Landed yesterday; despite excellent seats and a pleasant dinner and what should have been a great flight, I somehow managed to nadger my back while sleeping so I'm a bit slower than even jet lag. Er than even jet lag would account for. Normal service will be resumed once we get Simon's accounts and my mum's posthumous tax return done, and certainly not before tea and toast. I've had several perfectly intelligent phone calls (well, I thought I was perfectly intelligent) but typing is making me feel a bit woo, woo, woozy.

All the phone calls that Simon picked up while I was asleep were asking 'are you going to Mobile World Congress?'. Sadly the answer is 'not unless someone would like to host us. We'd love to go and meet up with your clients, it's a really useful show, but we just don't have the budget for the flight and hotel at the inflated conference rates. If you'd really like us there the diary would allow it, so last-minute invites most welcome ;-)

Also, I shall try to collate the posts I wrote on the road that post-by-email swallowed because LJ believes my mail is spam.

Current cat state; Pebbles has her head in Jeffrey's armpit and her foot on Calli's back, Calli has her feet under Jeffrey's tail. It's an extended furry patchwork... unfeasibly cute!

Simon and I are having fun researching a feature on enterprise technology in 2015 and we're getting some interesting predictions. But I'm also getting a number of PR folk who I'd have to characterise as either lazy, chancing it or in need of a visit to the optician sending through predictions for 2008.

Predictions for next year are common at this time of year and dailies and online titles will find them useful (print titles wrapped those prediction pieces up some weeks ago; dead tree media needs time to kill its trees). Sending them as a flavour of the areas your client can address or to see if there's a trend we'd like to ask you to extrapolate, with a note saying you're looking into the 5-10 year span we asked about is fair enough. Sending them to go into the 2015 piece because it's easier than doing the work involved in actually answering the query and being surprised when we come back and say they're not suitable isn't.

And if you're going to ask 'why 2015?' I'll be more impressed if you ask whether we're picking that year because of the AMD targets, the Cisco predictions, the Millennium targets, the Crossrail completion date, the climate predictions or simply because it's a round number in the 5-10 year period - because having thought about any of that before you ask makes me feel you're more likely to have useful predictions for the piece rather than just an attempt to get your client a mention, which gets the answer in the title...


BTW, for the benefit of my most-welcome PR readers who may be wondering what happened to 'the sweet Mary Branscombe' as characterised by TWL: this isn't a swipe at anyone in particular but at something of a trend in my mail in the last 24 hours.

"Certain statements in this press release may contain words such as “could”, “expects”, “may”, “anticipates”, “believes”, “intends”, “estimates”, ”targets”, “envisions”, “seeks” and other similar language and are considered forward-looking statements or information under applicable securities legislation."

You wouldn't want to sound as if your company actually had a plan now, would you...

I skim a lot of press releases, looking for keywords, product names or something that makes them interesting enough to read or follow up on them. Many are irrelevant, cover something tedious or don't tell the story well. Some start with a summary in bullet points of the bullet points that make up the majority of the release; with these I skim the summary. I ignore superlatives - best, fastest, first, biggest, largest, latest - and anything invoking temperature - hot, cool - and indeed the word 'new' as if there's a release about it that might go without saying.

I find mysef pitying the intern over at Rainier who had to read (or hopefully search with a macro) 150 press releases posted on Sourcewire to see how many such words I'm ignoring. "Out of 150 press releases posted on Sourcewire in June, “best” appeared 68, times followed by “latest” recurring 29 times and “largest” 24 times. Descriptive words such as “biggest”, “fastest” and “hottest” weren’t far behind." Andy Smith points out that you can blame the client and the PR both; and lots of comments abuse journalists for everything from cutting and pasting to refusing to work the way PRs want to needing superlatives to take an interest.

That's a six gun's worth of messenger shooting. Current press releases are almost uniformly trash even without superlatives. I often can't work out what a Microsoft press release is talking about because the language is so rounded and diffuse and marketed (like the email quotes santised by a marketing department to take out all interest, that I'll never use and regret wasting time on asking for when they arrive). But to me a press release is nothing more than a lead or a trigger, like a blog post; the real story I'll go find rather than waiting for it to arrive in a spoon. And I wonder. How many journalists do need to be 'woken up' by bombast and adjectives? How many do swallow the best/first/further, faster, furrier claims? Surely not many?

And are we to blame for being polite when we see terrible press releases? I cover the excesses of press releases when I do media training and I don't normally tell PRs their job without being asked to do so. But should we start saying 'this is meaningless - I had to look on the client Web site to work out what it was talking about' or 'that's plain wrong - it's not the first such but it is interesting because of x' or 'don't tell me what's hot/cool/significant - it's my job to decide that for myself'? It could take up a lot of my time - and I don't want to sound as if I'm insulting people who work hard and deal with deamnding clients. But if we don't say anything, are we implicitly condoning releases that make our journalistic lives harder?

Dear PR person
If you are setting up a phone interview for me with a US spokesperson, please take a look at the calendar and check what UK time corresponds to the US time you've booked and bear in mind that the US switched to daylight saving time last Sunday (I know because I was there and because I haven't had my head in a bucket for the last month: your IT team/calendar software/OS updater might have told you too, especially if you work in tech PR/have a client in the US/read the news). That way I won't get the call an hour before I'm expecting it, or phone in an hour late when the spokesexpert is packing up to leave.
Ditto if you're telling me about the conference call that's the only chance I'll have to speak to the high level representatives of the company about your new aquisition. You may think you're giving me nearly an hour's notice but actually you're telling me five minutes after the call starts (and no, listening to the recording isn't quite as useful).

