Sometimes it takes more than a webinar or a whitepaper to get the point across. 
If you (or your boss) identify with any of these, it might be time for a healthy dose of reality.
Does the sound like your PR firm? Email me - I have a long list of savvy, scrappy agencies and PR pros ready to roll.

12 Signs Your PR Needs An Intervention

• Your press kit has to be bound, stacked or downloaded.
• You have a hanging file full of pull quotes.
• You refer to spamming journalists as, “pr distribution.” 
• Your idea of PR software is Microsoft Word.
• You plan to keep pace with trends by hiring younger.
• Your Twitter feed includes a link to a doc, pdf or white paper.
• You think you can make your press release “social” by adding a “share this” button.
• Your PR tools include a fax machine and a bluetooth headset.
• Your press release reads like a tag cloud of keywords, an seo masterpiece.
• You rely solely on media outlets to reach your customers or consumers.
• You’ve sent an email in the last 6-months that included an attached press release.
• You still think hashtags (###) signify “the end.” 

Cure your lackluster PR. Fill your prescription at pitchengine.com.

Build digital press kits, pitches and newsrooms. Create engaging, consumer-facing PR content  - optimized for search and social media.
Get the word out™ to real people about what you do. 

PitchEngine is good medicine. 

Call 307-855-4011, Email or Tweet us.
Sorry, no faxes  

Follow Jason on Twitter. 

Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to sit down and visit face-to-face with PR professionals from many industries. Each, with their own ideas and misconceptions of social media. Sarah Evans and I relish every chance we get to set the record straight and help communicators “get real” about social media and their public relations efforts. I find myself repeating what has become a new mantra of mine, “In PR distribution, if there is an easy-button, don’t push it!”

A Little History
When I set out to create PitchEngine a couple of years ago, I never imagined it would be as robust and dynamic as it has become. I set out to develop a tool to make the workflow of public relations and media professionals easier and well, better. As a former journalist turned PR guy, I was annoyed at the antiquated methods of exchanging word doc attachments, ftp-ing photos and all the other “rigid” ways of sharing content.

I had to start by creating a new “press release” format that enabled us to include all sorts of pieces that we needed to share – pdfs, powerpoint presentations, videos, images, audio, etc., As I researched what was out there, I discovered that something similar had been conceptualized by Todd Defren. It was called the Social Media Press Release (SMPR). It’s important to point out – I didn’t build PitchEngine around this concept. At the time, it didn’t have much adoption, it was simply a mock-up of how something like this should look. The SMPR name seemed like a good fit at the time and made a lot of sense to me as a PR guy. So, I dropped the “press” form the name and called our template the Social Media Release (SMR). Little did I know, the very openness of Todd’s great concept would also be its biggest challenge.

Muddy Waters and a Slippery Slope
Todd is a thought leader in the industry. I respect what Todd developed in the SMPR concept and for all those who pushed the idea out to the industry (Chris Heuer, Brian Solis, Scott Monty, among others). Those who adopted the idea and implemented it in some fashion were early-adopters. However, as PitchEngine grew in popularity and more and more people flocked to build and share SMRs (24,000+ brands, 68,000 SMRs already), the industry and its established PR services also embraced the Todd’s SMPR idea. Unfortunately, in many ways the “SM” (social media) in SMPR  has become nothing more than buzzwords for the sake of marketing up-sell.

I’ve been very open about my views on the misconceptions/misrepresentation of the SMR:

• You cannot make a press release social.
  - Associated Press (AP) format is not conversational or social.
  - If you start by opening a Microsoft Word, you’re probably missing the point.
• Share buttons do not make a press release social.
  - Just because you have the option to share a link to a bunch of text, doesn’t mean you should.
• Multimedia does not make a press release social, it makes it more engaging.
  - I applaud those people who take the time to make their content more engaging and the services that enable them to do it (affordably).
• Social means it should be living and in real-time.
  - It shouldn’t “die” once you send it out through a wire service with no ability to edit, add to or create conversations.

