Publish and don`t be damned

Every PR company has at some time been given a weak or poor story with the injunction from the client to get it into print. The PR practitioner knows the article can`t conceivably get into print but accepts the assignment, goes through the motions, creates an unfulfillable expectation, and a few weeks or months down the line has to deal with the fallout when the article doesn`t appear in print.

There is clearly much value to be derived in an appropriate filtering exercise.

Or the PR practitioner doesn`t know better, accepts the assignment and enthusiastically submits it to a wide range of media in the firm conviction it will be accepted. Again, an unfulfillable expectation is created, the article doesn`t appear in print, and PR has been seen to fail.

So there is clearly much value to be derived in an appropriate filtering exercise. There is even greater value, though, in being able to identify news that is lying fallow in your organisation, which is the thrust of this column. (In other words, don`t chase manure when you have diamonds just waiting to be dug up.)

Consider this: The PR is instructed to write about spurious news while the real news is ignored for lack of management`s identifying it as news. What one can do is apply a methodology designed to flush out all news in a company and turn that into a structured media plan (as structured as anything can be in this volatile, ever shifting market). This methodology takes into consideration strategic issues (what the competition is doing, product and pricing, existing and potential customers), what the media needs, what has already been published, and more.

It then looks at a company`s existing media profile and aims to create a new profile based on the company`s needs. It does this through an analysis of events in the company. If 100 things take place in the company over a 12-month period, and they are all newsworthy, and their placement will not create cognitive dissonance, we will drive them into print.

As an aside, it is because we are committed to creating a print-based profile of a company`s activities and thoughts that we do not have tight, supplier-side restrictive service-level agreements (SLAs). Many PR companies enforce an SLA that is designed to protect their own workload and concomitant profitability. Ours is based on the client`s needs and value; our fee and agency-based value proposition follow logically. Try this mechanism yourself...

There are many categories of news, and to lump them all together is to create an unfair expectation. It is precisely this expectation that lies at the heart of so many ructions between client and PR.

Can you really expect Business Day to carry - and prominently at that - the announcement of the latest dot version of your niche product? Of course not; but some clients will insist that their rapid application development platform, their component-based software factory, their helpdesk, their systems management tool, deserves banner headline treatment in the business press.

It can`t happen. The best you can hope for is a placement in the trade press. That`s why trade press exists, after all. Niche media for niche technologies. Mainstream press for mainstream issues.

For us, there are various categories or tiers of news:

• Tier 1: Major events (acquisitions, joint ventures, business partnerships), big customer deals (multi-million tenders), top people joining (of course, no one wants to talk about top people leaving), strategy roll-outs, hot new agencies.

• Tier 2: Lesser events which are still newsworthy, second-tier deals, channel developments, in-depth case studies.

• Tier 3: Opinion pieces and feature and survey articles.

• Tier 4: International news, events (conferences, seminars).

The precise tiering depends on the profile of your company; opinion pieces that generate thought leadership could be more important at a point in time than a product announcement; and a well-placed case study could catapult you to the top of the tree. But the above are guidelines, and they are laid out for you because this is the tiering system the media use, by and large. In other words, they are a media person`s tiering system, and as a client or PR you can do worse than empathise with the media.

Under no circumstances should you send the following material to the media:

• Winning of awards, especially international ones: The fact that your principal was named winner of Windows Magazine`s Editor`s Choice for June should give you a warm feeling; but no editor is remotely interested.

• Industry recognition: Meta, IDC or Gartner giving you or your principal the thumbs-up is designed for overhead-ware, not for media consumption. They are seriously not interested.

• Your principal winning international deals: Quite honestly, no journalist wants to know -and neither do his or her readers - that the North Dakota Department of Transport has bought your data warehouse, middleware or six-way server.

Yes, it is really is all about value-add. Think as a journalist, wanting to pass on news that matters to their readership, and you`ll avoid much of the chronic misalignment in the whole client-PR-reader value chain.