Press and Public Relations Online

After the keynote address by Danny, the Thursday morning session at PubCon was the most challenging to me.  Unfortunately, there were three different sessions that I was really wanting to enjoy.  They were all going on at the same time.  So I found myself walking between the three of them an gaining some benefits from all of them.  I’ll blog about two of them.

The first was about Press and Public Relations online.  Here are some interesting comments from the panelists.

Half of all online users in June 2006 visited news sites online.  (I have no idea how they figured that out, but if it’s true, it’s interesting.)

Both PUSH and PULL PR is critical to good Press and Public Relations.

• PUSH PR includes wire services and pitching to journalists and bloggers.
• PULL PR includes news search aggregators and RSS fees for news.

You can pitch bloggers by looking at their previous posts to see what they are interested in and what they blog about.  Give them a similar comment and a link to the full article.  Offer them a simple blurb that they can post and videos and pictures.  This makes it very easy for them.

Be persistent when pitching bloggers.  Be as persistent as you would with a journalist and you’ll have greater success.

When working with journalists online keep in mind that 89% of journalists will accept email, but only 4% admit to using Google Alert or similar services to find what is happening.

Both journalists and bloggers love being the first to run a story.  Pitch to them before putting your release online and available to the public.  (Most do this for journalists, but forget to for bloggers.)

Yahoo News has editors (unlike Google News).  Most don’t know this.  They love advance access to stories and videos and will post them above other news.  Yahoo News is an incredible source for news.  It is very popular and the panelists mentioned that they get more visibility and traffic from it than CNN.com.

NOTE:  When the presentation was over, I asked the first question.  I wanted to know if they had any good examples of online pressrooms.  I wanted something to model after for my new site as well as my clients.

They recommended looking at AOL’s Pressroom, Magnum-Tech’s, and especially encouraged looking at a software called iPressroom to make one.

Good Recommendations.  Thanks!

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