PR People.. We are not alone!
I have come into journalism in a rather unusual way in the sense that I didn’t take a journalism degree or any other formalised training specific to the industry and neither did my colleagues. When ADSLguide.org.uk started (I’m supposed to call it thinkbroadband.com but I think “AG” has a ring to it :-p), we were just a bunch of techies who wanted to provide users information about ADSL services which were in their infancy at the time. Indeed we weren’t even forward looking enough to think that using a name with “ADSL” would potentially be seen to limit us in the future 
The site grew fast and we became known as ‘the’ source of ADSL related information. We suddenly had the opportunity to talk to senior people in companies who wanted a piece on our front page (or indeed some who just wanted to help us grow as they valued the independent information we provided). I think at this stage, our site was seen more as a technical aggregation/discussion site rather than a source of news so we dealt almost exclusively with the technical and product people within broadband service providers.
Over time we grew more and started being asked by other journalists to provide information for them about broadband.. I think they liked the way we aren’t there to promote any particular provider (indeed at this point we were running our site on a borrowed old server from Jezzer at the bottom of my hosting company cabinet in Telehouse only seven years ago).. With this, we started becoming much more the centre of attention, probably Andrew (MrSaffron) in particular who was the public face of our news items (and still is to a great degree). This also began the time we started spending more time on research, talking to providers, etc.
At the beginning it was an eerie feeling walking into a room and someone saying “Oh you’re the people from ADSLguide!” as if we were some celebrity which they met for the first time. This kept being repeated a few times until eventually we had met quite a few people so they began to know us. We spent quite a bit of time explaining to everyone what we did, how and why so they understood how we preferred to work.
This leads me to my point, namely how PR people deal with journalists. I was reading a series of white paper by Daryl Wilcox Publishing on how to write press releases which reminded me of the frustrations I have in dealing with PR people, leading me to believe that we are not alone.. This problem is clearly something that has been around in the traditional press for some time.
To this end, here is some advice to anyone about sending us press release:
- We only want to receive broadband-related press releases, or those that affect companies which broadband users could be affected. If your product/service is a tool broadband users might use (e.g. video streaming), then this is entirely welcome.
- All press releases should be sent by e-mail (usually to the staff member(s) you’ve dealt with before, or via the team@ address on our About page. Bear in mind that sending the press release to every e-mail address you can find on our site is likely to result in it going into the spam folder.)
- We do not open attachments unless we have a good reason to do so. All PR text should be in the body of the e-mail. By all means send us a PDF or Word file that goes with it with the nice photos and formatting, but unless we find the text appealing it won’t get opened.
- We receive lots of press releases and only write up articles on very few. This doesn’t mean we’ve not read your release, but we aren’t a news wire.
- Focus on what makes your company/client special. Have they introduced a new price point, or done something innovative? This is especially more important to the small companies because we’re not going to broadcast to everyone you’ve just introduced a £1 discount for a few months.
- We will use quotes but rarely lots of them. They are usually there to support the text but equally they should add something.
General issues to consider for anyone who writes to us at thinkbroadband (since if you’re still reading this you probably care enough to listen):
- The thinkbroadband staff are not employed full time to read press releases, announcements or to promote your company. We all have other jobs to get on with and have limited time to devote to the website. This means we don’t really want to receive a phone call from your PR people asking “have you received our press release?” ten minutes after you sent it.
- We all work in diverse locations and not in one office so we rely heavily on e-mail. This doesn’t mean we don’t exist and don’t have phones, but we find it’s the most efficient way for us to work.
- We are not an extension of your marketing department – That is to say we will give our opinion about your services, even if it’s bad. We’re not an affiliate marketing site the primary focus of which is to drive users to the highest paying service providers.
- We try to respond to courteous e-mails about concerns over comments our users have posted on the site. When we receive such requests via lawyers (the usual kind of in-house, including “corporate security”) making claims of dubious merit, they won’t incite a positive reaction. Just because we don’t have huge offices doesn’t mean we remove content because you think it shouldn’t be public.
- If you want to tell us about something brilliant or innovative, get one of your ‘techies’ to talk to us.. Marketing jargon doesn’t get far with us and you’ll just end up looking silly if you don’t know the answers to our questions.
I hope to write something more permanent for the thinkbroadband site in the coming weeks but I hope that may be of interest to anyone in the meantime.