DWPub Sporadic

Can bloggers learn from journalists?

Attending Cybher, a recent event for women bloggers, was a revelation in many ways – not least how the event felt more like a ‘movement’ than a conference, a wonderful antidote to the hundreds of dry corporate events I’ve been to over the years.

I spoke on the ethics panel at the end of the day. Normally at this end of a conference many of the seats earlier filled with delegates would be empty, such is the temptation for many to bunk off early . But at Cybher the room was still very full, a demonstration of the passion many bloggers have for their craft.

During the session I made the point that journalists are often trained – either in college or on the job – on many aspects which relate to ethics. I went on to assert that it would be very useful for bloggers to have access to this kind of knowledge.

Someone in the audience challenged me, saying “that’s a bit rich,” referring obviously to recent examples of ethical abuses among the journalist community, most notably the hacking scandal.

It was a good challenge and prompted me to argue that while some journalists behave unethically, the majority do not and one must remember that it was journalists who unearthed the hacking scandal in the first place, just like it was journalists that unearthed the MPs expenses scandal. (See this related post by Ellen Arnison.)

In any case, I added, I was not suggesting that bloggers should behave just like journalists (it’s a separate point but also journalism can be quite formulaic which could stifle the creative freedom of blogging) however knowledge of some skills and knowledge associated with journalism could be very useful to bloggers and give them confidence to do an even better job of serving their audiences.

This is a subject I may return to in a little more detail.

FeaturesExec Media Database goes mobile

We’ve launched a mobile version of the FeaturesExec Media Database today, a development which I'm particularly pleased with.

The idea behind m.featuresexec.com is to give users a streamlined experience of the main FeaturesExec website, with easy access to media contact, media outlet and forward features information, plus some additional functions.

It’s primarily a reference tool, offering the sort of capability that PR professionals on the move would require but without the complexity of the full-blown FeaturesExec Media Database which would be largely pointless on a smartphone.

We decided to go for the mobile website route rather than building an app as it is by far and away the most efficient way to offer mobile capability to the widest audience without the huge development overheads of producing separate apps for iPhone, Android and Blackberry.

We’ve taken cues from app design and the site has an app-like feel and ease of use.

PR professionals can now look up media outlets, journalists and forward features from their smartphone and, depending on the capability of their device, can make calls, send emails and input addresses into mapping applications direct from FeaturesExec mobile.

Check out the FeaturesExec Mobile press release.

PRs and bloggers - what's the story?

So, what's the story? Is it that eight out of 10 PR professionals work with bloggers or is it that one in five don't?

I'd be tempted to go for the latter. Blogging has been around for long enough for it to be established as a mainstream form of media for PR practitioners, so for nearly one in five (according to our PR attitudes to bloggers survey published today) to ignore it is disappointing.

I guess one argument could be that certain sectors - industrial, for example - are not well represented by bloggers and so PRs specialising in those sectors may have an excuse. Even so I would imagine even in the most obscure areas there are at least a handful of relevant blogs – a opinion echoed in Sally Whittle's whitepaper The Smart PR's Guide to Blogger Outreach, also published by DWPub today. And surely fewer blogs in a sector actually makes life easier from a PR perspective rather than being a reason to ignore blogs altogether.

So on that basis surely the vast majority - close to 100 per cent - should be working with bloggers, not the 82 per cent found in our survey.

It is also possible that our survey, which admittedly lacks academic rigour, masks the complete picture. I suspect if anything the method behind the survey - an online form for which invites were sent by email and social media - perhaps skewed results more towards a positive attitude to bloggers, as those likely to respond were possibly pre-disposed to social media and therefore blogging. Which suggests that in reality the situation is rather worse, with perhaps significantly more than one in five PR professionals ignoring bloggers.

This rather brings us back to the now rather tired, but sadly still relevant, mantra of 'PR needs to do more to embrace digital media'. It was way back in April 2007 that I personally alluded to this argument with my whitepaper Public Relations versus Search Marketing, and no doubt a great deal has changed since then. But not enough.

This perspective is supported by another result of the survey that found that of those who work with bloggers only 26 per cent believe their relationship with bloggers is 'strong'. Though this could be symptomatic of a blogger community that is unfamiliar, and perhaps suspicious, of the role of PR.

On the positive side our survey found that 98 per cent of PR professionals found bloggers 'useful or invaluable', which suggests that there is widespread awareness of the benefits of working with bloggers, despite not all PR professionals actually doing it. And of those who do engage with bloggers, 67 per cent have a dedicated approach when dealing with bloggers, suggesting a majority are doing in in an intelligent way.

See the survey press release and download the whitepaper The Smart PR's Guide to Blogger Outreach.

