Online PR: Should You Pitch or Ignore These 6 HARO Personas?

Ken McGaffin, August 20, 20140 Comments

HARO can be a great way to get coverage and links for your website – but it can also be a huge waste time with no results if you approach it in the wrong way. Understand these six personas and you’ll avoid wasting time and focus on the queries that could give you the media opportunity you’re looking for.

Online PR is an important part of any link-building strategy, but SEOs don’t always have the right skill sets to make it work for them. But one of the great things about HARO is that it can provide a great education at no cost – just dive in and keep at it!

HARO does have quality rules and the sites that pitch must have a certain score on Alexa. And the editors do scan the pitches and do refuse pitches that are not up to scratch.

Sign up at HelpAReporter.com and you’ll get three emails per day featuring queries from journalists who are looking for examples and good quotes to add color to their stories.

Scan through the queries (you’ll get between150 and 200 per day) and you’ll find that they fall into these types of personas.

Persona #1: Top-Notch

The BBC, Washington Post, ABC News, Fast Company, and many other top media outlets regularly pitch queries on HARO. These journalists use HARO to get quotes and add personal stories to their content.

This is one of the great advantages of HARO – it allows anyone who signs up to get access to top journalists.

Of course the payback can be tremendous, however for the top-notch journalists:

• You need to be exactly the type of person they’re looking for
• You’re going to face a lot of competition – lots of other people will be pitching
• You’ve got to have a great story and you’ve got to pitch it well – no mean task

If you can’t fulfill these criteria, then you’ll be wasting your time pitching.

And even if you do have a great story, that doesn’t necessarily, mean you’ll get a link. However, you can improve your chances (see 10 Ways to Increase the Odds of Getting Editorial Links).

Persona #2: General Business Sites

Probably the most common and possibly the most useful of the media outlets you’ll see on HARO. Most have good audiences and require a good standard of writing. These include sites like Open Forum from American Express, Entrepreneur Magazine, and BankRate.com.

Most of your online PR effort on HARO should go into sites like these.

They present a good opportunity because any business can respond, no matter what industry you come from.

The resulting articles are likely to be along the lines of "21 Small Business Owners Share Their Top Tips on…." That means you don’t really have a chance to stand out – the article will not be exclusively about you or your business.

There’s a high probability of getting a link because such sites understand the value exchange – give them a good quote and you get a link in return.

Of course others will see that too, so you’ll have lots of competition.

What is required is:

• Flexibility in being able to see how to make your business relevant to the subject of the article.
• A great sound bite – you need to write something original so that they can simply cut and paste into their article.

Persona #3: Niche Business Sites

These are queries from particular niches – lawyers, psychotherapists, dog trainers, and so on. You really have to be relevant to that niche – trying to twist your story to fit is a waste of time.

If you do fit the bill, you’re likely to get good editorial coverage and a decent link – but you must have a good story to tell.

The disadvantage is that any particular niche is not going to be featured that often and so your opportunities are limited.

Persona #4: Stingy Business Sites

Becoming a writer and posting queries to help you build content for your own site is a legitimate strategy (see Using HARO to Create Fresh, Compelling Content).

However, the value exchange mentioned earlier should be followed – any site that gets a good quote should give a link in return.

But "stingy" sites don’t follow this value exchange. They’re usually attached or related to a commercial business so they’re not strictly a non-partisan media opportunity. They’re often reluctant to give links because they want to sell their own good or services.

So choose very carefully before investing time in making pitches to these sites!

Persona #5: Authors Looking for Material for Future Books

These can be a mixed bunch. You may get some decent writers, with a publishing contract already in place, looking for interesting examples or case studies.

But you may also get a lot of people writing their first e-book who think they can fill it with material from HARO pitches. They still have to meet the Alexa threshold, but it‘s worth checking them out.

Remember:

• the book may never get published
• you’ll wait a long time for your publicity or link
• your contribution may be out of date by the time it’s published
,li>if the book does get published, it might bomb - no fame or fortune for you!

Are you really prepared to take the chance?

