Stage Two Consulting

Today I tried a new medium for pitching a story - a twelve second long video pitch. There’s continuous discussion about PR spam, and what’s the right way to pitch stories to bloggers and to press. Stowe Boyd explained his clear and unequivocal preference for being pitched via Twitter. This lead to a follow up post, and Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb also wrote a piece on twit-pitching.

I have pitched a few stories via Twitter, and in fact I was one of the 1st people to follow and post to the Twitter account called micropr, which I heard about from Brian Solis. I’ve pitched there numerous times, though I’ve never actually gotten a response (nor have we had success from #twitpitch or #pitch140). That said, I remain undaunted, and I truly do believe in the potential of new communication/social tools.

I have a story going out on the wire tomorrow morning at 9AM for Spleak Media Network (announcing some big new content partners - to give some perspective, their last content partnership announcement was with Hearst Digital Media).  If you want the news prior to embargo, please email/twitter me.  This morning, the first thing I did was login to my 12seconds.tv account (by the way, 12seconds.tv is nearing launch - stay tuned!), and record a couple of twelve second pitches. My first was terrible, so I canceled it. The second was a little better, take a look:

Spleak on 12seconds - take 1 on 12seconds.tv
Spleak on 12seconds - take 1 on 12seconds.tv

But still, it seems like there’s a dearth of information. How will someone make any kind of judgment call about whether it’s worth following up? So I tried a third take; my favorite so far:

Spleak, take: better on 12seconds.tv
Spleak, take: better on 12seconds.tv

I think this is an interesting tool for pitching stories. Considering the ongoing changes in communications and the media landscape, It’s important to explore various media and pitch avenues. While I agree with the folks at RWW that not everyone wants the standard email pitch, for many people it is still the best way to share news. But it’s part of my job to experiment with and try different mechanisms and tools for communicating both with clients and with press. If you have thoughts on video pitching in twelve seconds or less, I’d like to hear them. How were my attempts? What would you do differently?

The music lovers at TuneUp Media, a client based here in San Francisco, launched their iTunes Companion software today. Here’s an overview of what they are doing:

What’s the one problem most people have with their digital music collections? They’re msesy, err… messy. They’re missing albums, artists, or track names (Track01 ring a bell?). For most of us, this is something we tolerate because we don’t have the time to fix songs one by one, and previous tools are too complicated or ineffective to bother with.

Introducing the new TuneUp Companion for iTunes. TuneUp plugs into your music collection and automatically fixes your mislabeled song information. It takes the audio “fingerprint” of a song, compares it to over 90 million songs in the Gracenote database, and fills in the missing info. No more “Track 01’s”. No more Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stones, and TheStones. No more headaches looking for music on your iPod or iPhone. We like to say, “It’s your music’s new best friend.”

TuneUp also automatically finds missing cover art for your albums and lets you pick from up to 4 options so if you really want that import cover, you got it. You can even save all of the album covers at once with a handy “Save All” button.

So you’ve cleaned your music, found your cover art, what’s next? TuneUp integrates seamlessly beside iTunes to present the web’s best content in the “Now Playing” tab. Every time you hit play, TuneUp searches the web to provide music videos from YouTube, merchandise from eBay, song/album recommendations from Amazon, and news from Google for the artist and song you’re playing.

Additionally TuneUp lets you know when artists in your collection are coming to town with a “Concerts” tab. Even better, they pull information from both national and local sources so you won’t miss the next Justice concert, or the next show from local artist Sean Hayes.

TuneUp has something for everyone, and you can try cleaning your first 500 songs for free at www.tuneupmedia.com.

Useful links:

• TuneUp home page
• TuneUp blog
• TuneUp news feed
• Launch press release
• Online media kit (includes demo video, pix, etc)
• Joint press release with Gracenote

Coverage so far (will be updated throughout the day):

• Geek.com’s detailed review
• Lifehacker
• TechCrunch
• Venture Beat
• ZatzNotFunny
• UberGizmo
• KillerStartups
• Addicted to Digital Media detailed review
• Download Squad
• CNET Download.com detailed review
• Boing Boing
• GeekBrief.Tv

In a word: no.

