Being the savvy, well-connected PR pro that you are, you just helped bring about a great piece of editorial coverage in a major media outlet. The client is thrilled, you’ve won the praise and envy of your colleagues, all is well…except that online the article is behind a paywall so hardly anyone will ever see it. Doh!

There is a lot of discussion these days about paywalls, metered models, paytags for individual articles and the like. Publishers are desperately trying to come up with new business models and hopefully they’ll figure out a system that works. But from a media relations perspective this reminds me of the “if a tree falls in the forest” saying:

If an article about your company or client is behind a paywall and no one is around to read it, does it make an impact?

The credibility that comes from positive coverage in a respected media outlet remains, but a significant decrease in exposure certainly diminishes its overall impact.

The good news is that some of the models currently being considered include free access for users who come in from links in blogs and social media, so at least in some cases exposure will not be limited solely to paid subscribers. But it is too early to know how well these hybrid models will work so we may see publishers move to less porous paywalls over time. And some sites are already choosing to show only short excerpts of articles for free.

So if not many users are reading the coverage, just how valuable is it?

The rise of social media has already resulted in PR professionals relying less on the major media middle man and directly engaging their target audiences. So maybe it won’t really matter in the long run.

But companies like to frame newspaper articles and glossy magazine covers on their walls and PR professionals still need to deliver big wins. Has anyone ever framed a good comment thread from a company blog, or a collection of “likes” on a Facebook Page? So it’s hard to imagine mainstream media relations falling too far out of the PR toolkit.

Here’s another question:

Would you foot the bill to give users free access to coverage of your company or clients?

Imagine reaching out to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and offering to pay the bill for unlimited user access to content about your company. That would certainly be one way to try to maximize exposure.

But that would cause all kinds of problems, not the least of which the publications’ editorial integrity being called into question. Do sponsoring companies start getting more coverage? Does coverage tend to be more favorable because the content is essentially subsidized? It just wouldn’t work.

So as more major publishers move to subscription models, it will be interesting to see what impact this has on mainstream media relations.

Related posts:

1. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
2. Where Do You Want Your Social Media Press Releases to Live?
3. Does Social Media Increase a Journalist’s Value?

Unique, one-of-a-kind, best-of-breed…blah, blah, blah. We see this type of marketing speak over and over in press releases and promotional materials. And let’s be honest, we’ve all used it at one time or another — shame on us. But which buzzwords are the most overused?

I saw an item in PR Daily recently using the MoMA press release archive to demonstrate how press releases were much better years ago. That got me curious about which terms are currently being most abused. I hadn’t come across any anti-buzzword content lately so I thought I’d do my own research.

So I searched PRWeb’s press release archive for a selection of overused terms, buzzwords and marketing speak using a “site:prweb.com” search on Google, for example:

I opted for Google over PRWeb’s internal search because internal search results are not typically very good. I chose PRWeb over PR Newswire, Business Wire, etc. because it was among the first search-friendly services so I figure its content is fairly well indexed. And from what I can tell the PRWeb archive dates from 2006 so that is a good way to check press releases from just the last four years.

To come up with the list of buzzwords I started with the usual suspects then got some more ideas from Wikipedia and TechCrunch. This led me to David Meerman Scott, who I realized did something similar back in 2007 and then again in 2009 using a different set of terms and a larger range of press release services.

My list of terms could have gone on endlessly but I decided to cap it at 75 98 (the list is growing based on suggestions in the comments). A lot of what I have included is more marketing speak than technology or industry buzzwords, since I wanted to look at overused words across all industries. If there are any glaring omissions please let me know and I’ll add them in.

So here are the most overused buzzwords and marketing speak in press releases, based on the number of times they appear in releases currently archived on PRWeb. Any phrases that are sometimes hyphenated are grouped together with the non-hyphenated version (e.g. award-winning and award winning).

“Leader” was the most used term by far — funny how many companies, products and services anoint themselves as “the leader” or “a leader”. And it is not surprising to see “unique” in the top five since we all think we’re special, now don’t we.

