| RSS and press feeds |
[Jan. 18th, 2005|10:58 am] |
Charles Arthur recommends that PR people distribute their information via RSS feeds. I've been trying to get people to do this for a while, but with limited success. Charles mentions a PR person who asked him what RSS was, which is a fair question for most people to ask. But I was asked what XML was (RSS is a form of XML), by the internal PR person for a web services company, for chrissakes. That's pretty inexcusable, because web services companies build their software on XML.
Anyway, I was just having a chat with a PR buddy of mine, Mike Osborne, from Fishburn Hedges. Mike is too shy to have a blog, but he should do, because he's a very imaginative guy with a real love of his subject (in his case, intellectual property and law). He managed to fold philosophy and history and legal expertise into a conversation we had about a potential interviewee for something I'm working on - and the interviewee isn't even a client of his. He used to do PR for the company in question, (and I suspect that it would benefit from re-enlisting his services). It's refreshing to chat to someone who really understands the topic and I came away with some useful insights. That's not something I can say about every pitch.
Anyway, we got onto the subject of press releases and he inadvertently came up with a case against RSS releases. One of the problems with press releases - and ones from US firms in particular, is that they're full of waffle, often at the top of the release, managing to bury the scant useful detail somewhere in the middle. They're often way too long, and the marketing speak drowns out the interesting part of the announcement (sometimes the waffle is there to disguise the fact that there isn't an interesting part of the announcement, of course, and there's nothing that the poor person tasked with writing the release can do about that).
Often, the quality of the release isn't the agency's fault. I know people who have been forced to send out this drivel by US clients and forbidden to change any of it or delete the waffle. What Mike and a select few other PR people do is to send the release, with their own comments in the email as an introduction. IE: "Dear Dan, here's a release for you. The basic message is X and I thought you might be interested because of Y."
For the poor overworked journo wading through mountains of dross each day, this is a great way to cut to the chase and get the gist of the story. It also gives the PR person the chance to put their own personal mark on the release and establish better contact with the journo. It doesn't even have to be customised for each journo. Just adding their own spin on things would be enough to set them apart from the crowd. This would be the thing that would make me call the PR executive up for a chat or send back an email with some questions.
You can't do that with RSS very easily, because the client will generally want the feed to contain the vanilla release, and nothing else. Charles will doubtless say that it's the journalist's job to do this for themselves, and it's true, but getting that additional input from the PR person is a good point of departure for a longer conversation, and I'd prefer that over an RSS feed any day.
But RSS is an efficient way to do things, so what's a good compromise? Rely on RSS for all press releases but then have the PR folks mail selected journalists with their own take on the most important relevant stuff and then refer the journo to a permalink to highlight the story. If the PR dept was really smart (and had a smart client willing to play ball), they might also point me to a business blog post written by an executive for the firm who also has their own viewpoint. That's assuming that they can persuade their executives to blog, of course.
Looking through the press releases I received over the last few days, hardly anyone went beyond sending out the waffle-ensconsed, vanilla release. There was no personal touch, no individual angle. Perhaps people are too busy, or don't really have any insights into their own client's announcements, or just don't feel that they're particularly interesting. One thing's for sure though - I'll remember Mike as the guy I always call for a general, non-quotable chat about IP and patents, and whenever an email comes through from him, I'll always take notice. |
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