An old adage says that “all press is good press,” meaning that if you are getting noticed at all, even with a negative portrayal, that still increases your visibility and recognition amongst the masses, which is a net benefit. I think if you are either really big (like Nike), or really small (like an unknown startup no one’s heard of), there might be some truth to the idea. But for the VAST majority of people in the middle, I simply don’t agree.

Nike doesn’t want to be known as a sweat shop that abuses Malaysian children with unsafe work conditions at slave wages, but they are. Does it matter very much? For Nike, probably not. They have the athletic endorsements and the marketing budget to overcome negative press (and yes, it shouldn’t be ignored). However, Nike is such a large, recognized, long standing and wealthy brand that bad press isn’t that difficult to deal with. It keeps their name in the press, most people forget the bad stories, and just remember Nike when they think of shoes and sports.

Tiny startups can usually survive bad press, and possibly even benefit from getting on someone’s radar. They might get some new user signups simply by getting trashed on Techcrunch. This could increase their user base, and perhaps give them an opportunity to improve their site / collect feedback. But it can also lead to a negative long-term impression in the public eye, which requires careful and intelligent efforts to fix (of which PR is a component, but it better not be the only one!). Ultimately you still need to deal with bad press on some level, or it will work against you in the long run.

Small to medium businesses definitely do not want bad press (also, we’re not talking about ‘one single negative blog post’, we’re talking about a series of notable posts/articles). It is not somehow “good” even though it’s bad. Small to medium companies don’t have the anonymity of tiny startups, nor do they have the budget and inertia of massive, long standing brands.

Take Twitter for instance. Twitter is a cool service, and I use it a lot. I enjoy it. But it fails… constantly a lot. The folks at Twitter have worked hard to improve, and have a very admirable, self-mocking attitude about the whole thing. They use a critter called the “Fail Whale” when their site is down, as a tongue-in-cheek means of acknowledging that they’re having technical difficulties. But their failure rate is so high that it strains the utility of their service, and some of its big early adopters and users are either moving or considering moving to new services. This leads to a lot of bad press, in spite of their self-deprecations. Initially, that press was jocular and supportive. Now it’s way past that. The Fail Whale is now ironic, and not in the good way.

The Twitter example demonstrates that a lot of negative press attention can, and will, hurt your image. As we’ve said before, it’s not just about the marketing to fix the problem - the problems themselves must be fixed before any PR can even begin (you don’t mend a broken leg with a bandaid). All press is not good press.

My good friend, colleague, pseudo-competitor, fellow blogger, and much better photographer Brian Solis put a guest post up on TechCrunch today entitled the Evolution of the Press Release. If you are in marketing, I’d call it a must-read. I’m pretty sure his inspiration for the post is what Elliott refered to as “PitchMeme“, the minor brouhaha which occurred around Gina Trapani’s controversial “bad PR people’s wiki“. I call it controversial because I don’t like the “lumping in” of all PR folks into one big batch - the same way bloggers don’t like to all be looked at the same way (think about it!). The topic’s been pretty well covered already, and my thoughts on how bloggers should address things were in my blog post Friday.

I thought it would be prudent to put up a note on how we recommend our clients write and structure press releases (UPDATED: DON’T FORGET TO NOTICE THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT (FROM THE ORIGINAL POST) - for when they are necessary, that is). Some of this is very traditional, some of it’s a bit “two-oh-ish”, and it’s an evolving, living process. When dealing with marketing strategy and outreach in today’s high tech world, it’s important not to get fixated on what worked yesterday as it may no longer be relevant. UPDATED: IF YOU THINK I AM SAYING “DO THIS ALL THE TIME”, PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE (YES, IT TOO WAS IN THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE): Further, there’s no true “one size fits all” approach, you must tweak your strategies to meet your clients’ specific needs. That said, here’s our rough template:

Opening
Title - should communicate in a “non-tricky/clever” manner the message. No need to be cute here, just summarize your news in one sentence (which is why I’m so bullish on the importance of positioning).
Subtitle - optional, use if a 2nd sentence helps fill out the details.
Opening paragraph - 2 or 3 sentences that quickly get the info out. Assume your audience won’t read any further than this, so if you can’t figure out how to be interesting this briefly, odds are pretty good you either have (1) too much story, or (2) not enough story. Both are bad, consider either making multiple releases or not doing it at all, respectively.

