While You Were Out

Tuesday, 1:59 PM...

From: Rush Newsjack

To: Chuck Manners
Subject: Please approve Tweet

Please approve the attached Tweet before I send it. Thanks.

Rush Newsjack

Social Media Director
Cinnabon

Tuesday, 2 PM...

From: Chuck Manners
To: Rush Newsjack
Subject: Automatic reply: Please approve Tweet

I am away on a well-deserved vacation through next Tuesday, and not checking emails or accepting phone calls. If you need to send a Tweet while I'm away, use your best judgement. Thank you and may the force be with you.

Chuck Manners

Vice President, Good Taste
Cinnabon

Tuesday, 3 PM...

Tuesday, 4 PM...

From: Kat Cole
To: Chuck Manners
Subject: Today's Tweet

Chuck, don't bother coming back. May the reduction in force be with you.

Kat Cole
President & COO
Cinnabon

Outdated

Fifteen years ago, there were two flacks for every reporter. Today there are five.

"As the PR field flourishes, journalists are becoming a vanishing breed," says Mike Rosenberg in Ragan.com.

Searches on job sites for "reporter" and related keywords yield ads for openings "that have nothing to do directly with producing the news," Rosenberg says.

For every one opening for a reporter, a search yields 10 for candidates with journalism backgrounds or degrees willing to try PR.

It should come as no surprise—especially to acolytes of David Meerman Scott—brands are skirting the news industry to tell their own stories.

If you're not alarmed, fathom this: newspaper reporters are becoming extinct.

According to the American Society of News Editors, the number of staff reporters has dropped 40 percent in eight years.

As every flack knows, newspapers are the starting point for the original coverage picked up by all the other media outlets.

"The drop in newspaper reporters means the amount of real news out there has taken a wallop," Rosenberg says.

The gap in original coverage means more "earned" and sponsored placements make their way to audiences. 

In other words: less news, more propaganda.

Rosenberg recently tweeted the stats.

David Simon, former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of the HBO series "The Wire," retweeted Rosenberg's message, adding, "This is how a republic dies. Not with a bang, but a reprinted press release."

Purple Prose

It's been raining solemn tributes since Thursday.

We've also had to weather a torrent of opportunistic self-promotion.

While there's still a few days to enter, right now it looks like the grand prize in Prove You're Totally Tactless goes to Cheerios for its Tweet.

A spokesman defended the effort by saying both Cheerios and Prince are Minnesotan.

Exploiting headlines works, as David Meerman Scott says.

Boorishness doesn't.

The Postman Always Rings Twice

I don't often hear from my life insurance carrier. 

The company silently sweeps the premium due every month from my bank account, while we go merrily about our separate ways.

I'm not sure I want to hear from the firm, to be frank.

But this week, I suddenly did.

The letter carrier brought a stately direct mail piece offering me a $400,000 accidental death and dismemberment policy.

It arrived one week to the day after the bombs blew up at the Boston Marathon.

Tchotchke peddlers began to cash in on the tragedy within 24 hours. 

An insurance company simply moves a bit slower.

10 Steps to Better Media Coverage for Your Association

Association executive Edward Segal, CAE, wrote today's guest post. He is CEO of the Marin Association of Realtors and the author of several exceptional books on public relations.

Associations face two important challenges in generating the publicity they want. First, it's impossible to know what stories every reporter, editor, or blogger is working on or may be planning. Second, if journalists don't know your organization exists, they'll never think to contact you for quotes or information for their stories.

Your association can quickly overcome these hurdles by becoming a resource to as many news outlets as possible. Here are 10 steps to help make that happen:

1.   Take stock and cast a wide net. Make a list of all the topics and issues in which your organization has knowledge, expertise, or information. With this list in hand, identify the news organizations, as well as Websites and blogs, that follow or might have an interest in these matters. To ensure you haven't missed anyone, conduct a search of relevant keywords and phrases in Google's Web, blog, and news categories.

2.    Initiate contact. Send emails to appropriate contacts at these outlets to tell them about the topics and issues in which your organization has expertise. Explain that your association wants to be a resource for their stories in these areas, and ask how you can be of help in upcoming articles.

3.    Stay in touch. Reach out to these reporters on a regular basis. By staying on their radar, journalists are more likely to think of you when they need you. But don't become a pest.

