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PRobecast #150: Privacy problems for all

March 23rd, 2012 by

Happy PRobecast Milestone! Justin Martell, Caitlin Smith, Josh DeStefano, and Amanda King all joined me this week.

We  organized our discussion in a slightly different way today, in light of the story going around this week about employers asking for Facebook passwords. We’ll talk about privacy: what’s right and what crosses the line? How do we convey that information to those who will drive the trend? What if you actually provide your password – what happens to your friends’ or followers’ privacy?

We’ll discuss the Facebook passwords story, plus the app “Highlight”, which allows you to search for information about a person near you (location-based, of course).

Our PRobecast PR Power Ranker of the week was the Facebook story, to no one’s surprise. It affects all of us, but if just one person gives up a password, it opens all of his or her friends to the interviewer’s inspection as well. Besides, do you really want to hire someone who so willingly defies T’s and C’s? :)

 

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Category: PR, PRobecast | No Comments »

Friday press releases?? Say what!?

March 22nd, 2012 by

Pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch. That’s all I seem to do some days. I’m certain that many of my colleagues in PR will empathize with me. Not everyone loves to pitch stories, but it suits me just fine, thanks.

What I’m also positive of is the barriers to securing great coverage for our clients can be extremely daunting. Because even if your pitches are always spot-on, we all have days where even the best press release doesn’t get the type of coverage we hoped for. It’s always disappointing but that is the ebb and flow of PR.

Many in PR will agree that it’s standard procedure to issue press releases on Tuesdays through Thursdays. But while this strategy works sometimes, it also creates a glut of news and reporters are feeling the pain. This is a significant problem when agencies and corporate PR departments are jamming thousands of releases into a three day period.

I was recently confronted with this very scenario when pitching a release that was – you guessed it – issued on a Tuesday. In the course of my press outreach, I got into a conversation with one of my favorite technology contacts about how many releases he is receiving Tuesday through Friday.

Why not, he suggested, try something different and release announcements on Mondays or Fridays instead??

My first thought was, okay Monday makes perfect sense.

But announce news on a Friday?? What value would that bring to my client?

But after giving it some thought, I realized that I was initially thinking with my 2005 brain, before the advent of tools like Twitter and Paper.li.

Before these social tools were invented, a press release’s life was very limited. It would sit in an editor’s email in box for maybe a month or two before the article was written and published in the printed version of the magazine perhaps three or four months after that.

Today, once a story is out it goes viral on Twitter and on other sites, reaching more people than we could ever have imagined just five or six years ago.

This reminds me of an old story I first heard when I was selling TV spots in the 1990’s. It’s the “pan’s only this big” theory. The abridged version: Why do you keep doing the same thing, especially if it it’s not working?

In other words, maybe it’s time to try something new. Go wild and crazy. Issue a release on a Friday. Maybe not your client’s most important piece of news they’ve ever announced. But take a chance with a less sensitive piece of news and see what happens. You never know — you might end up finding many of your press and blogger contacts don’t have any big news to cover that day. And your client’s announce might just be exactly what they were looking for!!

Have you done something unconventional lately with your press release that’s garnered significant coverage? Please share your thoughts here!

Category: Media Relations, Messaging & Positioning, PR, Tips & Tricks | 2 Comments »

‘Kony 2012′: Genius or Disaster?

March 19th, 2012 by

Kony 2012: It was everywhere – every news feed, every status update, every blog and publication and news outlet. In fact, if you haven’t heard of this phenomenon, I suggest you crawl out from the rock you’ve been living under and join the 21st century.

The ‘Kony 2012’ video was created by the organization Invisible Children to raise awareness about the atrocities committed by the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony in an effort to help bring him to justice. The video was posted last week and received 100 million views in just six days, making ‘Kony 2012’ a bigger media sensation than Susan Boyle’s performance on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’.

The new epitome of viral video, ‘Kony 2012’ is not only a supremely compelling documentary, but also an incredibly interesting case study from a PR perspective. To start, the ubiquity of the video over the past week has been phenomenal. It spread through social media as well as traditional media outlets like nothing we’ve seen before. But how did it become such an event? It’s not as though Kony’s story is breaking news, and there have certainly been equally horrendous atrocities documented across the globe, but for some reason this particular video, among thousands of videos with similar content, really resonated with people. But again, why? What is it that makes a video become viral?

I have a somewhat cynical theory that relates the popularity of the Kony video to the Tom’s Shoes fad – it’s a great way for Americans to feel good about themselves while being trendy without actually having to really do anything. I suppose it’s a sad commentary on American lifestyle, but hey, it got the message out there.

Which brings me to my next point: yes, the video was a “clickable moment” and spurred countless donations and purchases. However, how much action will the video actually prompt? Will it actually help the cause? Will Joseph Kony be arrested and prosecuted based on the strides taken by Invisible Children? Unfortunately, its seems like due to poor PR on behalf of Invisible Children, the popularity of ‘Kony 2012’ could actually hinder efforts already underway. As soon as the video went viral so did the criticisms of Invisible Children’s background. Rumors circulated about the organization’s funding and leadership, and a great deal of controversy began to envelop the message they were trying to communicate. Only recently, one of the co-founders, Jason Russell was arrested under unseemly circumstances, which is, again, creating buzz and ink for ‘Kony 2012’ but doing nothing to help the cause.

This, in turn, illustrates one of the problems with receiving news through social media. It seems as though if the content is scandalous, shocking, or moving enough and there is sufficient hype around the story, people don’t really consider the source of the news. People tend to take in the information at face value without considering that there is no “gate keeper” or publisher or editor that makes judgment calls about the news we read. It is completely unfiltered and we are left to deem for ourselves what is valid information and what is not.

Overall, I think ‘Kony 2012’ delivers an important message about an important topic. It raises awareness about a serious global issue and was able to permeate the social web with unprecedented speed and reach. But the fact is, the public relations and personal issues of the Invisible Children may have hindered any positive attention that the viral video had attained for the cause. I’m still on the fence about whether the adage is true – is there really no such thing as bad press? All of the negative publicity may be keeping ‘Kony 2012’ in the news, but is it productive?

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Category: Messaging & Positioning, News & Commentary, Politics, PR | 1 Comment »