Supporting Details
Okay, this is your time to give some background, help flush out the rest of the story. Stats, market size, demographics, details details details all belong here. I recommend being to the point, again, keeping away from the “cute” factor. 4 sentences max, and if you have a lot of details, consider making a bulleted list instead of a paragraph.

Quote
The simplest reason to have a quote is this: it will inevitably get copied-and-pasted into an article somewhere, and it saves the journalist from having to email you for a quote for their article. Your quote should sound like a human being said it, and not be jargony robot-English. Also, there’s no reason to deviate from the “standard quote” format of:

“I said something cool,” said FIRSTNAME LASTNAME, the TITLE of COMPANY. “I’m excited about that cool thing I said especially because it’s so cool.”

Focus on the business implications, and/or partnership details
This is a good time to explain why the story matters SOOO much. Either there’s a huge opportunity for the company to expand, or possibly a big deal with a big partner/customer is being announced (if so, make sure you’ve referenced this earlier!). Think about the business/industry implications of your announcement, and make them clearly comprehensible.

[optional] partner/3rd party Quote
IF you are working with a partner, give them their quote here. If not, but you have a *very well known* fan of the company, they can make a quote. It’s absolutely not necessary otherwise, and should fit very naturally - if not, don’t include something just to fill in space (shorter press releases are always better than longer ones).

Background
This is a good place to wrap it up, either by including some broad background info on the company (such as a boiler plate) or some content you generically use to describe the company/service/product/market. It’s okay to reuse this content, it’s helping out those who may be new to hearing about you.

Useful Links
In “social media PR” style, we’ve begun including a bulleted list of relevant links. These links could include a company home page, blog, product details/specs/pictures, partner home page, useful resource, Twitter URL, RSS feeds, or anything else. In my opinion this section should have every link a journalist would want to be able to find other details that complement your release.

Contact Info
Phone number and email is a must-include, and I’m generally recommending having IM information here as well. If you use Twitter or other means of near-real-time communication, you should have this included as well.

That’s it for the Stage Two-styled New-Meets-Old-Media Press Release (as of May 11, 2008 - who knows what this will look like a month from now!). Hope this is helpful, and I welcome/encourage feedback via comments.

UPDATED: I’ve added two very large callouts in the beginning of this blog post.  This is because I want to make sure that anyone who is just ’scanning’ the post instead of reading it fully notices that I am not advocating a strategy of “always write press releases, and always make them the exact same.” Sorry about the big, bold text, it felt necessary.

Over the past few years as “the blogosphere” has grown and evolved, we’ve seen many bloggers move from “desperate to get attention” to “so ridiculously swamped they can’t take pitches anymore”.  Tom Foremski and Scoble both tried a Facebook-only pitch mode for a while (neither lasted), Marshall Kirkpatrick recommends RSS pitches (read Matt Craven’s thoughts and our own response here) and Mashable has their “what not to do” list as well.  This is all part of dealing with new media technologies and PR, which are generally at inherent conflicts with each other.

Until extremely recently, PR was mostly about using lists of press and blasting them with updates.  Relationships were always key, but the system of Draft Release, Create Embargo, Blast tended to work pretty well.  Today, it’s clearly not that easy.  There is so much noise out there it’s almost impossible to distinguish yourself, even when you have interesting news (hence my post on positioning).  Relationships are more important than ever, and doing The Blast is more likely to backfire than it is to independently generate widespread awareness.  But the blame for all this should not just be aimed at the PR firms, I believe bloggers and journalists have some responsibility for the quagmire as well.

Most blogs have some form of “contact us” or “send us news” page or email address readily available.  The reality is those emails tend to get put into the lowest priority bins, if not ignored altogether.  And that’s hardly fair.  In my opinion a news organization, be it an individual blogger or a mega publication, has the duty to receive incoming pitches from anyone.  But they also retain the right on their preference of the nature, content, and style of those pitches.

In addition to some of the examples above, I believe Stowe Boyd’s request for “being twitpitched” is an excellent way to step up to the table.  He labeled the post “how to pitch me” on his blog, and as a result, anyone who wants to pitch him now has a simple and straightforward mechanism to do so.  In order to practice what I’m preaching, on my LIVEdigitally blog I just wrote a “How To Pitch Us” page, and added it to my primary navigation links.  I hope to see many other bloggers follow this type of a path, as its so easy to complain about the noise yet IMHO equally easy to do something about it.