I know March is a weird time to put the clocks forward. I know we're not actually in the US. I do always try to double-check times myself because I find timezones very confusing (that's why I nagged the Office team until Outlook 2007 now does timezones properly, why I've bookmarked http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ and http://www.worldtimeserver.com/ and why I appreciate being able to have two extra timezones on my clock in Vista). But this is one more thing in the rich tapestry of PR life that you need to get right, because it's part of the 99% perspiration that makes for good PR...

To all my friends in PR
Especially if you're a journalist who has an alternative line in PR and email marketing...

If you receive a piece of email that has 252 people in the CC line, it's absolutely fine to mail back and point out that this is poor email etiquette. It's a great opportunity to pitch your email marketing services to someone who obviously needs them. But if you're going to suggest that it's a grey area for data protection and you also plan to include screenshots of your service in action complete with screenshots of a report for a previous project - perhaps you want to go delete those 251 other people in the CC line, or just not hit Reply All in the first place.

Just a thought...

A lifetime of reading murder mysteries, watching Veronica Mars and asking tricky questions at press conferences has not been wasted; at the murder mystery dinner last night I sat, like Hercules Poirot, exercising the little grey cells and sent Simon scurrying around as my Hastings (unlike Holmes, Poirot let his Watson do the legwork and ask the questions), caught the fairly hefty hint from the acting troupe and solved the mystery. Actually, almost everyone solved the mystery but our team had all the clues and evidence and I was asked to deliver the denoument! Apart from being utterly exhausted by that point, it was huge fun.

Spotting inconsistencies, evasions, uncertainties and other clues: all in a day's work for us technology journalists. Even better if there's a drink in it ;-)

I spend a lot of time trying to find the right people to talk to. There are some good resources for journalists, but no one place where I can go to find out who at - say - Panasonic I can talk to about portable DVD players. Panasonic's site has a news centre with a press release about portable DVD players, but no contact details on the press release or in the news centre. A handful of press releases about cameras have email addresses in, but they're rejected by the mail system.

Hitachi on the other hand has a whole page of press contacts with email, phone and fax contacts plus press releases organised by region and subject, not just 'new is interesting'. The site is well designed for search engines so the right page is the top result when I search for 'Hitachi UK PR'. It's so well done I'm looking for other Hitachi products I might need to know about and I'll forgive them for claiming the VCR is the most essential piece of living room kit (if you don't say PVR you have to say TV).

It's not hard to be accessible; in fact it's quite hard to hide all your contact information so thoroughly that I can't find it. (Insert the obvious comments about marketing and PR being about telling people about your company as I did my fish in a barrel quote for the day this morning.) But I'm stumped! Come on Panasonic, I won't bite..

There is a standard list of things that annoy journalists. One whole section is people asking for information that's tedious for us to compile and of dubious value if we do compile it. Did we receive your press release? If you sent it to the right address, we did.Will we be using it? If we are, we'll have contacted you already because we don't re-use press releases intact with no extra research (insert catty comment about automated news writing here - Ed). Can we send you a features list? No.

Magazines and newspapers produce features lists so the ad department knows what to try to sell ads for. PRs use them in place of building a good relationship with the journalist so that they're sure that if a relevant feature comes up, the journalist will ask if their client can contribute. A few freelancers do their own features lists and if it's the way you work, more power to you. I write for so many titles in so many markets on such specific features at often such short notice that my list is unlikely to have more than one entry that's relevant to any one agency and very few tht you could pitch on. Phrasing it right, keeping it up to date and distributing it would take a lot of time. I usually know exactly who I want to talk to before I sell the story. If I want comment for a specific feature I'll put that feature on a service like ResponseSource that publishes it to all the PRs who sign up. And if you tell me ResponseSource is too expensive, I'll ask you to explain why I should do more work to save your company money.

My features list for the next few things would read:
reader questions on Windows XP - sourced
Microsoft consumer-related people to interview, mostly from the US offices - I already have the relevant contacts
Battery and power issues for the FT - on the FT features list and I've had maybe 50 pitches already
ditto three other pieces for the FT
Camera reviews - sourced
MP3 reviews - this one I do need more contacts for
Failures in identity systems and what developers need to know - if I want to talk to your client I've been houunding them by email for a month
Motorola, Google and the mobile enterprise - sourced

A PR who knows me already knows this. A new junior account exec won't know this.But they'll have been hired by someone who ought to know it. Particularly if they work on the account for BigSoftwareCorp#5 who I have been writing about for years. If you ask me a daft question, I wonder how well you've been briefed. I won't blame you; I'll blame the person who must have asked you to do it. And if it's the third request I've had this month I'll wonder if we need to do a little... re-education.

If you leave a company, you lose your company email address. One of the things sbisson is covering in the phone interviews filling his days is how companies can keep ownership of official IM addresses in the same way. Here's a question for my PR friends. Do clients ever want to own the PR email contact for their company, so they can have continuity when they change clients? Do they see PRCONTACT@MyCompany.com as a valuable address? Or better yet NAME@MyCompanyPRTeam.com to make it really clear and avoid any confusion about information tht goes to all employees and information that doesn't. Do they see their space in my contact book as something of value to them, or something that it's my job and the job of the new incumbent to keep up to date? At least once a year I have to rummage around to find out who has the account for Company X now, and sometimes I find out the day after my copy goes in.