I was glad to see “revolutionary” with less than 5,000 mentions. That one was overused like crazy in the 1990’s.

Which terms do you think are the biggest offenders? What would you love to see stricken from marketing speak forever?

Related posts:

1. A Look at Muck Rack’s Twitter Press Release Service, 51 Releases Later
2. Where Do You Want Your Social Media Press Releases to Live?
3. Videos in Press Releases are Cool – If They Provide Meaningful Content

Yesterday Cision released the results of their Social Media and Online Usage Study, a survey of social media usage by print and Web journalists. Conducted with Don Bates of George Washington University, the study measures the journalists’ use of and attitudes toward social media for researching and reporting stories.

While it could be argued that some of the findings come down to common sense, there are some interesting statistics in the report.

Here are a few things that I’d like to highlight:

55% of the journalists said that social media was “important” or “somewhat important” for reporting and producing stories:

I tend to focus on how social media helps news sites to engage with audiences and promote their content, but it also offers a great way for journalists to research stories and gain insight into trending topics and public sentiment.

The flip side to that is that not everything gleaned from monitoring social media activity is accurate or reliable. So it’s not surprising that 84% of the journalists indicated that news and information delivered via social media was “slightly less” or “much less” reliable/vetted than news delivered via traditional media. The number one reason for this lack of confidence was a “lack of fact-checking, verification or reporting standards.”

Blogs were by far the most used social media tool (I’ll avoid the discussion on whether a blog is a publishing platform or a social media tool – or both), but microblogging and social networking sites also had significant usage:

Social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook were particularly utilized by journalists writing for websites (71%) as opposed to print magazines (61%) or newspapers (49%). A similar difference exists for microblogging sites like Twitter.

Newspaper journalists were the most likely to report using no social media tools (21%).

The section on sources used had an interesting stat that relates to the discussion of press release usage by bloggers and local news sources. According to the survey:

Less experienced journalists use information from press releases and PR professionals more now than five years ago to write their stories – more so than their more experienced counterparts.

So I guess the takeaway there is go after the new folks.

There is a lot more data in the Cision study, so I recommend downloading it to get the whole story.

Related posts:

1. Does Social Media Increase a Journalist’s Value?
2. Social Media Visitors More Loyal But Still a Very Small Percentage of Site Traffic
3. Search Marketing Dwarfs Social Media in Interactive Marketing Budgets

A new whitepaper from Vocus with their 2010 PR Planning Survey results has some encouraging statistics about the increasing role of search engine optimization in the overall PR mix.

Not surprisingly, social media gets the most attention with 80% of respondents indicating they plan to do more with it in 2010. But 57% also indicated that they plan to increase their focus on SEO:

That’s good news, because even just 2-3 years ago many companies’ efforts to integrate SEO and PR activities did not extend much beyond press release optimization. That’s certainly important but it’s just one tactic; there are a lot more opportunities to explore.

Greg Jarboe and Lee Odden are at the forefront of evangelizing the importance of SEO in public relations and in teaching how to actually implement integrated efforts. Both rightly deserve credit for increasing awareness industry-wide.

Another chart of interest in the Vocus whitepaper demonstrates how social media monitoring has become an essential part of the PR practioner’s toolkit:

News monitoring and online media databases have traditionally received the lion’s share of PR tool spending. Over time I’d expect to see social media monitoring tools grab more budget at the expense of both, as more and more focus is placed on direct communication with target audiences.

I was surprised to see only 36% of respondents are using online press rooms, since that should be a fundamental part of any corporate website. Perhaps some of the respondents took the question to mean third-party online press room services.

Related posts:

1. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
2. Journalist Social Media Usage Increases, Concerns About Reliability of Information
3. Where Do You Want Your Social Media Press Releases to Live?

I’m definitely a fan of Muck Rack – it offers an easy way to track major media journalists on Twitter and pick up on trending topics. So I’ve been curious to see how their Twitter press release service would do.