Persona #6: Anonymous

You’ll also see queries that give neither the name of the writer nor their targeted publication. For some reason, the publication does not want to tell you who they are.

Perhaps they’ve got a guaranteed spot on Oprah Winfrey and don’t want to be inundated with hundreds of pitches?

Perhaps, but you shouldn’t count on it. Your time could be better spent on other opportunities.

These six personas cover most of the queries you’ll find on HARO. But before pitching, you need to do some further checks.

Simple Checks on Queries That Interest You

When you do find queries that seem to fit the bill, check out:

• Is the site a place where you’d really like to be featured?
• Does the site readily link to sites that are featured in published articles?
• Can you find articles that have already been written by the journalist behind the query?
• Are there other ways to pitch this journalist or media outlet? A guest post or a press release perhaps?

Handling the media is something that won’t come naturally to all SEOs (see Jon Ball on SEW, "The Future of Link Building").

However, if you think you’ve got an aptitude for working with the media, then HARO is a great place to start.

You will get editorial and often that will be accompanied by quality links. But perhaps more importantly you’ll get the opportunity to develop your skills by working with and building contacts within the media – and that could be very valuable indeed.

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What Lady Gaga Can Teach You About Analytics

July 02, 2014 

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What do meat suits and analytics have in common?

A lot actually.

It turns out, Lady Gaga and her (now former) manager, Troy Carter, realized the importance of social media early on. In 2008, she was one of the first artists to begin utilizing Twitter to interact with fans. It made sense, because of her brand platform, but they soon realized that, while they didn’t own their Twitter followers or Facebook likers (Gaga has an amazing 66 million likes), they could drive them to their own space, LittleMonsters.com, and use the resulting data in fascinating new ways.

Gaga can customize set lists for concerts based on the listening habits of her fans in a particular location on Spotify—be sure to play this song, leave that one out. She’s taken fan-created artwork, uploaded to her website, and printed it on t-shirts, driving merchandising sales up more than 30 percent.

And the music industry is catching on. A service called Next Big Sound, which counts all the major record labels as customers, can predict (with great accuracy) which acts will be huge hits before they’re ever signed to a label by mining social media.

But it’s not just the music industry that can use big data to its advantage. Any company—or indeed anyone—can, and should use data to make better decisions. And companies who don’t do that will be left behind.

Data is changing your cabs, cigarettes, and corn.

When it comes to the impact of data, there are other great examples of how some companies are challenging traditional industries by learning more about their customers with data and technology.

Uber, a much talked-about car sharing service, has made waves both with it’s app-based bookings to request a car, and it’s acquisition by Google for a huge price. It’s also just one example of a new wave of services that are part of what’s being called the disruption economy. Companies like Uber, AirBnB (a web service that allows people to rent out rooms in their homes as hotels) and Coursera (a free education company) are using data and technology to outpace their traditional counterparts in the service economy.

They’re also being hit by a wave of regulatory backlash, but as Bloomberg notes, the writing seems to be on the wall, that service companies which don’t embrace technology will be on the way out.

The rise of ECigarettes, the smokeless electronic nicotine inhalers, isn’t due solely to the technology that makes the actual physical product possible; they’re also utilizing technology in other ways. Smokio is an eCigarette that comes with an app that monitors your nicotine intake. QuitBit is a “smart” lighter that connects to your phone via Bluetooth to keep track of your smoking habit, and IntelliQuit is the world’s first smoking cesation biosensor—a lighter-sized carbon monoxide detector that purports to help you quit smoking the way you started: one puff at a time.

Even the good, old fashioned family farm isn’t so old fashioned any more. Tractor and farm equipment manufacturer John Deere now uses data and analytics and many farmers rely on data to optimize fertilization and productivity. The company employs automated crop reporting that provides in-depth information about crops for farmers to assist in filing crop insurance claims. The data can also help farmers make difficult decisions about planting, harvesting, and more. Deere also provides a web-based solution for farmers to manage their fleets, decrease downtime, and save on fuel all based on sensors built into the tractors.