Moving Forward and Staking Our Claim
I desperately want to avoid nit-picking our way through the PR landscape about what the SMR or SMPR is defined as and what it provides. So, we’re going a different direction. The PitchEngine Social Media Release will be reinvented and reintroduced as the Pitch™. Yes, Tom Forenski. Yes, Peter Shankman. The traditional press release is dead! At least, to us it is. I call it “word doc PR” and it’s as played out as Christmas carols in June. Boss require it still? Just include it as an attachment if you have to. Or send it through a traditional service and embed a link to something much better.

Whether you’re pitching a 3-billion dollar product to the world, or telling your neighbors there’s a garage sale on Tuesday, a pitch is a pitch. There will be good ones, and there will be bad ones – we’re all about enabling you to pitch whatever it is you want to pitch in a concise, cool and more conversational way.

In the coming weeks, PitchEngine will roll out more creative tools to help businesses and organizations tell their stories, get found on search engines and interact with media, consumers and other online influencers. It’s time to put those documents in box, figuratively speaking, and take your pitch to the cloud. Pitch stories, pitch yourself, pitch anything. This is PitchEngine.

Follow me @jasonkintzler for more!

photo by Laura Gainor

I had a great time at Marquette University this past week, speaking to about 300 people as part of the PR + Social Media Summit put on by Comet Branding in Milwaukee. The twitter stream during my presentation was incredible and once again demonstrated to me that people are ripe for change in the PR industry.

But who the heck is going to lead this change? With all due respect to the PRSA, PR Week and others, I’m just not seeing anyone step up to the plate and tell it like it is, for the sake of the profession. Is it a big secret? If you want to be part of a sinking ship, do things like you’ve done them for the past decade and see where it takes you. Yes, I do realize that you made money doing it that way, plenty of money – but that’s going to change. If you’re still writing traditional press releases read my last post: 5 Ways to kill the Press Release. 

The thought leaders do exist
Brian Solis, Peter Shankman and Sarah Evans are doing what they can to open the eyes of an eager industry. I too am jumping at every opportunity to inject some passion into the process. Truth is, it’s the youngsters that are tasked with getting it done. As agencies begin to hire, they look for college grads to bring their “social media swagger” and inject it into their shop. But who’s teaching the kids?

The good news is there are a few Universities being proactive. They’re teaching social media skills and story telling (for people, not robots) right alongside AP-style and the fundamentals of public relations. Schools like the University of Oregon, Kent State, Wisconsin, Auburn and Marquette (one of my favs) have integrated PitchEngine into their curriculum to help students tell better stories. Professors like Bill Sledzik (Kent State) and Gee Ekachai (Marquette) who are giving graduates something more than fundamentals to take with them into the workforce. It’s been so successful for students that we’re creating a university software package to make it easier for schools to teach.

Who is succeeding now?
I believe it’s the smaller PR firms with creativity and grit that have big clients clamoring for the next generation PR. Social media aside, they understand that the PR process isn’t cookie cutter and that good PR doesn’t stop with a lead list, search engine optimization or the press release.

On the plane back from Denver I realized that now is the time to change course. I am recommitting myself to helping those who see into the future and feel ill-equipped. For those that don’t get a whole lot of inspiration form the pillars of public relations community.

I’ll start with this blog and next year’s speaking schedule, but I won’t stop there. I’m going to make it a point to rain on the parade of the “easy-button” generation of template-driven, over-optimized bad PR people. Change won’t come from recognition, it will come through adoption.

Who’s with me?
@jasonkintzler

share this post: http://post.ly/ZI3u

I’ve waited almost two years to pull the trigger on a post about the death of the traditional press release. Why? Because for the longest time, I thought it was just hype. Now that I’ve made the rounds speaking at PR, marketing and journalism events and conferences I am convinced – it’s time to face the music. 

No one likes to write them.
No one likes to receive them.
No one likes to read them.

In 1906, the press release was born out of necessity. It was actually very high-tech back in the day, serving as a “plug-and-play” for journalists who wished to typeset the text right into their newspaper article. With the internet came the ability to “simultaneously distribute” press information, which led to where we are today – an antiquated way of communicating news and announcements. But there is hope for the future, as long as we ditch the traditional methods and get savvy. Here’s how:

1.  Stop writing for your CEO and start writing for your audience.
Anytime someone criticizes the “death of the traditional press release” idea, they always point to good writing being the solution. But if you’re writing what the corporate mandate dictates, you’re likely missing the point.

