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Effective Media Representation - Traditional and Modern Media
By Jamie | February 23, 2007
When dealing with your business and its media representation with traditional based organisations such as Newspapers, TV and Radio, can you use the same methods with more modern media platforms such as news portals, web sites, social networking sites, weblogs (or blogs) often described as Social Media?
To find out more about approaching traditional media organisations, I attended a talk on Effective Media Representation given by Graham Birse and Graham Bell from the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce. At the end of the night a question was raised about how small businesses should approach on-line media companies. Given the limited time this was briefly answered with an example of being the first to comment on article that is posted to the BBC or Scotsman web site, which is something I’ve been preaching to our web site clients who run a weblog site. Further on in this post I would like to point out a few developing technologies that could help your business exposure on-line.
Comments on the Scotsman Web Site
The talk itself was focused on writing a press release for your business and the best ways to catch the media’s attention. Both speakers had a lot of experience to draw upon which made the talk very informative and interesting. Although the talk was only the tip of the iceberg on the subject matter they mention…
- what makes a story
- best ways to approach the media
- how modern journalism works
- selecting the right media platform
- how stories can become twisted
- PR companies
- Press Releases
- What won’t interest the media companies
I think traditional media organisations are still very much king but over time more and more people are embracing modern media platforms over traditional ones. In some cases modern media can reach more people than traditional ones, but more importantly they can reach the right audience, quality over quantity. Having said all that, traditional media have been around for alot longer than the new kids on the block. So I felt that alot of what Brise and Bell where saying could equally be applied to more modern ones. Here is a quick summary of the slide hand outs…
What makes a story:-
- Something Happens
- Some Where
- Some Time
- About Something
Making the story effective
- Who do you want to know this?
- How can you tell them?
- What can you say?
- Who can you tell?
Apparently some well know PR saying, Rudyard Kipling
“There are six men and true they taught me all I knew. They are: How and Why and What and When and Where and Who“
Approaches to the media
- Reactive
- Press Release
- Direct Story Placement
- Letter
- Opinion Piece
- Campaign
- Showboating
It’s okay to…
- State facts
- Have a strong opinion
- Talk as normal
- Use humour appropriately
- Use a pithy phrase
- Think of your audience
- Be positive
Weblogs, Press Release and Google Rankings
Graham Bell mention that journalists receive the majority of stories via email. That your press releases or a response to an article should be in the body of the email and not as in Word or a PDF attachment, a journalist simply doesn’t have time to open every email they receive. Now anyone who reads Terinea Tech Tips (Our Company Blog Site) will notice we keep banging on about blogging and how important it can be for your business. I would say you should not only email the journalist but also post it to your web site or better still your weblog. If your press release or your opinion to an article gets published online with a link to your blog or web site then this maybe worth more than the initial public exposure.
“Spending time writing a quality press release that is only discarded by a journalists delete key is a waste of time. The clever person would back both horses, emailing the press release and posting it as a blog!”
Why? Well web sites like the Scotsman and BBC News are ranked very highly by search engines such as Google and Yahoo. How do you get your company web site listed above your competitors in search engine listings, by being linked to web sites that are ranked higher than you. The more links to your site from quality sources the better. Even if the article isn’t published you should consider that search engines love fresh content, web sites with stale content will drift down the page listings. Another thing to consider are keywords you have used in your blog post. For example my company called Terinea is based in Edinburgh, and what have I mentioned right at the top of the post, Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce. Although my golden rule when trying to educate your users or potential customers via your blog, never try a direct sell, I sure this also apply’s to traditional media organisations. If you give good advice, people will ask or seek further information about goods and services you sell.
Find out more on blogging and business…
- Why Business Blogs Are Important
- The 12 reasons why UK businesses don’t blog
- One Red Paper Clip - The Power of Blogging
- Blogs and Blogging by the BBC
- Setting Up Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer - If you plan to blog, use Microsoft’s Blogging Client, its free, very easy to use and looks like Word
People Power
When you have published your carefully crafted well written story to your weblog site and the journalist has deleted the email from there inbox in a blink of an eye, what next? Well over the past couple of years has seen the rise of community driven portals such as digg and Newsvine. An extract from Wikipedia explains more…
“It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many other news sites employ”
At first glance Newsvine looks like any other news web sites expect the content is derived from other web sites and weblogs submitted by the community. Stories are then promoted to the front page by people recommending the story. Newsvine is basically run by hundreds of virtual journalists and editors with no hierarchical structure. The idea being the virtual paper is independent, representative of the online community, always contains fresh content and operates on non-hierarchical structure. What’s more Newsvine is a complete free service, be it reading the stories, recommending or submitting a story, more links below
http://www.newsvine.com/scotland - Scottish stories from Newsvine
http://www.newsvine.com/_cms/help/faq - More information on getting started with Newsvine
http://www.nowpublic.com/ - A similar web site to Newsvine, Now Public
Digg is very similar to Newsvine in that anyone can submit content and give out recommendations (Diggs) with the latest stories with the highest number of diggs are visible to the frontpage. Where as Newsvine hosts the story or a summary of it, Digg only contains a link to the story and a very small summary about it, you can also comment on the stories. Rubbish content gets buried when users decide a story is spam, poor, contains false information or duplicated story. Even if your not interested in promoting or submitting a story, Digg contains some really good material, just try searching for subjects related to your business or check out stories that Terinea has dugg that related to IT and small businesses (Link below). Remember Digg web site is ranked very high by the search engines, so submitting links to stories on your web sites will help to drive traffic and promote your business web site in the search engine listings.
http://digg.com/business_finance/popular/365days - Popular business stories from the last year
http://www.digg.com/users/terinea/news/dugg - Items that Terinea has recommend or “dugg”
http://www.digg.com/how - Getting started with Digg
The Future
I think within the next two years you may see traditional media organisations such as the BBC embrace community driven formats like Newsvine and Digg. To an extend the BBC already started by listing the five most emailed and most read stories, usually found on the right hand side of a story.
Although these community driven sites aren’t without there fair share of problems. Digg has two problems, firstly it started off as technology portal and has only recently allow other subject matters to be submitted. This means there is alot of content focused on technology. This brings us to the second problem, the online community behind Digg are mainly technology focused which means technology stories get promoted more quickly that none technology content. If Digg was purchased by Google or Yahoo tomorrow I think the increased exposure to the main stream public would balance out stories which are promoted and submitted.
Summary
Get yourself a company weblog, post interesting articles related to your industry, business events and information about existing clients etc, use your weblog in conjunction with email when submitting PR to traditional base media organisations, leave comments on other weblogs that related to your own. Become your own online media company via your weblog.
Jamie
PS If you enjoyed this article, leave a comment and link to your business website. Also check out some our pervious posts…
- 90 Web Marketing Ideas and Tips For Small Businesses
- 50 Simple IT Ideas For Increasing Your Business Competitiveness & Productivity
Topics: Marketing & Social Media |
February 26th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
That’s great Jamie and thanks for the links/plugs. I wholeheartedly agree with your comments regarding the future. We had Robert Thompson, editor of The Times to speak at a recent Presidents Forum Dinner. It’s not just about moving away from paper -it’s also about how you can grow your market - 800,000 people in India
reading the Times on line for example….
Then there’s the whole issue of ‘instant news’ as opposed to daily cycles of the press.
February 26th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Thank you for your reply - Jamie
See… http://grahambell.org/communications/21