Francis Moran & Associates — We bring technology to market

By Danny Sullivan

After reading the recently unveiled 101 Dumbest Moments in Business of 2007, assembled by the recently defunct Business 2.0 Magazine, I was struck by the thought that most of the events likely resulted in extensive hair loss for the PR folk involved.

Crisis management is a core competency of any decent PR firm, but I’ll be surprised if you can find many folk out there who actually enjoy that particular component of their work.

Most of the events described in the list probably had the same effect on the respective PR departments as dropping a tube of mentos into a bottle of Coke. A panic explosion. Emergency meetings to decide what kind of spin to place on the situation to fix things… herds of flacks running around shouting on phones… that sort of thing.

But the mad panic usually isn’t worth the blood, sweat or tears. The media froth around an issue will almost always disappear in fairly short order (unless it appears again in these end of year lists) and the best way to handle the short term frenzy is to treat it calmly and honestly. If a business blunder has truly been committed, then it’s best to face up to things and draw a line under the matter.

Far better to spend your time discussing what approach should be taken after the storm has passed than pulling out hair trying to influence the immediate situation.

Still, I hope 2008 is a crisis-free year for me, and I hope it is for you too. Happy holidays!

Technorati Tags: crisis communications, public relations, PR, media relations

By Jill Pyle

Every business has a story to tell and every story has some level of news value. Some stories are of interest to a large number of media, while others appeal only to a limited group. Determining which set of media should be interested in your story is a job best handled by an experienced public relations practitioner. Above and beyond developing a media list, any practitioner worthy of your business should be able to identify the set of media that have the potential to move your market and push forward business objectives.

With the launch of each new client and product, there are several types of media outlets a public relations agency might consider targeting. There are trade magazines, consumer magazines, local newspapers, national newspapers, web sites and blogs, to name a few. And for each type of media outlet, there is a wealth of publications and a plethora of writers and editors.

Specializing in public relations for high tech B2B companies, we usually rank trade magazines at the top of our media lists. So what exactly are trade magazines? Well, they’re the exact opposite of consumer magazines. They are magazines that often are an authoritative resource for business managers and employees who work in a specific field. They cover industry trends, include case studies, profile new products and highlight industry leaders.

There are two kinds of trade magazines, vertical and horizontal. An example of a vertical trade publication is the National Locksmith, which exclusively covers issues that are relevant to locksmiths and professionals concerned with physical security. Unlike vertical trade magazines that focus on a specific topic, horizontal trade magazines cover a broader topic area, usually attracting a larger audience. eWeek is a horizontal trade publication, appealing to the large audience of IT professionals, corporate managers and technology enthusiasts.

With the audience for many vertical trade magazines numbering 10,000 or fewer, keep in mind that it’s the quality of the audience that matters. Findings from a recent Forrester study noted that 40%-45% of purchasing decision makers rely on traditional industry-specific media to validate their purchase decisions, which is why trade magazines often rank as top tier targets for many of our clients public relations programs.

Technorati Tags: trade publications, trade media, trade magazines, public relations, media relations, PR, media list

By Francis Moran

I could subtitle this, A newbie’s excellent adventure in blogging. Read on.

A week or so back, I reluctantly waded into the increasingly acrimonious battle being waged by some bloggers against the worst of the pitches they receive from PR folk, a contest that even the most mainstream of media are characterizing as a war. I believe it’s really a phony war given that competent practitioners on both sides of the PR-journalism fault line understand and appreciate what the others do, and know how to create value from the necessary relationship between us.

In my post, I cheered the bloggers who were naming and shaming the wretched. This caused my colleague, Gillian Brouse, to comment that, while she generally agreed with my sentiment, she was thankful such bloggers were not around in her misguided youth to call her out on the mistakes she made. Then, late last week, she drew my attention to what she called a “particularly egregious” example of a horrible pitch. I’m not going to provide the link here; if you really want to see it, you’ll be motivated to find Gillian’s comment and get the link there.

I’m not providing the link because my intent here is not to dump more opprobrium on the poor flack who was called out. I’m writing this update to share with you what happened when I posted a comment on that site, mainly in response to the many defensive comments it received from other bloggers and, especially, from PR practitioners who felt slamming bad PR was, to quote one of them, like “shooting fish in a barrel.” I wrote,

We’ve been commenting a bit on this whole hacks-versus-flacks thing our own blog, wwww.inmedialog.com, and one of our readers pointed to this, what she called a ” particularly egregious” example of the worst of PR practices. Some of our comments, and yours, wonder how fair it is for bloggers to pick on such easy targets. As a practitioner for 20 years, I say, “Bring it on.” Like the jackal who actually does the shepherd a favour by culling the weakest from the herd, having bloggers name and shame these poor practitioners will only make the PR species stronger.
BTW: Poor Tom Biro has missed the boat. This wasn’t a case of a “blog pitch gone bad.” This was malpractice from the first cut-and-paste. It was engineered from the outset to be a disaster.

As soon as I hit “Submit,” I had a momentary pang of concern that I had gone too far, especially in naming Tom Biro, the unfortunate flack’s boss, whose internal email addressing the problem had also been outed by the blog site. I’m very new to blogging and while I most certainly don’t want to pull my punches, I also don’t want to insult people or start flame wars.

So imagine my consternation when, the following morning, my Inbox told me I had an email from Tom! I expected a broadside of invective from him, or, at least, a mumbling defense of how his person had been mistreated, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Well, my hat is off to Tom. He wrote me a gracious and sporting email that made no excuses and actually thanked me for weighing in. “I completely take your comments to heart,” Tom wrote, adding, “I appreciate your chiming in and criticism of this situation, and this is yet another reason why I’m so strident into bringing much closer the way that solid media relations is supposed to work.”

And then, bless him, he graced us with a marvelous compliment. “Thanks for adding some actual value to this discussion, and now I’ve got another blog to keep an eye on by people who take their world very seriously.”

It confirmed my conviction that strong opinions about best practices in PR will find a receptive audience and that the blogosphere can be a forum for effective and considered debate of these issues.

Technorati Tags: hacks vs. flacks war, public relations, PR, media relations, blogger relations, pitching, bad pitches, Tom Biro