sharing and the number one way to share videos was email, way ahead of social network distribution.”

I recently blogged that for organizational communicators, email is more important than Facebook, basing my opinion on Tom’s research that 99% of all active internet users rely on email daily, making it most popular online communications channel. What do you think? Is email still the most important online communications channel? And will it hold that status through 2009?

If you’d like to discuss this subject directly with Tom, he’s going present his latest social media research at the upcoming Digital Impact Conference in NYC April 30-May 1, which I’m co-chairing with Elizabeth Albrycht.

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Stop Tweeting and Start Emailing: Why Email Matters More than Twitter

I recently posted that I believe online newsrooms, search engine optimized press releases and email newsletters are more important to organizational communicators than Twitter and Facebook. Not that I believe Twitter and Facebook are unimportant. The Advance Guard just released a white paper on how organizations can leverage Facebook’s new fan page upgrades, and Twitter is emerging as a powerful discovery channel.

But if you look at the adoption rates -- and you have the ability to create content that is genuinely compelling to your key publics -- email still dwarfs other channels, particularly for business-to-business communications. With 99% of internet users citing daily use according to recent research [PDF], email is by far the most popular online delivery channel available.

In this post, I’ll drill down on best practices for email newsletter campaigns, which can be used to notify recipients about updates to an organization’s online newsroom, and to solidify relationships that may have been created in the physical world in the online space.

I’ve been researching marketing campaigns that rely on the online newsletter as a delivery vehicle. Most of the quantitative research I found was on MarketingSherpa.com, and excellent online resource, and to which I owe a huge debt of gratitude for this post.

There’s a good deal of free research available, but I have a paid account, which gives me access to premium research. After reviewing a series of research reports and case studies on what works and what doesn’t, here are my topline summary of my findings:

Good Content is Goal Number One – While many of the underlying design tenants can add incremental increases to the effectiveness of your email newsletter efforts, if the quality of the content isn’t truly useful to your key publics, best design practices alone won’t help you. “Article quality is far and away the biggest factor - good relevant stuff gets 100x the click through of marginal stuff, and weak stuff will be ignored,” says email marketing guru John Wall, host of Marketing Over Coffee.

Promos Don’t Always Work - Special offers aren’t always the answer. In fact, research shows that no offer campaigns often outperform sweepstakes and give-aways. Could it be that hard sales tactics are ineffective in world where people filter and consume only the information they want, anytime, any place, any where?

Be Careful with HTML - Content featured entirely in HTML gets blocked, especially by at work recipients. So use text-only promotional content including a spelled out, clickable URL instead of just HTML.

Viewing Occurs in the Preview Pane - Design for email client preview panes because 80% of at-work users decide what to open and what to delete through their Outlook preview panes. The same is true with 70% of consumers.

Design for the Upper Left-Hand Corner - When designing for the preview pane, keep in mind that the left hand column as always included, while the right hand column may be out of view. The challenge is that while left hand columns will be visible in the preview pane, heat map studies show that people tend to click on the upper right hand portion of the screen, so design your newsletter email template to make use of both.

Optimal Email Subject Line Length - There are three schools of thought on email subject line length. The first prefers subject lines under 45 words, since Hotmail and Gmail truncate anything longer. The second group says open rates increase with 50-80 character subject lines, as long it doesn’t fall in the 60-70 character range. The third, and in my opinion most reasonable school of thought is that the subject line length should be tailored to the campaign. If it’s promoting a specific call to action, keep it short. If it’s a newsletter, make it longer and tease the contents.

Design for Multiple Systems and Clients - Design your email newsletter templates to look good in a range of email systems. Set up test accounts in AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Roadrunner and Yahoo. And pull it down to a range of clients like Entourage, Outlook Express and Outlook 2003-2007. Tweak your email newsletter template as needed to make it look good in as many systems and clients as possible.

Design for the Mobile User - To help the mobile community derive value from email newsletters, feature a series of content related links above the banner so that Blackberry and other mobile users have something to click on with excessive scrolling.

Designing for Outlook 2007 – Here’s a list of email marketing design limitations that would very useful to any email newsletter template designer looking to build something that looks good in Outlook 2007. Bit a good rule of thumb is to keep your email template simple, and treat it as stepping stone to a landing page where you do they fancier coding.

Admin Links Below the Fold – The objective is not to make it difficult for recipients to opt out, white list or forward the email newsletter, but rather to invest the critical top left corner of the screen that is visible in the preview pane into teasing the content specific being sent.

Opt-in Form Design is Critical - If your newsletter is designed to generate leads, the formatting of your opt-in form is much more important than the creative, and single column forms work best. Also, keep in mind that phone number fields in opt-in forms always *crush* reply rates.

Of course, if you want all the details, you need to get yourself a MarketingSherpa.com premium access account, which is well worth every penny.

If you’re a public relations practitioner seeking an easy-to-use platform for managing your own, custom online newsroom with search engine optimization wizards and integrated email newsletter capabilities built in, tweet @chrisbechtel, email us at info@ipressroom.com or call +1-310-499-0544 ext 504 to schedule a live demo of the iPressroom online newsroom PR software package.

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Online Newsrooms: Why Ease of Use is a Strategic Imperative

Online newsrooms are the heart of effective online organizational communications, as I tweeted on #journchat last week.

Twitter and Facebook may be major arteries, but your online newsroom is where awareness is converted to measurable social, informational or ecommerce transactions with the least resistance.

But before you get mired in the muck and start thinking tactically about how to staff and manage an effective online newsroom, there are important strategic best practices to consider first.

In this post, I’m going to address one of the most important strategic best practices: ease-of-us.

Jakob Nielsen, "the guru of Web page usability" according to The New York Times, says there’s a correlation between the experience someone has in your online newsroom, and their perception of your brand, product or service.

If the in site search function in your online newsrooms is clumsy, if reporters have to fill out a request form to reach a media contact, or if your video plays with excessive buffering, users have a poor experience and your reputation suffers.

If you’re a PR person, and you’ve taken the time to create compelling press materials that are genuinely interesting and newsworthy, and someone goes to your online newsroom and can’t find it as easily as they can through Google, or they can’t watch your video cause it downloads too slow, the impression is one incompetency, and your reputation takes a hit before you even start communicating.

In the right hands, Blogger, YouTube, Flickr and Feedburner are tools for serving all formats of content, effectively and efficiently. But more often than not -- in the hands of someone with no experience designing interfaces that promote positive user experiences -- cobbling together a handful of Web 2.0 services is a recipe for a bad user experience.

Just to hammer that home, remember, if the user experience suffers, your organization’s reputation suffers. So if your job is reputation management, guaranteeing a positive user experience is task number one.

Before you hire anyone to design your online newsroom, look at the sites they’re designed for other organizations and make sure they’re easy-to-use and navigate. Make sure they’re seamlessly integrated into their host site. Make sure they’re aesthetically appealing. And make sure they demonstrate best practices.

Because if they don’t, you could wind up painting yourself into a corner with a vendor that doesn’t know how to create an interface that leads to a positive user experience.

Next, I’ll be blogging about another important strategic best practice for online newsrooms, and what you should look for from a PR software vendor pitching you on an online newsrooms solution.

Photo By: Spackle Toe

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Why Online Newsrooms, Search Engine Optimized Press Releases and Email Newsletters are the Steak, and Twitter and Facebook are the Sizzle

Online Newsrooms are the core of any effective organizational communications program. Other channels may extend reach and build influence, particularly for the individual, but there’s no where like your own website to convert awareness into measurable transactions.

The website is the single, most credible source for conveying company news, according to a survey of 1200 journalists [PDF] by PR Week and PR Newswire.  In fact, the only source considered more credible then an organization’s own online newsroom, is a third-party newswire service.

But if your online newsroom is the centerpiece of your external communications efforts, how do you get the right people to notice the news, photos and videos you’re posting?

Search engines are the number one way people source opinions on products, brands and services, according to Tom Smith’s report “When Did We Start Trusting Strangers [PDF].”  But what can you do to accelerate the process of getting your news in front of the people you’ve been previously informing through other channels?

That’s where email newsletters come in.  According to Tom’s study, 99% of internet users communicate via email, outstripping every other online channel from an adoption stand point.  And those same people cite email from a friend or colleague as the number two most common way they source opinions on products, brands and services.

So in terms of importance, online newsrooms, search and email and the first, second and third areas any organization looking to migrate their communications online should be focusing on.

So while Twitter, Facebook and social media releases get the PR digerati’s attention  -- and I am *very* excited about these channels too – I would argue that the research and adoption rates clearly show:

1. Online newsrooms
2. Email marketing
3. Search engine optimization

…are far more important starting points for public relations and corporate communications professionals looking to get their arms around online organizational communications.

You need an online newsroom you can manage content in yourself, because if you’re still relying on the web team down the hall, you are marginalizing your future, and your department’s future.

You need an easy way to search engine optimize press releases.  And you need a way to send out email newsletters to your house list as a way of building awareness for your online publishing efforts.

Over the next few days I’ll be posting about best practices for online newsrooms, press release SEO and email newsletters.

If you’re a marketing or public relations practitioner seeking an easy to use platform for managing your own, custom online newsroom with search engine optimization and integrated email newsletters, tweet @chrisbechtel, email us at info@ipressroom.com or call +1-310-499-0544.

Photo By: Pop of Photo

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