DWPub supports London 2012 hopeful

The opportunity to support a local athlete in an Olympic Games on home turf does not crop up that often and this is why we're very proud to be sponsoring London 2012 hopeful Jade Nicholls.

Jade's sport is the discus, the classic Olympic discipline, and despite being a young and up-and-coming athlete she already has noteable achievements under her belt – such as British champion for the last two years and the UK indoor discus record.

Our sponsorship will help Jade make the maximum use of the last few months of training before the games in July.

You can track Jade's progress on her blog, and you can see our press release here.

Jade is also sponsored by Tudor Wholesale Foods.

ResponseSource and republication of media requests

We recently discovered a company taking journalist requests from our ResponseSource Enquiry Service and selling subscriptions to receive them.

Clearly this is bad for our business but the greatest concern is that it is unpopular with our journalist community. Journalists and bloggers take confidence in the knowledge that their enquiries are going to our established customer base of PR professionals with which we have a close relationship and are not being redistributed beyond this group.

We've asked the individual behind this venture to stop republishing ResponseSource enquiries and it appears this request has been heeded.

I have to say in 15 years of DWPub I have never been put in such a position and it's really not in my company's culture to be confrontational or litigious. This is why I have not identified the individual or the company here.

I'd like to take this opportunity to confirm a couple of things with our community of journalists, bloggers and PR professionals.

• We do not have any relationships with third party organisations for the republication of ResponseSource Enquiry Service content

• ResponseSource Enquiry Service subscriptions are for the purposes of conducting PR campaigns and persistent forwarding or republication of requests is excluded in our Ts & Cs

The ResponseSource Enquiry Service has been extraordinarily successful and continues to grow. It takes significant resources to manage the service and I'm very proud of the hard work my team put into ensuring it works for both journalist and PR users. Ensuring subscriptions are not abused is part of this work. The ResponseSource Enquiry Service is quite open and we really don't want to lock it down and make life harder for everyone.

Easier filtering and new format for media requests on ResponseSource

We introduced a few changes to the ResponseSource Enquiry Service today. These are a new preferences interface for recipients and a clearer format on the email enquiries themselves.

We've offered filtering on enquiry and media type for a long time but now you can set this up yourself and change it at will.

The new format should make the enquiries easier to read and enables us to embed useful links in the text. It's all about making it easier to identify and respond to the media enquiries most relevant to you.

While on the subject of ResponseSource here's a few facts and tips on the service (many thanks to Dan Griffiths for compiling this):

We handle over 25,000 requests per year through all categories - this equates to over 100 requests per working day

The DWPub server processes around 50 million individual ResponseSource emails each year

All enquiries are moderated by the FeaturesExec Media Database research team

Established in 1998. Volumes grown every year

Used by trade, consumer, daily and regional press to request info. Serves both ‘old’ and ‘new’ media

The first line of about two-thirds of the requests appear on the ResponseSource Twitter feed

We supply over 120 of the top 150 pr agencies (the gaps tend to be the larger public affairs and city specialist agencies where RS not so relevant)

To get a good result from journalist pitches be brief, be direct, and be on-topic

If an enquiry is irrelevant, you can just delete the email and don't have to worry about helping the journalist

Improve email feed relevance with personal category selection and preferences such as filters and blacklists

Here's a live journalist enquiry volume graph

The DWPub Media Suite - reflections on a re-brand

It was a therapeutic experience producing our recent piece in B2B Marketing about brand consistency where we discussed the introduction of the DWPub Media Suite among other things.

Our re-brand, which was implemented in a 'big-bang' last September after about a year in the planning, was a major project for us. Reading about it (yes, reading rather than writing, I confess that the first draft of the article was written by our  PR team) helped me appreciate what we have achieved.

Thinking back on it the whole process was a heady mix of stress and enlightenment. I'm very happy with the results, I must admit what appeared to be a project about logos and strap-lines actually turned out to be as much about strategy. We now have a much clearer idea - internally as well as externally - of what DWPub is all about.

People may sometimes mock branding excercises, but done well they can really contribute to a business at every level.

Why we sent our brochure to so many people

We sent a brochure, with a covering letter from me that you can see here, to lots of people over the last few days.

In some cases it went to multiple people in the same organisation. This would have applied in particular to the larger PR agencies where we have a lot of contacts. I've had a few comments about this, mostly citing a waste of paper, and for this I do apologise.

I wanted to take the opportunity here to explain the thinking behind the mailing.

We conducted some research recently that revealed quite a few people only knew DWPub for one or two of our services. And where people were familiar with more of our services the relationship between them was not fully understood. It showed, for example, that some did not realise that ResponseSource, FeaturesExec and SourceWire were all from the same people.

