Is there ever a convenient time?
This week, the PR industry was the subject of some feather ruffling, or as some would see it, a slap in the face, I see it as stating the obvious.
A campaign to introduce an unofficial bill of rights has been announced for journalists and bloggers, a set of guidelines, if you will, as to how PR professionals should approach and communicate with journalists. As expected, this has created a flurry of comments, tweets and gripes from the industry, some angry and some in agreement.
As announced in PR week, a number of high profile PR agencies are backing the campaign and quite rightly so, we pride ourselves on the relationships we develop with our press contacts, it is a mutually beneficial relationship, journalist’s need PR’s just as much as we need them.
Like with any relationship, it can have its up and downs, the one between PR’s and journalists has always been perceived as tenuous, from personal experience this is quite far from the truth. However, I would be naive to say I have never been on the receiving end of a polite ‘f*** off’. Sometimes people just have bad days.
The key to PR professionals building good working relationships with journalists is training; a junior level account executive will quite often find the thought of selling in to journalists terrifying and thus avoid any kind of verbal engagement, email is the less intimidating option and the one which more likely to clog up a journalists email and quite rightly annoy them. This is the where senior staff come in, a good agency knows that an excellent grounding in media relations works wonders for the confidence and skills of any PR professional, which is what PR’s need to build great working relationships with journalists.
Jayne is forever saying ‘just pick up the phone’ and miraculously it works, emails are useful yes, but by no means are they a way of getting the best coverage. Speak to a journalist, find out what they are working on, what interests them, if they are too busy to talk when is best to call back, the hard sell turns people off, don’t just assume that they will automatically want to use your press release, if they don’t want the particular piece you are selling in then offer solutions to any gaps they may have and always ask if it is ok to send a press release over.
Emails have revolutionised communication and it would seem, robbed us of our good old fashioned PR skills. As Orange famously said ‘It’s good to talk’…
05/02
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