Your PR Efforts may be Hurting You

I’ve been on both sides of the public relations industry. For years, I wrote a syndicated technology column for the Chicago Tribune. Now I run a consulting firm that focuses on clients’ marketing efforts.

When I was a recipient of press releases, and now, as I streamline PR efforts, one thing has always been clear: The majority of media-relations work hurts more than it helps. Much of today’s PR falls prey to the following problems:

THE BUSINESS IS BASED ON NUMBERS, NOT RELATIONSHIPS. Most PR professionals blast pitches to thousands of press people, most of whom they’ve never met. But getting coverage is about relationships. When I was a technology columnist, there were a handful of PR professionals whose pitches I always tried to cover because we had a relationship. They understood my work and my audience. Most other releases? I rarely got past the incomprehensible headline.

Solution: PR teams should stop blasting and build relationships. They need to understand the audience of the media they’re pitching, and then try to help those people.

THE PRESS RELEASES ARE TERRIBLE. The vast majority of press releases are ill-conceived – they focus on features and specifications rather than the value of the product or service at hand. And they’re often poorly written, filled with errors and don’t tell a good story.

Solution: PR teams should consider eliminating press releases altogether. Then they’d be forced to learn what the publications they work with actually cover, which would help them customise their pitches and generate real results.

MANY PR PEOPLE DON’T REPRESENT THEIR COMPANIES WELL. Media relations work tends to be a thankless, unrewarding job. A high failure rate is common and expected. That’s why most media relations people are young and inexperienced. Yet these are the employees responsible for one of the most important tasks at your company – alerting the media to your products and services.

Solution: Consider managing your most important media relationships on a personal level. If you work at a larger company, try assigning five to 10 key media relationships to your top executives. Then, ask them to spend two minutes per day building those relationships. Your PR people can coordinate coverage, schedule interviews and respond to queries, just as they do now. But the relationships should be built by people who know how to build them. Journalists will bend over backward to help people who help them.

(Alex Goldfayn is the CEO of the Evangelist Marketing Institute, a marketing consultancy. His latest book is "Evangelist Marketing: What Apple, Amazon, and Netflix Understand About Their Customers (That Your Company Probably Doesn't).

© 2012 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp.