One of those savvy PR pros published a beautiful pitch this week that exemplifies exactly what I’ve been getting at – throw out what you know about press release templates, wire distribution and weak-sauce efforts and shake what your mamma gave you. Exercise your writing chops and create something great.

In this case, ironically, Dogfish Head’s Justin Williams happens to be a former journalist and he knows how to tell a story. Click the image to read the full pitch.

So, as Google continues to crack down on third-party sites with duplicate content and put the squeeze on SEO platforms, it’s high-time you start focusing on content, not distribution.

Foster and cultivate your own, home-grown networks and start being a publisher. The sooner you transform your mad press release writing skills into something more consumer (or customer)-facing, the longer you’ll be relevant.

Just sayin’.

Everyone in public relations or journalism knows it. It’s a love/hate relationship. In many cases, we make friends and contacts that mutually benefit each other’s careers. In other cases, we do what we gotta do to make our client or managing editor happy. Some PR pros are better than others, while some journalists are easier to work with than others – it’s just the name of the game.

I’ve split my career on both sides of the media relations aisle. First as a journalist, and later a PR pro. I’ve always thought that both disciplines were very similar, but not exactly synonymous. In the past, there has been a very distinct line between the two, but that is all about to change. Welcome to 2012 – the year it all turns upside-down.

We all know what’s happening with journalists.
The newspapers (that are left) aren’t hiring journalists. And, if they are, those coveted positions are few and far between and certainly don’t qualify as “get rich quick” schemes. Media outlets big and small face limited resources and new constraints on their time and revenue potential. The long-form skills that used to set them apart from the amateur blogger are now out-of-fashion. News consumers prefer short form, media-rich experiences.
Granted, some exceptional journalists – those with a decent brand and some business savvy – are making it work. They understand that content comes in many shapes and formats and their adapting quite well.

Many PR pros are walking towards early retirement.
I see it all the time. Traditional PR, traditional measurement and a traditional mindset have worked for them, so they just keep with it. They continue to face pressure from potential new clients who want something different, so they hire younger or try to out source “social media” in hopes they can keep pace (but thinking deep-down that this is a passing trend).
The PR pros that are seeing the most success are the creative ones. The pros that have seen past the old skill sets and are becoming an integral partner of their clients. They’re more than their “PR voice,” they are their eyes and ears too. Their listening and engaging and most importantly, their telling their client’s stories – not just spamming it out to journalists and hoping for the best.

Journalists begin to steal some PR thunder.

Despite the warning signs (and blog posts from people like me), PR pros who are still wrapped up in press releases will miss out on a far bigger opportunity – brand content creation.
First, larger brands began to hire journalists and bring them in-house as content chiefs. Robert Scoble and Rackspace come to mind. And, if you’re not into bloggers, take my friend Justin Williams, a former journalist for The News Journal, a Gannett Newspaper, who left the newsroom in favor of the bar room joining Dogfish Head Beer as their Chief Storyteller.
Now, however, it’s getting even easier for brands to find journalists to generate their content.

As reported in Ad Age last week, a new startup called Contently has found that there’s more demand for quality freelance content coming from brands-turned-publishers than traditional media companies. Contently lets journalists create online portfolios and profiles for free and provides tools to brands to find the right journalist for a project, and manage assignment workflow and payments.
So, instead of PR pros filling the content need for their clients (like they should be), journalists will instead fill the void. And good for them. I’m a proponent for anything that moves the ball forward and disrupts the status quo (for obvious reasons).
If you’re a PR pro, you need to listen up. Brands and businesses are the publishers of the future. Media outlets are your competitors now, not your biggest allies. If you’re not finding ways for your client(s) to be the best content producers for whatever industry they’re in, then you aren’t doing much, quite honestly. If you think press releases and old school distribution channels like wire services will get it done, then you will have a lot to talk about post PR career.

Companies like H & R Block and PepsiCo have discovered this and are capitalizing. (Disclosure: Both PepsiCo and H&R Block are PitchEngine customers). Metzger & Associates, a PR firm in Boulder, Colorado who represents H&R Block set out to help the tax preparation giant become a viable resource for customers searching for tax answers. By publishing hundreds of tax tips, Metzger helped H&R Block rise to the top of the search engine food chain just when consumers were searching most, in February and March. You can read about Metzger’s success here on the Cision blog.

