Today, Gawker’s Ryan Tate posted a story entitled “Three Annoying Habits of the Laziest Journalists on Twitter.” In a nutshell, Gawker hates journalists who (1) Tweet a“barrage of rushed, repetitive questions,” (2) Make their “heartless pursuit of the story totally obvious” and (3) rhyme gratuitously on Twitter. Being the unapologetical bunch they are, they’ve named names. Most horrifyingly…USA Today’s Barbara De Lollis.
Is this not why there’s an “unfollow” button? If people are so annoyed by these journalists’ tweets, why are they following them? I’m sure many PR professionals will agree that Barb and her cohorts make it easier to track what they’re writing about, thus enabling us to send appropriate information. Other professions are using Twitter to communicate directly to their trade audiences and gather feedback and research more quickly, so why can’t journalists?
Sure, Barb could be more engaging and interactive with her followers and show some more personality in her tweets - that’d probably make her queries more appealing to her readers and would probably generate more responses from them. But hey, from a professional standpoint, her tweets serve their purpose to the PR community. So, to answer Tate’s question “Do any of De Lollis’ followers actually answer…?” Yes, we do!
As for the rhyming lady, well unless her followers are all in kindergarten, that’s just not cool.
It’s an exciting day here at M Booth! We are extremely excited to join the Next Fifteen family. And don’t worry, we’ll still be the same M Booth you know and love.
TechCrunch likes calling out thoughtless, and often old-school, PR practitioners for the sins they commit in the name of the profession. Over the weekend, Robin Wauters wrote an interesting and funny post disparaging the stale, ambiguous, and downright inaccurate language we often find in press releases, e.g. leading, revolutionary, cutting-edge, synergy, and almost all superlatives.
As the business environments PR pros work in change, so must PR tactics. Here’s to changing with the times.
-Tom
P.S. I think Robin’s list missed paradigm shift – whatever that means.
Someone should be fired. In fact, a bunch of people should be fired from Horizon Realty Group in Chicago. By now, most have us have heard that Horizon is suing one of their tenants for $50,000 for libel. The suit is a response to Amanda Bonnen’s tweet complaining that her apartment was moldy. Bonnen has about 20 followers and is not an especially active twitterer, but Horizon decided to sue, and later described themselves as “a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization,” according to Mashable and other sources.
What could have been a message that went unnoticed is now all over the Web and in print media. Horizon’s decision to sue has amplified the negativity and vilified the organization. This could be the most colossal PR blunder I’ve ever witnessed. Not to mention that the case has no chance in court. The person who should be charged with libel is whoever decided to bring the suit – that’s the person most culpable for defaming the company’s image. I’d be more critical of the organization, but I need to be careful – I can’t afford to get sued.
While everyone was stuffing themselves with barbecue and watching fireworks this weekend, The New York Times published an article that’s a must-read for all PR folks. The piece examines how the profession of public relations is changing in the digital age — it’s becoming more about bloggers and online influencers and less about just traditional print and broadcast journalists. Yet publicists are still necessary, because someone needs to know who these people are and how best to reach them.
The article also briefly touches upon the need for a new system of PR metrics, which is a topic we are constantly exploring here at M Booth:
Instead of calculating the impressions an article gets by estimating a publication’s circulation and pass-along rate, [Brian] Solis counts the number of people who tweeted about a company and their combined following, the number of retweets or clicks on links, as well as traffic from Facebook and other social networks.
Many people don’t realize that the PR profession is about much more than straight-up media relations, but it is — and it’s continuing to change before our eyes.
A recent survey of 449 bloggers from 21 countries found that 90% of them welcome contact from PR people. (They like us, they really like us!) In fact, over 96% of American bloggers said they are contacted by PR folks on a weekly basis.
Many bloggers said they appreciate it when publicists are able to supply photographs, charts/graphs and videos. The bloggers’ pet peeves about PR pros included:
PR people continue to blindly send corporate press releases to bloggers.
PR professionals are failing to read the blogs and truly understand their target bloggers’ communities.
They seem to expect bloggers to post corporate material, demonstrating a lack of understanding of the medium and the very reason why bloggers blog.
They treat bloggers as they would journalists - not as influencers, which is more appropriate.
Definitely some good points that we always keep in mind here at M Booth!
“ [Brand representatives on Twitter] are not acting like spokespeople, but real people. You have to be careful about what you say while, at the same time, be much more personal than the average corporate P.R. guy. You need people who understand the mores and etiquette. Not everyone knows how to do that.
