I’ve been thinking about the press release a lot lately, as, I would guess, have most other PR bloggers traversing this whole online media thing.  Todd Defren, the social media release’s daddy, has significantly influenced the format of my own releases – most notably in the inclusion of the "purpose-driven" delicious links and Technorati tags.  It’s still a work in progress, but I’ve been happy with the results so far.

Dan Greenfield of Bernaise Source posts a great article for PR n00bz and pros alike.  His Five Considerations for Better Press Releases are rudimentary, but even the best writers can use a refresher.

Your style – How often do you see a release begin with company X “announces?”  Reviewing our releases and those of other companies, more often than I realized.  Note to self: STOP.  There are times when “announce” is the exact verb to use, but not every time.  Be selective. And speaking of verbs – they power your release.  As our writing coach told us, don’t let adjectives tell the story for you.

For instance, I sent out a release with this very headline this week.  I probably wouldn’t change it even if I could, but the next time I find myself "announcing" anything, I’ll probably stop and think before finalizing it.

Maybe I’m misreading the situation, but it seems like no matter how much I read about PR or talk to the PR people themselves, nobody can agree on whether or not it is okay to call a reporter that you don’t know to follow up on a release or pitch that you’ve sent.

Richard Laermer of the Bad Pitch Blog talks about following up with enthusiasm, and about how many possible stories are killed by a lack of follow up on the part of the PR person. 

David Parmet of the Marketing Begins at Home posts a quote from Paid Content about calling journalists to follow up on releases and says "This behaviour is beyond dumb."

I’m inclined to agree more with Richard than David on this one.  In fact, from my experience, the idea that once PR people send a release by email that journalists have it and will call you if they need anything is fundamentally false. 

In my work as communications director for a theatre company, I had about a dozen reporters who I talked with on a regular basis over the span of five years, and who (for the most part) liked us and what we did.  Yet, whenever I sent a release, I would wait a day, and then call each and every one of them to follow up on the release and ask if they needed any more information.

About 50% of the time, I would get… "Huh – I don’t remember getting that.  Hold on a second.  Oh – here it is!  Sure, we’ll send a camera."

That’s a lot of missed opportunities if I didn’t follow up. 

Journalists get a lot of email, and will inevitably miss the odd one that is obviously just another release.  By following up, we’re at least making sure that the reporter is aware of what we have sent, and if they’re waiting on an editor or are simply not interested, that’s important information as well.

I’m not advocating calling every reporter every time you send them anything, but sometimes, it’s a necessary evil.  As long as you are professional, prepared and respectful of the reporter’s time, they should have nothing to complain about.

I’m a firm believer that as PR professionals, it’s important for us to give back to the community and help young PR students understand what the profession is all about and how they can develop the skills they need to succeed (or even get started) in the industry.

I chat with students quite often who want to make a career in PR, and I find myself always giving the same advice:

Take responsibility for your own education.

Every good PR person I have ever met has been incredibly smart. Every mediocre one has been adequately educated. Good PR programs are rare at the University level, and more often than not, don’t equip students with the tools they need to survive in the workforce. The recommended reading isn’t enough – you need to be the one in charge of what you learn if you’re going to be employable when you graduate.

Here’s my story:

I tell pretty much anyone who asks that I owe my entire career to theatre. I was very much into art and music when I was in highschool, so I started doing musical theatre. I continued this during my first year doing a Bachelor of Architecture and offered to do the posters for the production. This was my start in PR.

When I decided that being an architect was not in the least what I wanted to do with my life, I switched to a communications degree, tweaked slightly so that I could focus on studying advertising. I took marketing, english, psychology, philosophy – anything that had anything to do with advertising or marketing in general.

In my third year, I was looking for a summer job, and found a position as publicist of the Ottawa Fringe Festival – a theatre festival with roots across the country. I applied, and because of my background in marketing and theatre, I got the job and was forced to learn how to write press releases, put together press kits, pitch reporters and coordinate interviews within a couple of weeks. I read everything I could, voraciously consuming information, working 80 hours a week with no budget, and by the end of it, I had promoted a festival.

On one of the last days, a guy I had met in my first year asked me if I wanted to help him promote a show he was doing in the Winter. He couldn’t pay me anything, but “it would be good experience.” I told him I wasn’t interested, but if he wanted me to come on board and help him co-found the company, build the brand and marketing collateral (I was still pretending to be a graphic designer at this point) that I would do it “for the experience.”

Five years later, I was still working with the company for next to nothing, but we had built it into one of the biggest theatre companies in the city, winning awards that previously only the National Arts Centre had won, and I had developed a reputation for being good at what I did. Lots of people were calling me to work with them, and some wanted to pay me actual money this time.

During my time with the company, I was hired by a PR firm (by a professor with whom I had kept in touch), largely due to my theatre experience. Had I not had this experience, I would have been unemployable since I don’t speak French (one of the joys of living next door to Quebec), but because I had taken my education into my own hands and invested my time in actually learning my trade outside the classroom, I was hired right away. I’ve moved on since then, and now have about the best job a PR guy could ask for. And I owe it all to theatre.

I recently told a girl in her second year of a university mass communications program that unless she took responsibility for her own education, she would never be employable. She was understandably shocked by this – she figured that getting a degree in communications was the way to get into communications. I told her she was wrong. The irony is – she’s in practically the same program I took from the same university. If it weren’t for the experience I picked up outside of school, I wouldn’t have hired me, either.

Now, not everyone has the luxury of being able to take four years of electives and call it a degree (seriously). But whether you’re blogging, involved in knowledge sharing organizations, maxing out your credit card at Amazon, or working your ass off for charities who need help with PR, the onus is on you to learn. Nobody is going to hand you the knowledge you need to make it in this business. It’s your responsibility to seek it out for yourself.

So, I pose this question to all the other PR bloggers out there. If you could give one piece of advice to a PR student, what would it be? I’ll post all the best answers here if anyone takes me up on it. Hopefully, someone with more influence than myself can help it take off.

Last week, I was asked to do an interview for a PR pub about crisis communications in the blogosphere (more on that later).  What do you do when a meme comes out with one of your sleeping employees on a customer’s couch?  I talked about this a bit in this post, but there’s obviously a lot more to it than just talking to bloggers – though that in itself is a good start.

If you look at the big negative memes that have come out over the past couple of years – Comcast’s sleeping cable guy, AOL’s customer service guy who wouldn’t let a customer cancel his service, or the "Dell Hell" posts that have been cropping up, they all have one thing in common:  they’re a negative result of a company’s inaction or unwillingness to change.

Studies are saying that CEOs are increasingly viewing blogs as a threat.  This is a very naive way of looking at the situation -  like saying that radar guns are a threat to driving.  The real threat is not listening to customers complaints – if anything, blogs make that easier.  You are now empowered to listen to your customers’ conversations by simply subscribing to an RSS feed.  When you start hearing negative buzz, you can now act on it instantly.

Nobody wakes up in the morning and says "I’m going to ruin Dell’s reputation today." A blogstorm starts as a drizzle – a leak that becomes a flood.  React quickly, address the problem before it becomes a bigger one, and chances are you’ll never have to worry about dealing with a major blog backlash that can potentially overflow into mainstream media.