One in a series
Publicity can be taught in school. It can also be learned being an intern at a publicity firm. What we are now facing are "poor" publicity skills.
I am not referring to the vocabulary or grammar that is used when you are communicating. Those are called the hard skills, like math. These are the soft skills that are not taught in schools or at any job.
Here is an example.
When you type someone an email you probably:
- Do not use capitalizations
- Or you type in all caps
- Your sentences are combined without punctuation
- Your signoff is your first name
Everyone is guilty of this, including pr professionals, who should be very communication sensitive. We are seeing more poor publicity skills when contacting publishers, pitching stories, or sending press releases, all through email. It is becoming habit and we are always in a rush, so who cares about publicity skills?
But if this were a typed letter, you would make sure the structure of the letter and the wording make smart business sense.
You can improve your pr skills by:
- Learning when and how to use style and "tone of voice"
- Knowing how to acknowledge, respond and signing off
- Knowing good practice guidelines for delivering your email service
- Developing practical skills for responding to emails
These are simple tips but seem to be forgotten when we communicate through email as we contact the media. Professionalism will always rank higher and gain more respect than those who think casual or informal communication is the key to favorable publicity.
See Also
- Develop Good Publicity Skills
How to communicate to the press
departments separate. For example, let the IT people, or web people work with the publicity staff. If you source out any of these to a pr firm, or agency then have a meeting where they can discuss their projects and objectives and what plans are set for the future.
Not all press releases written by professional publicity people or pr clients follow the standard rules for press release structure. This can affect the chances of your release being read, or even published.
campaign. Sometimes it is best to target the few media reporters that best fit your press release or pitch for an article. e-Mail blast can be good for some news bulletins or to announce an event you might be holding. But I recommend that you are selective in that approach and choose the few media you really want to attend and send them a separate email with a personal invitation, not a generic one.
This type of tagging is more accepted. Just like the graffiti taggers are sending a message, the Internet tagging craze is how we title messages. It can become an excellent publicity and marketing tool when used correctly.
After hiring a new staff member most companies usually show them the process used in producing and submitting a press release. Some pr clients, or public relations firms don’t even do this. An article in PRSA gives some advice on the "
Just as your web site needs to be optimized, it is just as important that each press release you distribute be optimized when submitting to the online news media. The use of keywords and how they are placed within the text body is critical. Using too many keywords, or phrases will destroy your objective.
Professional publicity people know how to contact the media, know how to start a conversation and probably know what angle to present to the reporter. But do they really? Chances are these top publicity people get through the clutter by knowing the media on a personal basis. I don’t mean they go drinking together (or maybe they do), I mean they have built a long-term business relationship making it easier to contact them.
The blog I wrote on "Publicity is your web site" is one of several parts to taking advantage of a web site as another pr tool.
The best and most oblivious media is through your web site. Simple, yet companies tend to crowd everything they have about the company into hundreds of pages deep, or they make one page be a couple of thousand words long.