The result was our re-brand which we introduced last September. It was evolutionary, with the objective of tying our products more closely together and reinforcing the DWPub family. We've had great feedback from this, a project that was a real team effort and a tribute to all my colleagues at DWPub.

The direct mail campaign that's just gone out was an extension of this. Having not done a DM shot for some time I felt it would be a good idea to do one to present our new branding and to remind our community of the full range of products we offer. That was the motivation behind sending a complete brochure.

My thinking was that, in a smaller A5 format, and with space for each person's login details on page two, the brochure would be looked upon as a reference guide. Therefore sending one copy per person seemed to make sense.

In hindsight I appreciate that when multiple copies of the brochure arrived in certain offices this would have looked wasteful.

I failed to predict that response, perhaps because overall the amount of direct mail we do has massively reduced over the last three years, having placed a greater emphasis in digital marketing. In 2010 we did just two DM campaigns and last year we did none at all. This compares to 2008 when we did ten! I'd also opted for A5 format which helped us reduce the amount of paper used (thus also reducing the weight and the amount of fuel used in transporting it).

I think there is still a place for direct mail in B2B marketing, though admittedly this was perhaps not the best example. But I hope you can see the rationale behind it.

How to choose a PR agency

A friend of mine asked me the other day if I could recommend a PR agency.

Knowing many, many PR agencies (a very large proportion of UK PR agencies are DWPub clients) you would have thought that it would be easy for me to recommend a PR agency to someone. But it's not.

Choosing a PR agency is a bit like choosing a wife or husband. You want to get on. You want it to last, a reasonable amount of time anyway. You want to be able to work well together when things get tough. You need a few things in common. And you don't want to be with a dominating partner, or one that is too weedy to stand up for themselves. Would you choose a life partner based on someone else's recommendation? Probably not.

If you search for 'choosing a PR agency' you'll see there is a lot of clever advice out there. And there are all sorts of established processes for such things. I don't want to recreate any of that, but instead just offer a few thoughts.

Time for a list.

1. Culture. This is numero uno most important factor, in my opinion, when deciding which PR agency to hire. You need a compatible culture. This does not mean to say that the people in the agency need to look like the people in your team. But they do need to be able to work together and understand each other. Culture is a hard thing to nail down, but if you share one then the relationship will work much better. At the end of the day you want to work with people you like, so don't play down that factor.

2. Size matters. If you are a small company you will find it easier to work with a smaller PR agency or even a freelance. Big PR agencies are geared up for serving larger companies, with all the scale and reporting abilities larger companies require. This is not a hard and fast rule though - a large agency could be a good match for a start-up if there is a good cultural match and the agency really wants the business. And a freelance could do a great job for a large company if they have good sector expertise and the client has a fairly narrow product set or operates in a niche sector. But generally it's better to one of an agency's biggest clients then one of its smallest.

3. Clear objectives. PR people are very creative and if you do not give them a clear set of objectives their minds will explode with ideas, but none of them will be much use. Seriously, modern PR is very much objective-orientated. It's not just about 'column inches' any more. What are your business objectives, in terms of sales or other measurable results? Give these to your shortlist of agencies and you'll see better quality pitches.

That's just straight off the top of my head. I may revisit this subject, as it clearly deserves more than just a list if three thoughts.

Benefits to bloggers of being listed on the FeaturesExec Media Database

Many journalists are familiar with media databases such as FeaturesExec and the benefits of being listed in them. These benefits are possibly even more applicable to bloggers.

Here's an explanation, aimed primarily at bloggers, of some of those benefits:

• Profile raising. Being listed in FeaturesExec ensures your blog is visible to public relations (PR) professionals in the course of their work. In addition to their role in providing content for the media PR people also advise their clients on what media they should be following, including influential blogs. So being listed helps to extend your audience.

• Source content. A listing in FeaturesExec helps PRs learn more about you and your blog. They can then provide you with relevant, useful information such as exclusive content, Q&As, competitions, product trials, vouchers and invitations to events as well as press releases. Thus can be a great source of content for your blog.

• Specify your interests. We can include details in your listing about specifically what you want to receive from the PR community (and, of course, what you don't want to receive). The more detail on FeaturesExec the better PRs can tailor contributions to your blog.

Our aim at DWPub is to help the PR and media communities communicate. Bloggers have become an important part of the media and we are keen to work with influential bloggers to help them engage with the PR profession. Including major blogs in our FeaturesExec Media Database is just one way we are doing this.

We use a range of criteria to indentify major (or 'influential') blogs, including frequency of posts, subject focus, quality of writing and design, number of comments and site traffic. This criteria is always under review and I'm always keen to talk to bloggers to find out ways we can make our services work for them.

Bloggers may also find our other services useful, including the ResponseSource Enquiry Service and SourceWire News Distruibution – more details here.