How Not to Suck at PR in 2010

It’s now officially 2010, and while many PR firms and companies are doing a great job; there are far too many companies that don’t. These firms don’t qualify for a post on the Bad Pitch Blog; but for one, or all, of the following reasons they suck at PR.

So please, I implore you, don’t suck at PR. With so many talented individuals in the arena and simple steps not to such, there’s really no reason to suck at PR.

Here are 3 ways not to suck at PR and to get bloggers to pay attention to what you are pitching.

1. Get Em-bed with the bloggers: No not in bed with them Embed, as in embeddable video. We aren’t print and big part of that is that we can deliver timely media rich content to our readers. Most often this is in the form of videos which are easily embedded in posts.

Many companies have great demo videos that I would love to share with my readers, but I can’t because you don’t offer an option to embed it. Why is immaterial, with YouTube available there is no logical reason not to let me share your video on my site. Don’t kid yourself that the video is worth visiting your site to watch — if it’s that good embedding it will drive even more customers. A second alternative is to let me download and embed it on my own, but again, no sense in doing this when you can create a corporate YouTube account or handle it yourself.

2. Image Not Found: Again, nothing is more frustrating to me personally than locked down or flash only product pages and images. If you are pitching a product I need to be able to easily share that image with my readers. This may be a screenshot or picture of your product; whatever it is make it easy for me to share.

3.Press Pages aren’t just for looks: Have a press page, even if that means a single page with one with a product shot, one embeddable product demo and an email address for more details. If you can’t do this, how do you expect to answer questions and more importantly for you complaints that press may be covering. On a side note, right or wrong, I judge the companies I cover and those I shop at based on whether they have a press page.

Bonus Round – Focused Concise Pitches: Press releases are great, they represent a carefully crafted product pitch; what’s better is a pitch that has a concise focused pitch to my readers.

Follow these 4 steps and soon, you too, won’t suck at PR.

image via smlp.co.uk on Flickr

How to beat writing stagefright!

Have you ever found yourself in the shower or on a walk full of great ideas to share with the world? I’m sure you have. Everyone, even non-writers, come up with their best thoughts while doing other things. Most of the time translating those thoughts into a cohesive idea comes easily enough but lately I’ve found that when I sit down in front of Blogsmith or Wordpress to get a blog post written I get caught up in the details instead of writing.

It’s easy enough to do, just look at everything going on behind the scenes!

There’s links and tags and categories and comments and a billion other things screaming for your attention and on top of that you have 1- Firefox tabs and a Google search bar to distract you with the answers to minute details that you think will make you sound witty and intelligent but in the end only take up 20 extra minutes of your time.

Lately my solution to writing stagefright or distraction has been to switch up where I write a post. My two favorite resources are Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die, which forces me to just write, and Word, because it fixes most of my typos saving me time later. If neither of these are doing it for me I’ve also found that Google Docs and yes, even notepad can be just the change of scenery I need to get an idea out. There’s always time for cleaning up spelling, grammar and formatting later. Now you can even buy an Adobe Air version of Write or Die with more options for just $10.

I know that there are special programs that black out your screen to focus you on your task, and admittedly I haven’t tried them, but I really enjoy the ability to write on any computer I find myself in front. Being able to write anywhere, without a need for a specific tool, location and setting, is just an added bonus of my change it up writing program to fight the distractions and stagefright that comes from associating writing with a specific screen.

Have you faced a problem like this before? How do you tackle these problems and stay on top of your writing?