Six ways to annoy a journalist – without really trying

Time to read: 3 minutes

We are very lucky that our head of tech content Sandra Vogel is also a working journalist. It helps keep all of us PRs on our toes. Here she shares some journalist pet hates – forewarned is forearmed.

PRs try their hardest to achieve success with every pitch. Journalists spend big chunks of their day reading pitches and working out what is useful to pursue.

For both parties, it can be a bit of a battlefield. Journalists never have enough time to triage an inbox. For the PR, there are never enough successful placements of a pitch.

There are ways PRs can up their pitching game – and perhaps the first place to look for clues on strategy is identifying things that annoy journalists so that these can be avoided.

Here are six things that can annoy a journalist – and obviously enough, they are six things a PR might want to avoid.

1) Bombarding

One email is enough. If you’re going to send a follow-up, wait a while. Wait a couple of days. Sending a follow-up within hours is not going to win you brownie points. If several PRs are working on an account, ensure only one sends an email to a particular journalist. Journalists don’t want or need to receive multiple copies of the same email from different people.

As for follow-up calls, tread carefully. “Did you get our email about….” is not a good way to go. If you sent it, the journalist got it. If you are going to follow up, do so with more information and a new snippet of interest. Don’t give the task to a junior who may know neither the journalist nor the subject matter. Follow-up calls are part of your journalist relationship building. Use them rarely, use them wisely.

2) Inappropriate addressing

I don’t want to receive emails that start “Hi, Vogel”, “Hi [name]”, “Hi, Andrew”, or anything else that’s not “Hi, Sandra”. But I do receive them. Even though I know this isn’t personal, it annoys me. For some journalists, it will result in immediate hitting of the Delete key before the main point of the email has been reached.

3) Media database errors

If you’re taking the personal approach and setting aside time to check a journalist out and reference their work, ensure you get it right. I’ve had emails that start something like, “I really enjoy your work at [website], and I wanted to run an idea by you”. OK. But if I’ve never worked at [website], alarm bells ring.

This can cause a journalist to decide in a split second that whatever comes next is irrelevant to them and spark another quick reach for the Delete key before any further words are read.

4) Spelling mistooks and word-related offences

Journalists are writers. I know, talk about stating the obvious. But the point is that they are, therefore, highly attuned to spelling, grammar, and other word-related matters. Emails and pitches that have not been through a spell checker, or those with poor grammar and syntax, won’t get much traction. Not everyone is a super-wordsmith. However, a person unable to write a proper sentence or pay attention to a spellchecker should not be let loose on journalist emails.

5) Errors in accompanying documents

Accompanying documents include things like press releases and report summaries. In late February, I received a 2021 press release dated 2020. Seven weeks into the new year. Oh, how the PR and I laughed. I’ve also had press releases and report summaries with tracked changes left in them. These can be amusing and informative, but sometimes the tracked changes can be a bit near the knuckle and embarrassing for the PR and their client. The PRs don’t laugh quite as much then. I am afraid an email request to “please delete without reading” is sent more in hope than expectation.

6) Jargon and weasel words

Any pitch that claims what’s on offer is “unique”, “groundbreaking”, or “game-changing” gives itself a lot to live up to. Usually, it can’t meet the highfalutin claims, and a journalist will not need long to confirm that. Tread carefully about what you claim in a pitch. The watchword here is to sho,w not tell.

Related to this point is the overuse of a range of words that just set journalists’ teeth on edge. Here are a few: showcase, synergy, disruptive, next-generation, revolutionary, innovative, DNA, passionate.

It might be hard to avoid using words like these, but many journalists find them lazy ways of expressing ideas. Avoid.

It’s not too difficult to find out what irks journalists. Just ask a few of those your own agency values and respects the most, and you’ll get a good, strong list of annoyances. That’s step one. