Five PR-Related Things We Need to Get Rid Of

by Katie Delahaye Paine

Now that the AVE is going the way of the dodo bird, what else can we put on the endangered species list? 

Here are my suggestions: 

1. Media Lists

Not that they weren’t useful back in the day when you hired someone to smile and dial and do nothing but “pitch” stories all day long. But in today’s media-rich but topically niche environment, media lists are essentially spam enablers. All you have to do is read the Bad Pitch Blog to get an idea of how damaging these lists can be to your brand. 

2. Impressions (aka opportunities to see, aka reach, aka circulation figures)

Just think about it: What really constitutes “circulation” these days and how much of it can you really count? If I pass along via email an intriguing story, no one knows whether I‘m sending it to one person or 100. If you post a link on Twitter, sure, you can track how many people had the opportunity to see it by looking at the number of followers and all of their followers, etc. But honestly, how many of your followers really respond to anything you put out there? I figure it’s only 10 or 20 out of the 330,000 people I allegedly “reach” according to most influence analyzers.

3. Direct mail

 Please take this away sooner rather than later. It kills me to see a forest of dead trees in my mail box that I just have to take to recycling every week. Above is a typical week’s haul for me and it all goes straight from the mail box to the recycling bin to the Transfer Station. Why? Has anyone noticed that the cost is going up and the effectiveness is going down? Are direct mail marketers that insulated from reality? 

4. Press releases as a tool to reach the press

Now I’m not saying that a press release isn’t a great vehicle for putting your messages and ideas and facts in one place. But it has no impact on the press. If you want to reach the media these days, you send them a link on Twitter or Facebook. And it better be to something more interesting than a press release. So let‘s drop that title all together and call it what it is: The official organizational statement which most people will ignore. 

5. Advertising inserts

In my book they are just the uglier first cousin to direct mail, but again, is anyone measuring their impact on a business? Are they really cost effective or is someone not looking at the right numbers? I love this shot of the kiosk for the local paper at the end of each day. All the ad inserts are right there at the bottom, left behind because no one wants to read them. 

Those are my top five, what are yours? --KDP

--Katie Delahaye Paine is CEO of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.

 

Comments

[David Jones]

Katie: I'll deal with the PR things on your list and ignore the DM and FSI. Hard to argue with the RODT (Return on Dead Tree) metric as it's still being defined :)

If we adjust the filter on things like media lists, impressions and press releases and start talking about them differently, we'll get further as an industry. Here's my suggestions:

Replace "media lists" with "insights". Working off a list is a bad, low-value, boiler-room publicity tactics and we should be ashamed of it. Good PR practitioners know less is more and matching your story to the media's/blogger's/consumer's interests gets more bang for the buck.

Replace "impressions" with "custom measurements". Hey, I'm preaching to the converted here, but trying to find a standard measure for how information is consumed is hopeless. Figure out what's important to your organization or client, benchmark it, set a target and measure against it.

Replace "press releases" with "content". We'll get way further if we focus on what the receiver of our information need. If we think about getting our story out through the right "content", then we're forcing ourselves to create things that are useful for our audiences. In many cases, a press release may be required, but often times it can easily be replaced with a three-bullet e-mail, video, blog post, etc. Use the most effective tool for the job, let's not default to press releases.

[Dannystarr]

Just a few comments.

I come from a mostly marketing background but has recently starting doing more comms work and the one thing I couldn't believe was the reliance on "impressions" as a metric to report the results (not I'm not really saying effectiveness) of comms work. I think part of the problem is that the use of that metric is so engrained in the industry that change will be hard because people love to see the big numbers.

And the blasting of press-releases was even more puzzling to me... I felt like I was going back to 1999 in email marketing. The days of spray and pray - which unfortunately, aren't over for some marketers/spammers. And the click through rate was terrible... seems like a huge waste of time to me but one that comms industry, like marketing will have a hard time shaking.

I am also opposed to direct mail but the reality of it is that for some businesses, like local businesses, they are still effective. I spoke to somebody just yesterday who runs a fitness centre and a mailing he did was high effective and we was pleased.

[David Geddes]

Katie -- I dislike junk mail (oops .. I mean direct mail) as much as you do. However, we are both researchers dedicated to bring empiricism to communications and marketing. I have attended client meetings where their direct marketing agencies were presenting their results. Like it or not, these agencies are experts, complete with PhD econometricians and statistical modelers, who can show a real ROI about the relationship between a junk mail piece (OOPS again ... i mean direct mail) and sales results, donations, or whatever business outcome they are promising to generate. In fact, I would expect that their contracts have results-based compensation schemes. So, I think yo need to be fair and admit that you and i dislike junk mail, but the junk mail companies have the courage to measure themselves on ROI.

David Geddes, evolve24

[Gina Cuclis]

Reading these comments about direct mail at this time is interesting as we are four days away from a national election. Whose mailbox isn't full of political mailers? I know several political consultants who claim mailers work, and that's why candidates use them. It's scary to think there maybe people who actually use mailers to decide how to vote.

[Bill Paarlberg]

Excellent point, David! Much as we may dislike their product, direct mail people walk the walk when it comes to, as you say, “Bring[ing] empiricism to communications and marketing." (I really like that phrase.) They get the data and they know how to use it. A lot of us in PR should be so smart. I strongly suspect, as Gina says, that we get direct mail because it works. B.