CorpComms Magazine

It is a universal truth that if companies want coverage in the media then they will need to tell journalists what they are doing. Time-pressed hacks will not come calling without an ulterior motive.

But the way companies choose to distribute news is crucial if they want to ensure maximum exposure in the most appropriate places and in front of the most suitable audiences.

Targeting content has never been more important than it is now. Long gone are the days when journalists ploughed through a pile of random press releases that had landed in the post-bag in the vague hope of finding something interesting to write about.

Today journalists cover different sectors on a daily basis, writing blogs, making podcasts and providing online content on top of their usual roles, providing broadcast or print coverage. Most barely have time to answer the phone or check their email, let alone open a letter or unravel a fax.

And companies that use a scattergun approach to send out press releases will suffer. ‘If you just keep blasting people with irrelevant stuff, they will become desensitised to you,' says Andrew Muir, managing director of media distribution provider Vocus. ‘And the day you do send something they want to write about will be the day they don't bother to read it.'

‘Journalists are covering multiple beats now, so PRs have to be a lot sharper,' adds Alex Northcott, chief executive of the alerts and networking service, Gorkana. ‘You can't just bomb blast 1,000 journalists with the same story - it does no-one any favours.'

There are plenty of ways to ensure that a company's message is being sent to the appropriate people within the right outlets. Most are tried and tested, but all are continually evolving.

All media distribution specialists provide the standard database of journalists, usually updated every day - even every minute if necessary - as well as other mechanisms such as forward features services, and media request facilities. These services provide the bedrock on which clients can interact with journalists.

Databases are being improved all the time - beyond the basic journalist profile page. Gorkana, for instance, downloads news headlines with bylines to the relevant journalist's profile page each day, allowing PRs with stories to pitch to ensure the journalist they are approaching really is writing about the subject in hand. Vocus includes podcast interviews with journalists ‘so you can hear in their own words the sorts of things they like to write about', says Muir.

The key, says Daryl Willcox, chairman of Daryl Willcox Publishing, which was among the first to put these services online, is to concentrate on what journalists need. ‘It is tempting to focus on your client's needs but we have a culture here of making our products work well for journalists, which in turn makes them work better for our clients.'

Distributing forward features lists, for example, benefits both sides because they are sent to a targeted group of PRs who in turn can contact the journalists involved. Those journalists then have the choice of whether or not to use the information they receive.

Media request facilities allowing journalists to approach the wider PR community with specific queries have proved surprisingly popular, despite many journalists' initial sniffiness towards them. Daryl Willcox Publishing alone processed more than 50,000 such requests last year.

PRs can also monitor who reads their press releases. Gorkana's Client Relationship Management tool, for example, records which journalists click the email link to read a news release, so you only call those you know are interested. The CRM tool can also record every contact a company has with a journalist, allowing PRs to measure their interaction with the media. ‘More and more clients are moving to this tool now, especially as there is more pressure on them to justify their budget,' says Northcott.

KEEPING FOCUS

Of course, it is not all about making the journalist's job easier. By being able to target press contacts more tightly, communications professionals can open up new opportunities for themselves.

Andrew Denny, client liaison officer at Norfolk-based PR firm Publicity Works, which uses distribution services from Vocus and PR Newswire, says: ‘As a specialist agency, we mainly focus on the food industry and we have a small universe of journalists we know very well.'

On occasion, however, Denny's clients may need to access journalists outside this sphere. An example is CNP Professional, which produces protein supplements, sometimes used by athletes for nutritional purposes when they are training. These supplements are currently being used by sportsmen in a series of expeditions, such as a round-the-world yacht race, and Publicity Works has been able to target the sports journalists covering this event, using media distribution services, something the agency could not have done by itself as it is too small. ‘It will definitely result in better coverage,' says Denny.

But targeting specific journalists is not the only way to improve distribution. Many companies use press release wire services, which centralise releases in a publicly-available forum and can be picked up by large numbers of people, websites and other organisations.

There are two main benefits to using a service like this. The obvious one is that a much wider distribution can be achieved. A service such as Business Wire, for example, distributes globally and has partnership agreements with many news wires, including Dow Jones and Bloomberg.

Agnes Deleuse, marketing manager at Business Wire, says: ‘We can distribute globally, and reach all types of media - print, broadcast and online, which is the obvious advantage of a wire. You can reach a relevant journalist in the US, if you need to.'

Groups providing a wire service like this include Daryl Willcox Publishing, PR Newswire, and Marketwire, among others.

Distributing more generally to the Internet can enable companies to tap into a more modern form of media, known as social media. This is where the various communities of bloggers and Internet forum users who may be discussing your products are to be found. They are becoming more and more influential all the time.

‘This is the new way of distributing news and it is gaining huge traction with our clients,' says Muir. ‘It is clearly important to send your story to journalists but you are relying on two things - one, that they will use it to write an article, and two, that they will write what you want. Sending out a release to the wider Internet where it can be picked up by the end user directly is also important.'

Increasingly, media distribution is moving in this direction, although most providers recommend using both approaches - targeting specific journalists as well as publishing on the wider Internet.

There are generally two ways to make the best of the social media approach. The first is through search engine optimisation, which allows companies to use keywords and backward hyperlinks to websites on their press release to propel their news into the top few results on a search engine result page.

The other is to actively engage with social media, and drive traffic back to your website as an added bonus to distributing your news. Roy Jacques, director of sales UK at Marketwire, says: ‘Engaging with social media is about trying to engage with members of this online community, getting them to share your information with each other, and then come back to your website.'

One way to do this is to provide direct access to you. Vocus, for instance, includes links on its social media press releases to enable people to blog about a client's story, and then links the responses directly back to the client.

The clear benefit of all this is that it is much easier to measure the response to each item of media distributions. Blog responses aside, it is impossible to say how many people really read any particular newspaper article. But it is possible to quantify the number of page impressions made on a specific web page.

‘The results you get from online press releases are much more measurable than column inches,' says Willcox. ‘And PRs really need to qualify their existence these days.'

This can also lead to more effective communication. ‘This is the new way to do PR,' says Muir. ‘It is possible to measure this sort of response with real-time charts and graphs. If you are managing a campaign, and after two or three days you can see where it is working or not working, then you can get insight into how to get your campaign back on track.'

KEEPING CONSTANT TRACK

Similarly, Business Wire's NewsTrak service provides information about which portals and websites their clients' news appears in, as well as a summary of viewer interaction with the release. It also measures how well a press release has performed in terms of a company's own keywords in various search engines through its Enhanced Online New Measurement facility.

Deleuse says: ‘We can allow clients to track their reports to see who is reading them, by adding tags which tell you who opens them and on which website. This gives clients the ability to see the quality of targets they are hitting and gets you the visibility of your content in your own words on the internet.'

Until now, many companies have seen online PR as being mostly about defensive action. ‘It should be more about using it as a positive tool to get your content out - not just to the media and social media, but also to your end users or consumers,' says Willcox.

‘If your distribution strategy doesn't include social media then you are missing a trick,' vows Muir. ‘If your competitors have it, you will be at a competitive disadvantage. Leave it out at your peril.' 

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