Is the PR industry maximizing the potential of bloggers?
In the world of Public Relations all of the KPI’s, AVE’s and company mottos can distract from the aim of the game. What it truly comes down to is generating awareness of a service or product. Whilst traditional media coverage is still incredibly relevant and valuable, there is one area that is massively underutilised and potentially misunderstood– blogging!
Blogs are great for PRs. One of their main advantages is that they tend to focus on one singular issue, whether it’s gluten-free meals, menopause or men’s socks. This means that if your story fits in with the blog’s subject matter, then it is relevant to their readers. By securing coverage in blogs you’ll actually be promoting the brand more effectively with people who are genuinely interested.
Also, by focusing on a singular issue, bloggers will usually have a good understanding of the relevant research, products and experts in their field. If you can convince a blogger that your story is credible and relevant to their readers, you tap into an entire audience of people who trust the blogger’s perspective.
What is vitally important in getting bloggers interested is really getting to know their blog. For example, we work with a lot of parenting bloggers and recently did a story charting the life of an average 12-year-old boy. It was not simply enough to send the story out to all the parenting bloggers; we had to select the ones who actually had sons. It’s always good to explain why a story would interest them and with this particular story it helped to ask them to compare our findings to their experience as parents. Sometimes the content itself is not enough. You have to give the blogger a reason to engage.
So, the million dollar question is: What can PRs offer bloggers?
Payment?
The truth is the principle rule of PR is that we do not pay for coverage. That’s advertising. However, some bloggers run their site as their main source of income and expect PRs to pay them for taking their stories. Unfortunately, that is just never going to happen. When a PR can land a good story on the MailOnline with nothing but the quality of the content, why would they pay a blogger £70? Especially when the blog has about 3% of the readership of the MailOnline. It may upset some bloggers to hear it but payment is just simply not on the table.
Content
Content is what PRs can offer to bloggers. PRs have surveys, spokespeople, experts and a whole host of other resources at their fingertips that a typical blogger couldn’t afford or gain access to.
Personally, I am in a unique situation as I’m both a PR and a blogger. Now if I were approached and asked to write something for money I would turn it down. My voice is credible and taking payment ‘bribes’ to run a story would make it less credible. My opinion can’t be bought. Yet, if someone came to me with good content, research I didn’t have access to, graphics and other resources that I actually found interesting and felt my readers would find interesting, I would be more than willing to take it.
This is what PRs can offer to bloggers: content they couldn’t afford and stories their readers will respond to. PRs can also offer bloggers products to review. This saves the blogger time and money and gives them something to talk about. Providing a beauty blogger with free make-up samples does two things.1- it saves the blogger having to spend money on the samples and 2 – it makes for appropriate content that the readers will be interested in.
Events
PRs also have the funds to put on events that bloggers can go to. Bloggers shouldn’t want to be seen as a keyboard warrior, preaching from the confines of their bedroom. They should be out there engaging with people on the topic of their choice and PRs can facilitate that. Events are great. Not only does it keep the old Instagram account looking busy but it is also a meeting of like-minded people working in the same field which is great for getting inspiration as well as keeping an eye on your competition.
Inspiration hub for bloggers
As part of SWNS, we have an online hub (PLUG!) where we upload our stories and resources. This is free for bloggers to go to get relevant content. Whether a blogger needs stats to support something they are writing about, a quote from an expert or if they are simply looking for something fresh to write about, we’ve found an online hub is a great way for bloggers and PRs to work together. We have the content and they have the following. We provide newsworthy content to bloggers for free and they find their readers responding.
My hope for the future is for bloggers and PRs to understand how to work with each other more effectively and make each other stronger.
Understanding how a national newsdesk works
Can you just email it, please? Six words to send a shiver of dread down the spine of any PR when attempting to “sell-in” a story to a national newsdesk. It almost certainly means that cleverly tricked out idea or cheerfully penned piece of copy is heading for the email queue graveyard, unloved and almost certainly unread.
But perhaps the issue lies in the very phrase “sell-in” – and the alarming lack of a working knowledge of how a newsdesk works.
I should know…I ran one for a decade and had exactly the same attitude to the daily avalanche of well-meaning but ultimately futile calls from PR executives.
A newspaper is not a blank canvas of opportunity to be filled with PR “puff”, rather, at least in the opinion of the journalists manning its newsdesk, it is a limited space on which they aim to paint a daily masterpiece.
Everything must be there on merit. Every line, every column inch must be hard earned. The same golden rule applies to their online counterparts. Content must match the digital DNA of its host. Anything that does not will jar with an online editor.
The step from national newspaper journalism into PR is a very small and indeed logical step to take.
But for many it represents a yawning chasm with an ‘us and them’ mentality that frequently sees the two sides who should, perhaps, be working hand in glove instead diametrically opposed and pitched as polar opposites.
