And why not? After all, it seems like common sense that journalists don’t like being lied to.
To emphasise the point - and with great foreboding - The Times home news editor Martin Barrow warned PROs: ‘If we know you’re lying, we will work extra hard to ensure we expose you and your company.’
In the steaming cauldron of PR sins, saying “no comment” suggests you have something to hide; trying to “spin” your communications is a way of dressing up something nasty as something nice and, finally, “lying” is just plain stupid.
Anyone with the job of speaking to the media on behalf of their organisation could do worse than take the advice put succinctly in Frank Jefkins’ book, Public Relations: “If PR is to be credible, it must avoid false image making…the media are prejudiced about PR to the extent of expecting false image polishing.”
If you’re lucky, the instances of having to break bad news to the wider world while journalists or bloggers bay for blood at your gates will be rare. And when it does happen, there are ways of tackling it - but lying isn’t one of them.
The urge to save whales, turtles and mountain gorillas always benefits from the emotional impact humans feel when a species appears to be on its way out.
But when it comes to journalists, who’d've thought anyone outside the media world would care, never mind a Labour MP.
But Midlands MP, Mike O’Brien is bidding for a journalism conservation prize by accusing Trinity Mirror of “serious attacks on news, journalists and journalism” with its plans to cut jobs in Coventry and Birmingham.
It’s tough times making newspapers profitable and an alternative to keep quality journalism viable is, well, to forget the profit bit. Such is the idea of MinnPost, a Minnesota-based, not-for-profit news site that keeps journalism alive through reader donations rather than advertising alone, which - as founder Joel Kramer discusses on The Marketing Edge podcast - is no longer willing to fund quality news content.
Adopting a journalist to save them from extinction may not yet be necessary, but if ordinary people and MPs care enough to back their news gatherers that suggests a healthy society at work.
I’ve spent the last few years envisaging an application that would allow me to know what my journalist contacts were up to, minute-by-minute. I’ve thought about a messenger-based system that would allow me to drop a quick note to them to see if it’s a convenient time to chat about a possible news angle on behalf of my client because there’s nothing worse than calling when they’re on deadline.
Well it’s arrived and it’s growing in popularity. If Facebook is the new Second Life, then Twitter is the new Facebook. It’s the tool us PRs have been waiting for.
For those of you who haven’t come across Twitter, I encourage you to watch this video courtesy of Commoncraft.
Exploring Twitter from a PR perspective has been interesting and has shown initial potential but it needs to be accepted by the masses to make it truely useful. Here are my thoughts on potential future uses of Twitter for PRs:
- Online Research: Drawing on a pool of social media enthusiasts (why else would they have Twitter accounts?) has turned Twitter into a great resource for research. Answers to questions are incredibly quick and offer great insight into areas you might not be familiar with. Working on adventure sports for one of my clients, I had to wade through media databases and avoid the much-hyped but low traffic websites. After requested help on Twitter, within minutes I had reached a community of adventure sports enthusiats who offered guidance on forums where extreme sports fans actually interact. Thanks everyone!
- Contacts: I wonder how many journalists out there would sign up for Twitter if they knew it would put an end to calls and emails from PRs at inappropriate times? Well only 27 so far following a search for “UK” and “journalist”. They’re obviously all too shy to put on their real profession. If newsdesks had Twitter at their disposal, the relationship between hacks and flacks could change dramatically. From instant updates like “Don’t bother me. I’m on deadline!” through to “Looking for urgent case study about….” journalists should be using Twitter as a tool to interact with PRs. If newsdesks are evolving into 24-hour bodies, maybe it’s time for their journalists to move away from resources like ResponseSource to a more immediate communication tool.
- Driver to website or blog: Driving interested audiences to a particular website is a regular occurance on the application. Most of the people I follow are comentators in the social media field and so links on Twitter to new posts on their blog make it easy for me to make a snap judgement on whether I’m interested in the topic or not. As previously noted, Gordon Brown, or rather Number 10, uses Twitter to publicise the PM’s current activities and highlights press releases from their press office. I have no doubt I’m one of the first to read these releases and I like to think journalists are using this as a resource to follow the PMs movements.
- Listen to the conversation: Using tools such as Tweetscan, PRs can search for who is talking about their brand and in what context. (Thanks for that one Jon!)
It wouldn’t surprise me if companies with busy press offices set up their own Twitter feeds to announce press releases, but don’t bank on having masses of followers. Brands with a strong online following and dedicated brand advocates, such as Apple, will benefit highly from this but it will be interesting to see which companies experiment with this tool as it gains popularity online and with mainstream media.
I agree with James Horton that the key to Twitter for PRs is to experiment - the same philosophy behind any new media tool - but don’t forget that this is a community. Don’t see this solely as a resource. Ultimately, the more you put in, the more you’ll get out.