4.    Alert yourself. Set up Google Alert for the topics and issues for which you'd like to generate additional publicity for your organization. Evaluate the results and, as appropriate, contact the editors, reporters, and bloggers to offer your organization as a resource on future stories. If you contact them quickly enough and have something to contribute, they might include you in updates to those stories.

5.    Cast an even wider net. Join one or more online services that provide subscribers with inquiries from journalists, or help link experts with reporters. These sites include Help a Reporter Out, Muck Rack, PR Newswire's ProfNet, The Yearbook of Experts, and Radio-TV Interview Report.

6.    Don't wait. Respond immediately to all media inquiries. Whether reporters are on deadline or not, the sooner you get back to them, the more likely it is that you will have an opportunity to be a resource. Given the competition organizations face for publicity and the deadlines under which reporters work, the expiration dates of these opportunities may be very short.  

7.    Give good quotes. Journalists can be inclined to interview people who have demonstrated that they can give good quotes. When reporters see you've been interviewed by other news organizations, they may seek to contact you for interviews for their own stories. Consider your sound bites to be auditions that can lead to additional publicity opportunities.  

8.   Get a room. Establish a "press room" page on your Website. Make it as easy as possible for visiting journalists and bloggers to immediately see your association's areas of knowledge and expertise and how to contact designated spokespeople. Keep press materials current and ensure that links to news stories where your organization is mentioned are working.

9.    Plan ahead. News organizations may post editorial calendars on their Websites, or will be glad to send them to you on request. The calendars can be an early warning system about future stories: armed with this advance notice, you might be able to position your organization as a resource to the reporter or editor and wind up with more coverage for your association.

10.  Be patient. Providing journalists with whom you've had no prior dealings with tips and information for their stories can be an investment in time and resources. Sometimes the payoff will be immediate, such as a quote, attribution, or profile. At other times, your efforts may take some time to bear fruit. But if you don't try, the payoff will be zero.

Blogging is Easy. Just Open a Vein.

Two in three B2B marketers say producing sufficient content is their biggest challenge, according to a new study by the Content Marketing Institute.

But blogging's easy, if you think like a journalist.

Lack of content never fazed famed journalist Kurt Loder, who once said, "News is anything that's interesting, that relates to what's happening in the world, what's happening in areas of the culture that would be of interest to your audience."

News in your industry is anything that's trending around your products and services. 

That means industry-focused content is all around you—in mainstream newspapers, television shows, trade magazines, scholarly journals and nichey newsletters—just waiting for your unique spin.

If anything's a challenge, it's the latter effort. 

Spin demands a little sweat.

As another famed journalist, Red Smith, once said, "Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein."

CBS Earns a Black Eye

The acerbic well of public trust has been further poisoned.

Last month, CBS executives ordered subsidiary CNET to pull a product from consideration for a "Best of CES" award at the Consumer Electronics Show.

CNET was under contract with the Consumer Electronics Association to judge the competition.

But the executives at CBS didn't like the fact that CNET wanted to give the award to "Hopper," a new product that lets Dish TV subscribers skip commercials. (CBS, in fact, has sued Dish to stop the sale of Hopper.)

“I can never recall any major media company, much less a top-tier First Amendment protector like CBS, publicly mandating an editorial decision based on business interests,” writes Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, in USA Today.

The decision has destroyed CBS' reputation overnight, Shapiro says.

"CBS, once called the Tiffany network, will never be viewed again as pristine," he writes.

The CBS executives have earned a spot on the Wall of Shame alongside Lance Armstrong, Kenneth Lay, Bernie Madoff and Jack Abramoff.

They've also made marketers' jobs a little harder by adding to the "trust deficit" and strengthening customers' skepticism.

To find an antidote, read my free white paper, Path of Persuasion.

Starbucks' "Newsjacking" Attempt Falls Off the Cliff

Starbuck's attempt to "newsjack" deficit negotiations has fallen off its own cliff.

Last week, CEO Howard Shultz asked the employees at 125 Washington, DC-area stores to scribble the phrase "Come Together" on the paper cups they hand customers. 

But employees aren't cooperating.

I asked three of them why.

"We're too busy," one said.

"We can't remember to do it," said another.

"It's pretty stupid," said the third.

Lesson learned: There's many a slip between the cup and the lip. 

If you want to newsjack successfully, first get your employees on board.