Companies that are embracing technology and finding ways to put data to use for their customers are not just ahead of the curve, but setting the standard for the way their industries will work in the future.

Does your industry embrace technology and data? Or are you lagging behind? I’d love to hear your ideas, concerns and examples in the comments below.

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Richard Edelman: Traditional Marketing Is Broken

June 26, 2014 

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In Chicago today, the head of the world's largest PR firm declared that the marketing industry has its business backward. Speaking to an audience of academics and brand marketing executives at De Paul University, Richard Edelman, who runs the eponymous agency as President and CEO, stated that much of the marketing we've grown up with "is a short-term and broken model."

The marketing industry has been rocked the last few years by the massive rise of commercial brands acting as publishers. Whereas brands like General Electric and American Express historically could only reach customers through advertisements next to content people sought in newspapers and television, they can now create their own stories that readers find and share in their news feeds on social media websites. (This, of course, is not news to anyone who's reading this story on LinkedIn.)

However, the communications approach brands have been using as publishers is still often anachronistic. "It's always been marketing first and communications as a servant," Edelman said.

I see the emergence of a new paradigm, which is 'communications marketing' instead of 'marketing communications.'"

The difference, he says, has to do with priorities. In a media environment where control over who sees content is actually up to readers—not editors or advertisers—companies who wish to build relationships with potential customers must now do so on readers' terms. That means communicating meaningfully before selling to them. It means sharing useful and entertaining information as a primary objective, with the understanding that relationships and sales will eventually flow if done appropriately.

The early adopters in the marketing community understand this well. It's why Red Bull makes snowboarding movies and drops skydivers from space to entertain its audience. It's whyBlackrock creates in-depth education to help people understand investing. And it's why creative and media and PR and social agencies (and publishers like The New York Times and Forbes) now sell "sponsored content" and content marketing solutions.

Social media has changed our expectations around what we see and don't see on the Internet, and that's forcing the hands of some brands—the ones with a lot to lose—to behave more in the interest of the crowd. Interestingly, that mindset (and pressure) is influencing beyond simply what brands broadcast from their Twitter accounts. Edelman uses Starbucks as an example: The company recently announced that it's going to subsidize its employees college tuition, in part as an effort to help its workers feel connected to the brand and to care about its customers more to the point that they share the brand's story and ethos with strangers who buy lattes.

You're not just selling coffee," Edelman said. "You're selling a relationship."

The key to "communications marketing", Edelman said, is "substantive storytelling." Purveying interesting and surprising stories instead of ads. To work, he said, brands must publish content that is:

1) "Rational and built for consumption." (Useful to the reader.)

2) "Emotional and built for sharing." (Of human interest.)

3) "Supported by data and insight." (Factually sound.)

These sound a lot like things a journalist would say. But when Edelman then declared that the PR industry must now consider themselves "guardians of truth," I was taken aback. It's a dramatic statement coming from the head of an industry that's thought by most people to be paid to spin facts. However, knowing that the social media crowd is quick to point out and amplify improprieties, public relations firms seem to be grabbing onto the idea of storytelling and relationship-building through radically transparent publishing more fully than almost anyone. (I suspect that this is largely due to the fact that Edelman and firms like Weber Shandwick's Mediaco have been hiring editors from traditional media with strong journalism backgrounds to run branded content.)

Though I think that brand publishing should not be overly compared to journalism, the infusion of a journalistic mindset—or communicating instead of selling—into marketing is a great thing. After all, the number one priority of journalism is to seek the truth and not betray readers. Marketing, historically, hasn't had much incentive to rank such ideals above the bottom line.

"We're going to change the mindset of marketers," Edelman says. It's a lofty idea. But if we can collectively manage it, it just might make the Internet—in which the 5.7 trillion ads served per year get ignored by 99.9% of us—a little more interesting.

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Shane Snow is Chief Creative Officer of Contently and author ofSmartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success. He writes about media and technology for Wired, Fast Company, Ad Age, and more, and tweets at @shanesnow.

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Image via Edelman. Disclosure: my company works with many of the companies mentioned in this post.

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