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Being a PR Wonk is Hard
Posted July 3rd, 2007 by rybolov
So I’ve gotten ISM-Community a wee little bit of press over the past week.
About the best advice I’ve gotten on PR stuff was from Paul Graham’s essay The Submarine:
“A good flatterer doesn’t lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.”
In other words, I wrote our press release so that it was easy to cut and paste the sections that a reporter would want. Instead of giving them a list of facts, I gave them a modular story with some good quotes that could be cut off whenever they wanted.
Anyway, you’re hearing about me being a PR wonk because that’s about all I have time for right now. I can’t talk work-related stuff because for the next couple of weeks it’s all stuff that nobody needs to know about–covert missions and whatnot. =)
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3 Comments »
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:50 am
Well, then I shall pass on some advice my boss recently gave me:
“When you call in sick, its probably not a good idea to ask in the same breath where the good smallie hole is on the Umpqua” 🙂
July 3rd, 2007 at 7:56 pm
And you’ve done a great job with the press release – telling the world there is an interesting new product out in the stale ISMS waters filled with me-too’s.
Now you just need to ramp up the advertising bit. 😉
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:22 pm
Hey, I found out that I was responsible for press on Tuesday by inferring it from a Curphey email that went along the lines of “I’ll talk to Mike about writing an announcement”.
Not bad for throwing together a press campaign in 4 days in my “copious amounts of free time”. I know have an unofficial guide to ISM announcements and a templated press release to give to people along with instructions on where to post all the goodies.