Based on his experience as the recipient of PR pitches, Curt Monash, head of Monash Research, says that you should never try to sell with PR; rather, he says, you must use it to market. Here are some of his recommendations on the proper approach to PR:

• Marketing to generalist influencers in the hopes they will in turn influence the broad market. “Instead of nagging a reporter to write a specific story, you can just focus on building up their opinion of you and your technology, in the hopes they will write favorably about you when it fits their needs to do so,” says Monash. “When you do this, your end goal should be quality of mentions, with a secondary emphasis on quantity.”
• Marketing to specialist influencers in the hopes they will influence other influencers, as well as influencing the general market. “When addressing specialized ‘expert’ influencers, you should have two end goals –quality of online mentionandquality of word-of-mouth mention,” Monash notes.“This area is even more skewed to quality than the prior one.”
• Reaching out to the broad market directly. Google News and other aggregators tend to carry press releases right alongside traditional news articles, and a significant fraction of the top search results on your company name are likely to be your own press releases, says Monash. “For that reason alone, I wouldn’t forgo issuing press releases, especially ones with informative headlines and first paragraphs.”

He offers these additional tips for PR marketing:

• Press, bloggers, analysts, and other influencers can no longer be neatly separated from each other. “Only use PR people who can be trusted with all those constituencies,” he recommends.
• Using PR people to sell a story that the target doesn’t care about is a VERY bad idea.“It’s commonly worse than using a salesman to sell a product the prospect doesn’t care about. Why? Because there’s more chance you’ll later regret burning the relationship,” says Monash.
• Compensating PR people based on press mentions almost guarantees they will overselland burn your relationships, unless they are confident they have a long-term relationship with you. (On your payroll or otherwise.) “Otherwise, their short-term motivations are not at all in your best interest,” Monash notes.
• The higher your volume of press releases, the clearer your headlines and other writing need to be.“The more attention you ask for from each target, the more responsible with that attention you need to be,” Monash explains.
• Review pitch e-mails just as you review press releases.“If you do a sufficiently great job of clear headline and topic-paragraph writing, maybe the pitch e-mail writes itself,” says Monash. “Otherwise, it’s apt to be botched.”
• The worse the press release, the more you need to supervise the pitch process.“If somebody micromanaged you into a bad release, then you need to micromanage your minions into pitching as if the release had been better,” Monash suggests.

Source: Strategic Messaging

Posted March 30th, 2010 under Intellectual Property Marketing

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