Beth Mansfield, Director of Public Relations at CKE Restaurants is masterful at writing for the Carls Jr.’s key demographic, an 18 to 34-year-old male. Headlines like, “Badda Bing, Badda Boom: Carl’s Jr. Goes Italian With New Parmesan Chicken Sandwich” or “Bourbon: It’s Not Just for Breakfast Anymore” are written for who they’re trying to reach, their consumer. 

“The days of a dry, boring product press release are gone. We keep Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s guests coming back by having innovative products. We have to be innovative and engaging in our press releases. By speaking to our target audience of young, hungry guys in our press release, we encourage dialogue and see far broader pick up of our product news,” said Mansfield.

If the goal is SEO, then don’t bother trying to write to your audience. If the goal is to be engaging and to get readers to share and talk about your content, then write what you would want to read. What the SEO gurus don’t tell you is that Facebook has already surpassed Google and now drives more traffic to key sites than Google. This means that soon, a well shared post will be just as important as an “SEO optimized” robotic headline and subhead that is heavy on the keyword links.

Besides, the logic is simple: You can’t make a press release social. Traditional, AP-style press releases just aren’t conversational. You can’t cram a bunch of text and a word doc into twitter and expect it to play. Companies are now driving sales through social interaction with consumers. That’s a metric we can leverage.

2.  Include shareable content
If your producing a traditional press release and then adding an image or a video, make sure those assets are shareable. What is the purpose of including assets if a journalist or blogger can’t use them? Many wire services offer multimedia up-sell options, but few of them actually allow you to embed video from YouTube or photos from Flickr. This is part of the social media integration I always talk about. And one of the big differences between traditional and social releases.

Tom Foremski proclaimed in a recent post, “Why are people unable to understand the value of putting links into PR copy? Do they know how to create a link and embed it in their copy?”

3.  Throw out the traditional metrics
 So, you’re measuring the success of your PR efforts by calculating the publications ad value equivalent? Hmm. Makes sense, since the traditional advertising model is working so well…Yikes.

There are a million…okay, a hundred social media monitoring sites out there. Start tracking how your release travels and performs across the social web. Stop relying on services that autopost your content on “downstream websites” as proof of performance.

4.  Stop using Word
Seems simple, but it’s a buzz kill from the get-go.

“Sweet, I’ve completed my document and now I have a file attachment to send around. People love downloading files, right?”

Sound silly? Is it you? At the risk of sounding “salesy,” get on PitchEngine and create a shareable, social release from the start. Hundreds of PR firms are already making the complete switch away from Microsoft Office to our cloud-based platform. Think of it this way, you wouldn’t create a post in Word and then copy and paste it into Facebook would you? (If you answered, “Yes,” please disregard #4 entirely). 

5. Be creative
As PR professionals, brand managers or entrepreneurs, we should be passionate about what we’re pitching. If we’re not, we should be honest. Either way, if there is an “easy button” in the PR process, don’t push it. Be creative and you will be rewarded.

Andrew Fowler uses humor to break the ice with journalist friends and potential PR contacts. 

“Think of the press release as the Ring in Lord of the Rings. Remember what happened to Gollum? He got super ugly and went nuts. Poor Frodo suffered too but look how happy he (and everyone) was when he finally destroyed the Ring in the depths of Mt. Doom. Rid yourself of the Ring (press release) and it will open up all kinds of possibilities to do interesting, creative and humorous things with your PR content,” explains Fowler.

Think about the pitch as the new release. Make it tasty, but concise. Too much of a good thing is too much. We’ve already discovered that social media releases on PitchEngine are more engaging than traditional releases shared on the wires (Alexa.com)

If you give any of these methods a try, you’re going to begin to see the light. If you’re worth your salt as a PR pro, you have built relationships with journalists, bloggers and consumers in one form or another. Why subject them to a half-hearted effort by pushing them a press release? Send them something they can sink their teeth into and you’ll see your success multiply.

6. What would you add?
How else can we kill the traditional release, once and for all? Leave your suggestions for number 6 below. 

And follow me: @jasonkintzler for continuing discussion.