How can this gap be bridged? Put simply by working hard to understand the mind-set of the national papers and the staff who populate them.
By their very natures, news editors are a tough and cynical bunch. There is little a grizzled desk veteran will not have heard during his or her career. They’ll have heard every pitch, every nuanced subtlety deployed to chisel some space in the paper. And chances are, a call redolent with cheery bonhomie will be the last thing they need at 10.45am as they battle to build a newslist that will impress an editor.
Similarly, an online news editor will be bombarded by pressure – working at enormous speed while attempting to make sure every paragraph is accurate and every line sings.
That is why every decent PR would benefit from time spent in a newsroom environment. An opportunity to witness the ebb and flow of a day at the editorial coalface. A chance to witness:
- How a newslist evolves, who is likely to give them the time of day and when.
- The pressures brought to bear by editors and their executive teams.
- The immense speed at which stories are published online.
Much of the problem is caused by the very different timelines in play. A PR exec may have spent six weeks working towards building the “perfect” pitch. Gathering the information, writing the copy, ensuring all is approved by the client – only for it to be dismissed in a matter of seconds by a harried news editor working at warp factor 10.
Understanding the news agenda on any given day is utterly crucial as well. No newsdesk journalist will give a PR their attention while a terrorist atrocity is unfolding. Equally, sometimes a well-delivered light and frothy pitch might be the perfect riposte to the grim horror that seems to haunt our newspapers and websites in these troubled and uncertain times.
Timing is all. Freelance journalists are masters of this, understanding the right moment to call in with their offerings. They have this advantage because they have virtually. all worked in a newsroom environment and there really is no substitute for that.
Even the jargon is completely different…as with any industry, journalists and PRs have their own patois of acronyms and buzzwords, but for two professions seemingly so closely aligned, I have been taken aback by quite how different the methodology and mantras are.
News is gathered organically, and no one can have complete control over how it will grow during any given day.
News editors and journalists, in general, are perpetually one call away from triumph when a story works, or staring into the abyss if a front page splash crashes and burns.
They are expected to keep dozens of plates spinning simultaneously and to move with devastating speed when a story breaks because time is their greatest enemy.
It is only close up that the frenetic pace of a busy newsroom can be truly understood.
It is only through experience that the alchemy of turning newsprint into newspaper can be fully appreciated.
At 72Point working alongside a newsroom is an undoubted advantage. Having the SWNS Group as our parent company means we are in hourly contact with our content users, and actually being able to immerse staff in a newsroom environment with newsroom attitudes gives them an invaluable insight into how the media works.
The art of storytelling
It’s easy to tell a story, watch:
Steve Martin walks into a room. He sits down in front of a vintage typewriter, looks pensively at the clock and begins, slowly to type. As his fingers move from key to key, a single word is stamped onto the page...
You want to know what the word is, don’t you? Is it a happy word? Is it a suicide note? Is that the actual Steve Martin, from Father of the Bride, or just some guy called Steve Martin?
Storytelling gives you the power to change a world – a world of your own creation. If you get the world right, like JK Rowling or JRR Tolkien, you can bring billions of people into it with you, eager to find out what the next word is.
Storytelling doesn’t have to be about creating fantastic universes, either. You could tell a story about the most banal interactions of daily life, and if it resonates with people then it will find an audience.
At 72Point, storytelling is in the essence of everything we do. We’re looking to find stories that will evoke a reaction in as many people as possible, who may then share that story online, in their workplace or at home, starting conversations and debates.
A lot of our work starts with a very small survey – in a meeting or brainstorm, someone will toss out a statement like ‘I realised this morning I’ve been singing Blank Space by Taylor Swift wrong for months’ and that will start a conversation about your hearing going in old age, or the differences between women and men, or how often misheard lyrics replace the real ones in your mind. If it gets us talking, we think it will get the general public talking, and so we’ll then take that idea, create a big survey around it then we’ll have a new story – like the song lyrics that everyone gets wrong.
That story worked because it’s a conversation that millions of people might not think to have, without a little push from us. But once they do, they realise that actually this is a topic that everyone has an opinion on - and if it raises a little awareness of hearing aids, then that’s our work done.
Storytelling isn’t simply about words, either. We’re increasingly using other methods to get across our ideas, from 360-degree videos where online users can explore a new space, to interactive puzzles as well as our in-house-produced video content. We’re covering all the bases when it comes to getting messages and stories into the press.
For crystal-clear visual representation of a story, our talented designers are on hand to create infographics and animations that can bring a static story to life. The best examples of our work are the ones that bring together elements of everything we can do, to deliver a story that everyone can take something from – like this example about debt levels.
Personally, my opinion on telling a story is simple – just keep people reading, one word after the next. If your content is engaging then you’ll do exactly that.
And hey, you made it down this far, didn’t you?