Muck Rack charges $1 per character to send out a 140 character press release, with a minimum fee of $50. Releases are posted on their press release page (and in its RSS feed) and tweeted via @muckrack, which currently has 5k+ followers.

Based on their press release page and RSS feed, since the service launched in late July they’ve distributed 51 press releases, a small number being their own. That’s an average of about 4 press releases per week, so there’s not a lot of volume yet.

Of those 51 releases, 28 included a bit.ly URL, so I tried using bit.ly search to get click data on each of those shortened URLs. My intent was to show the average number of clicks for bit.ly URLs in Muck Rack releases. Unfortunately I discovered that the “total clicks” figures bit.ly reports from its search page are not very complete or accurate (you get better data on URLs you’ve personally shortened in your history when signed into bit.ly). So I wasn’t able to learn anything meaningful there.

bit.ly search did have data on the URL in the most recent Muck Rack press release, reporting 65 clicks:

That doesn’t measure up to the hundreds or thousands of clicks that popular content often gets via Twitter, but press releases are in a different category. It’s less important how many people click and much more important who is clicking and what they are doing with the information. If you look at @muckrack’s followers there’s a mix of media and non-media professionals, so there’s certainly an opportunity for the press releases to get some exposure.

To see how Muck Rack stacks up against the competition I checked the volume of activity on some other Twitter press release services, but there aren’t a lot of apples-to-apples comparisons to be made. Much of what’s out there is established press release services that now send out releases via Twitter in addition to their main distribution methods, or services like Brian Solis’ microPR that connect PR and media professionals without the use of press releases.

Probably the closest competitor is Journalism.co.uk in the UK, which charges £30 to distribute a release through Twitter and RSS. As of today their @pressreleases Twitter account has 6,600 followers, a bit more than Muck Rack’s 5,050. Their Latest Press Releases page shows their most recent 50 releases, the oldest being from October 7th. So in less than a month they’ve distributed as many releases as Muck Rack has done in its first three months.

Of course the larger question is whether or not companies will use third-party services to distribute press releases via Twitter when they can do so for free on their own. The answer lies in how much additional value the services can provide in terms of exposure and activity.

UPDATE:
In addition to hearing from Chris Evans-Roberts of Journalism.co.uk in the comments below, today I corresponded with Greg Galant, CEO of Sawhorse Media, the company behind Muck Rack. Greg noted that they encourage users to use bit.ly so that the metrics will be open and verified by a third party. He also agreed with the notion that it’s important who sees a press release, not how many people, and that they are focused on making the service more useful for journalists to increase its value.

Related posts:

1. Where Do You Want Your Social Media Press Releases to Live?
2. The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases
3. Videos in Press Releases are Cool – If They Provide Meaningful Content

Yesterday I received a copy of Rafe Needleman’s Pro PR Tips in the mail from ITDatabase. I’d seen some of the tips previously via Twitter and on the Pro PR Tips blog, but the book presents them in a nice, clean format that makes for a good read. I ended up going through all 100 tips in one sitting.

In the book the PR tips are broken down into various categories like PR basics, pitch tips, demo tips, etc. Some are practical and useful, others are pretty entertaining.

Among the ones I liked, here are a dozen that stood out:

Tip #7: Don’t thank me
When you thank me for a good review, I get suspicious. I think I must have missed something and let you off too easy.

Tip #14: Dirty Secret
Every now and then, press releases work. (Yes, writers hate blind press releases. Except when they are good).

Tip #16: Not BFFs
Dear PR Person,
We didn’t “work together” back in 1999. You pitched me. It was beautiful, but don’t make it more than it is.

Tip #21: Guest List
People I want to hear a pitch from, in descending order: CEO, CTO, VP Product Development, Janitor, Brand Marketing Manager.

Tip #25: Black list
Yes, I really do have a list of PR people I won’t talk to. It’s shorter than you probably think, though. Everyone deserves a second chance.