PepsiCo hijacked the SXSW story this past year creating a live channel online and running it non-stop during the popular Austin conference. Former PR Newswire staple, David Weiner, and team interviewed celebrities, tech speakers and more serving as the media outlet for the entire conference, not just the PepsiCo scene. The content they produced was shared in wholesale fashion.

Brands will gain major distribution outside of PR.

Before now, brands just couldn’t get distribution for their content unless it was newsworthy. And even then, some journalist had to find it interesting enough to rewrite and distribute to their media outlet’s audiences. PR relied on PR wire services for third party placement – buried on sites like Bloomberg or Forbes – but not accessible by a single consumer directly. See Magic Behind PR Distribution for more on that.

From now on, paid distribution will provide a huge audience for branded content.

Outbrain automatically places your content at the foot of articles on sites like CNN, Fox News, Mashable, TMZ, Aol – you name it. Outbrain uses a cost-per-click model similar to Google AdWords. You provide a piece of great content and decide how much you want to spend per-click. You only pay for the views you get – unlike the old PR wire model where you pay a hefty fee regardless of placement.

Who wins the battle?

Brands and consumers win. And that’s why I love it. Regardless of who creates the content, the best will rise to the top. We’ll see more and more vertical content that is hyper-related to our interests – think American Express OPEN Forum, but for whatever you’re interested in.

So, what’s next?

> You’ll see brands do amazing things.
Red Bull has it’s own production company. And Red Bull Media House and Brain Farm put out an incredible film called, The Art of Flight in 2011. It’s a snowboard film of epic proportions that boasts the most advanced and progressive film making technology ever used in action sports. It’s a result of brands doing things they know their customers want, instead of someone else doing it and trying to get it sponsored. It’s a small example of where we’re heading.

> You’ll evangelize for brands without feeling like a marketer.
When brands create great content, people share it. We’ll continue to see more brands become publishers and provide cool things for us to talk about. The focus will be less on the interaction we saw during the rise of social and more on content. To be more specific, it’s not just going to be a customer service play anymore.

> You’ll get more of what you need.
Brands are experts in their industries. After all, they’re the ones who set the bar, figured out their customers, or solved some problem. In many cases, consumers want to hear from the experts, not a buffer.

As a PR guy, I spent a lot of time getting people straight to the source – whether that be a product developer or an engineer. They didn’t want to hear my iteration, they wanted to plain talk. It might not be as sexy, but it’s certainly going to get to the point.

> You’ll become a better storyteller
You’ve written AP format press releases for so long you could do it in your sleep. Drop a couple quotes in a template and it’s all good, right? Now, you can start telling the story that your clients want people to read, not the one a journalist decides to tell.

This is your opportunity to flex your understanding of news consumers and the brands you represent. It’s your chance to steal a piece of the advertising budget and increase your value without sacrifice. If you don’t, there are journalists waiting in the wings who will be happy to pick up the change.

So what’s it going to be?

This week, I sat down via Skype with John Lucchetti of Backstage Business – A Behind the Scenes Community for Digital Media Entrepreneurs. Here’s what we discussed:
http://backstagebiz.com/2011/12/online-pr-with-pitchengine-ceo-jason-kintzler/

PR Wire Distribution is Magic

I get asked all of the time about my thoughts on PR distribution. My answer is usually this: If you think you need to distribute your story to journalists, first, consider your goals.

The music industry used to rely solely on record labels for distribution. Then, artists and consumers realized there were alternate ways to discover and purchase music. Sound familiar? PR wire services, like record labels, are the “deciders of news.” Not only do they decide what’s newsworthy by vetting the content you produce, they also own the content you publish on their sites. Then, they resell it to financial news sites and other third party outlets.

Another little-known fact is that ALL of the wire services utilize the same distribution mechanism (it’s called, Comtex) to publish stories on downstream sites. It’s questionable whether your audience reads any of these downstream sites, which typically display your release in places hardly visible to anyone.

Here’s an example:
I paid a quick visit to the homepage of Marketwire, the Canada-based PR wire service. I chose a random press release: http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Xicato-Announces-New-Spot-Module-Range-1392361.htm. Then, I “Googled” the headline. I found a couple of those downstream posts, like this one: http://finance.bnet.com/bnet/news/read?GUID=17063812.

