Online PR Tips

In today's digital age, where people have access to a breadth and depth of information and news online, flashy, die cut press kits are largely a thing of the past. They continue to have value at trade shows and conferences, where reporters are often filing stories from laptop computers with small screen and slow internet access, because they can spread the contents about on a table and absurd more information in less time, but for the most part, the hard copy press kit is largely dead.

The key to a great press kit in today's age, is having an easy to use and navigate online press room that provides access to all the facts, figures, news and information happening at your organization on your website.

According to a recent PR Newswire and PR week survey the most credibility source of information for journalists online - more credible than even a third party newswire -- is that issuing organization's website. The horizontal menu bar of an organization's website has become its own digital masthead. Information published on an organization's website is considered the official company line; while information published on a third party website needs to be fact checked.

The key to a great press kit is the ability to upload their news and information to an online press room that can be easily updated and maintained, search engine optimized and socialized. By making your content searchable online, you expand your sphere of influence via the web to reach not just the media, but prospective customers, shareholders, investors and employees as well.

It may seem obvious, but the key to a great press release is highlighting what the most newsworthy aspect of your announcement, whether or not it's something you want to talk about.

You may be announcing a product that a community of activists find socially irresponsible, a new service that threatens a certain work force or a new brand that directly threatens an entrenched category leader.  Having the courage to acknowledge that aspect of the news in your release could the difference between actually getting people's attention and having a press release with so little news value, it never gets noticed.  

Putting your news in context against the larger trends of the day is the key to writing a great press release that gets noticed.  Writing a great press release in the digital age means drafting a search engine optimized press release with your keywords serving as hyperlinks to a landing page on your website that you'd like to increase the search rank for.  With more that 9.6 billion searches counted in 2007 in the US alone, connecting with people through natural search is among the greatest opportunities new media communications presents.

If you want to get the most effort out of any PR agency or freelancer, give them projects they can be successful executing.  If you're the client who's always making unrealistic demands, you're the one they're going to dread calling, and dread servicing.  What public relations practitioners despise is a client at a private company who says things like "My other agency got me so much more coverage than you do" or "the Wall Street Journal writes about this kind of stuff all the time" after distributing a press release about a new service or product offering that gets panned by mainstream media. 

The clients PR people die for are the ones who actually read the Journal and say "since we're not a public company and our product is unproven by the marketplace, let's steer clear of national dailies and focus on trade news outlets." 

They're also the PR agency clients who are most responsive when their PR account executive suggests soliciting client testimonials to ad legitimacy to their announcement.  The big difference between PR and advertising is that advertisers say good things about themselves, and PR people get others to say good things about them.

Contrary to what some may think, PR services are not about spin.  It's about articulating the real value your brand, product or service provides authentically and transparently.  A client who realizes this is the one that gets the most out their PR agency.