Josh Bernoff in The New York Times
Cision recently launchedJournalistTweets, a site that shows tweets from members of the media on Twitter. However, there don’t seem to be too many journalists listed as yet, since the same ones keep coming up.
Google is holding a Doodle 4 Google contest for kids to submit their own “Google doodle,” to the theme of “What I Wish for the World.” You can vote on the finalists, and the winner will be awarded a $15,000 college scholarship, a trip to the Google New York office, a laptop computer, and a t-shirt printed with their doodle. Their school will receive a $25,000 technology grant towards the establishment/improvement of a computer lab.
The video above features the President of Domino’s USA responding to a PR crisis that erupted this week after two Domino’s employees posted an online video of them tampering with food in, um…pretty gross ways.
While the original video is fodder enough for controversy, what’s really fascinating (and frightening) is how social media sites like YouTube can quite literally deface a company as large as Domino’s in a matter of hours. That localized stunts can be broadcast internationally with the quick click of a button means that crisis communications is a whole new beast in the digital age—the Domino’s video has been viewed over one million times, and discussions have been very lively on forums like Twitter.
Domino’s is getting high praise, however, for its response to crisis: a YouTube response and the formation of a twitter handle, @dpzinfo, to address customer concerns. By communicating with customers through the very same medium that so easily soiled its reputation, Domino’s has proven its moxy and social media dexterity. Unfortunately, this incident will forever be a cautionary tale for other companies.
Since there are many PR professionals on Twitter (some people have even accused us of “killing” it), there were plenty of tweets flying around last night, accompanied by the official#prweekawardshashtag. I livetweeted the winners for a while, for the benefit of my PR buddies who couldn’t make it last night, but then I had to stop because my BlackBerry’s battery started to die. PRNewser took notice, and posted my tweet about the event’s interesting choice of MC on the blog this morning.
Although Andrew, Kate and the Tea Forte team didn’t win Consumer Launch of the Year, I think everyone had a pretty good time. However, most of us didn’t feel comfortable sticking around for the “After Glow,” whatever that involved.
On one hand, I think it would be impossible to write about a company in a completely unbiased manner when they gave you hundreds of dollars worth of free swag, no matter how transparent you are about it. On the other hand, no one is ever completely objective about anything, and bloggers’ content is influenced by other forces (advertisers, hopes for more traffic, wanting to get into other bloggers’ good graces, etc.) all the time. I do think it’s important to keep the incentives fairly moderate — there’s a big difference between sending a blogger a product worth $20 versus a $500 gift card, which may seem a bit excessive.
Budget airline Ryanair and its madcap CEO, Michael O’Leary, have usually been a great source of amusement for me. Whether it’s because of their raunchy advertising campaigns or O’Leary’s sketchy behavior, news about Ryanair always brings the LOLZ. Including this latest incident — after an Irish blogger posted on his blog that he found a bug on the Ryanair Web site that changed the displayed price of a ticket to €0.00, a company representative left the following anonymous comment on the blog:
jason! you’re an idiot and a liar!! fact is! you’ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it! you dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!
Even though the comment was anonymous, it could of course be tracked back to Ryanair through the user’s IP address. Instead of apologizing for the employee’s rudeness and lack of PR ethics, the company released the following official statement:
Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.
Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.
Oh, Ryanair. Feel free to leave any insulting, grammatically-incorrect comments below…this “lunatic blogger” can take it.
![While everyone was stuffing themselves with barbecue and watching fireworks this weekend, The New York Times published an article that’s a must-read for all PR folks. The piece examines how the profession of public relations is changing in the digital age — it’s becoming more about bloggers and online influencers and less about just traditional print and broadcast journalists. Yet publicists are still necessary, because someone needs to know who these people are and how best to reach them.
The article also briefly touches upon the need for a new system of PR metrics, which is a topic we are constantly exploring here at M Booth:
Instead of calculating the impressions an article gets by estimating a publication’s circulation and pass-along rate, [Brian] Solis counts the number of people who tweeted about a company and their combined following, the number of retweets or clicks on links, as well as traffic from Facebook and other social networks.
Many people don’t realize that the PR profession is about much more than straight-up media relations, but it is — and it’s continuing to change before our eyes.
—Alyssa](http://28.media.tumblr.com/Ktn5HONUJpk3zs6ysWrFj0qno1_500.jpg)