At first glance, you’re like, “Cool, there’s our story on BNET!” But, with a little deeper investigation and a visit to http://bnet.com, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything on the brand, Xicato. Yes, Marketwire did what they said they would do by publishing on news websites. But, was your goal to get indexed on random sites, or to reach people? Was it worth the bill? That’s a question you’ll have to answer yourself. And I’m not just singling out Marketwire – all of the services do the same thing, since they feed their vetted news through Comtex.

Usefulness aside, for decades many public companies were required, by law, to utilize a wire srvice. The SEC required what they defined at the time as, “simultaneous distribution”. Now, however, we can all distribute content simulataneously and alert people faster than practically any of those services. To their credit, the SEC has started to loosen those requirements and companies like Expedia, Google and others have followed suit, choosing to publishing their earnings information and press content on their own sites rather than via a PR wire service (We launched our Embedded Newsroom to enable brands to put their news on their own sites with this in mind).

Because I founded PitchEngine, doesn’t mean I can’t be objective to what’s happening in the industry. I was blogging about these topics long before PitchEngine and I will continue to. The reason PitchEngine is thriving is because communicators are discovering and having success with the alternatives. They’re starting to ask “How can I enagage with our customers” instead of, “Where does my press release go.” We see the future of PR as Brand Journalists creating Consumer-Facing PR content.

I’ve met some smart people who work at each of the wire services throughout the past couple of years. We even brought on former PR Newswire President, Dave Armon, as an Advisor. What I’ve learned is that people know what’s happenning, but they’re in a tricky spot. Regardless of the monitoring services they buy, or the social share buttons they add to press releases, their business model relies on distribution. And that model is not sustainable. This is why they won’t just, “build a PitchEngine,” as I’ve heard people mention before. Shifting from their distribution model is like turning the Titanic. That is assuming their planning to turn.

New Distribution:
One of my favorite examples of “New Distribution” happened a few months back when the iPhone 4 launched. Here’s the story of how a pitch™ and a tweet propelled massive distribution to more than 1.3 million people – who actually cared about the content. And here’s an exampleof how the press release of tomorrow can be a sales tool as much as an information source. Want to hear more? Just ask me, the list goes on for days.

I’m all ears to hear your take. What do you think the future of distribution looks like? Will you continue to spend the same amount on wire services as you did in the past? Journalists, do you rely on PR wire services for content, or do you head to Google or Twitter like the rest of us?

Jason Kintzler
@jasonkintzler and on The Facebook

I’ve been a vocal proponent for steering PR pros away from using the standard, AP-style press release exclusively. I think good writing is still critical, but the stale template makes us lazy as communicators.

When we set out to build PitchEngine back in 2007, one of the fundamental questions we had to answer was about the type of content we would allow. The wire services like PR Web, PR Newswire, Business Wire and Marketwire all have editorial guidelines that prohibit content they deem not “newsworthy.” Some of the services have editorial departments, while other have mathematical formulas for how they vet press releases. I firmly believe that the future of public relations is consumer-facing. And, consumers don’t read press releases, regardless of what the holdouts will claim. The gatekeepers of the past will be left holding the gates. And Chris Brogan‘s “gate jumpers” will pass them up.

Ad Age ran a great article this week about this shift toward conversational content this past week. It’s only going to get more important for communicators.

Influencers, which include journalists, bloggers, and your customers, are all news consumers. They read content because it looks engaging. That means you must have more than a snappy headline these days to garner attention. What’s more, you have to make it concise, conversational and catchy. That’s why PitchEngine has made such an impact on the PR industry in just a few short years. It enables communicators to be creative on behalf of their brands and share their stories, announcements and digital flyers with actual people who care. Why? because you took to the time know them.

Beth Mansfield uses PitchEngine for Carl’s Jr. and exemplifies the combination of creative and formal brand journalism. Take a look at this pitch, targeted to the restaurant’s demographic, an 18-24 year old male. From the headline to the Twitter Pitch, there’s not much about this that screams “press release.” Instead, it’s a fun, conversational piece of content – a pitch – with the wherewithal to go viral with her audience.

Think about it.
- As a communicator, you are now a brand journalist.
- You (or your brand) own your audience – you’re not just renting it from a news outlet.

So, do me a favor. Next time you get ready to share some news, or a story about your client or brand – write it like a blog post. Write like you would like to be written to.
Breakout of the old and get with the now. It can be very liberating.

- @jasonkintzler