Tip #27: You do your job, I’ll do mine
Will we take a submitted article? I just threw up a bit in my mouth.

Tip #37 Uh-huh
If we’re doing a demo via phone and WebEx, at least 25% of the time that you’re talking, I’m reading my email.

Tip #42: Flair
A sure way to get your email noticed: Use colored backgrounds, fancy fonts, and complex templates. Journalists love that.

Tip #44: How not to pitch
“As seen on TechCrunch” is a bad way to start a pitch to me.

Tip #49: Where’s the fire?
The flag on your email says, “Urgent.” My brain says, “Meh.”

Tip #73: Decoder ring
You say: “Google’s entry into this space validates our market.” You mean: “We’re screwed.”

Tip #74: Restroom pitch
Yes, I would like to hear your pitch, but not until you zip up, wash your hands, and we leave the bathroom.

What are some of your favorites? By the way, ITDatabase is giving away free copies of the book to tech PR professionals; you can fill out a form on their blog.

Related posts:

1. Google News Optimization Tips
2. Fortune 100 Need to Get More Creative with Twitter
3. Paywalls, Media Coverage and User Access: What’s a PR Pro to Do?

Executive quotes in press releases are notorious for lacking any kind of substantial information. It’s the most common place to find fluff in a release, and they tend to be largely ignored.

Yesterday’s Microsoft – Yahoo press release featured video quotes from both Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, partially shown in this screenshot:

On the surface this seems pretty cool, and the press release even includes links to additional video clips for broadcast media:

But unfortunately these videos offer little more than a multimedia version of the typical executive fluff.

I commend Microsoft’s PR firm Waggener Edstrom for incorporating video content into the release, but it would have been great if the videos had been more substantial.

They can probably counter that both videos have had a significant number of views. But that’s all the more reason to make the most of the opportunity.

Do the videos add value or are they more executive fluff? Watch and judge for yourself.

Related posts:

1. Great Example of a Multimedia News Article from ESPN.com
2. A Look at Muck Rack’s Twitter Press Release Service, 51 Releases Later
3. The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases

The discussion about HubSpot’s post on the syndication of social media press releases vs. traditional press releases called my attention again to PitchEngine, a platform for creating and sharing social media releases (SMRs).

PitchEngine is a good tool that provides a useful service, and it’s reasonably priced (in fact it’s free if you only keep your SMRs on their site for 30 days). But what caught my eye were the options for archiving releases and creating a custom newsroom.

With archiving you can use RSS to feed links to your PitchEngine SMRs into your own newsroom, as GerberGear does:

Or you can host a custom newsroom entirely on PitchEngine.com, as Brunton does:

Both options create opportunities for additional exposure on PitchEngine, and they are useful for sites that lack the resources to maintain their own pressrooms. However there is also a downside. Whether it is individual releases or your entire newsroom, hosting on PitchEngine means that the content is not on your site, so your domain loses the SEO benefit of the links pointing to that content. Essentially you are helping to build up PitchEngine.com’s link equity as opposed to your own.

Some may consider this issue a worthwhile trade-off, if they feel they will gain greater overall exposure through a third-party site than they would by hosting their releases on their own site. However long-term it is much better to strengthen your own domain as opposed to someone else’s.

I want to stress that this issue is not unique to PitchEngine, it applies to many third-party release hosting services. For example on The New York Times Company’s corporate site, press releases are hosted by Thomson Reuters on http://phx.corporate-ir.net URLs:

Last year Todd Defren wrote that social media releases are best kept in your company newsroom for a variety of reasons. Specific to the SEO implications, I believe that is still the best approach. Keeping the content on your own domain allows you to benefit from internal and inbound links to both the newsroom itself and individual releases.

Related posts:

1. A Look at Muck Rack’s Twitter Press Release Service, 51 Releases Later
2. The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases
3. Videos in Press Releases are Cool – If They Provide Meaningful Content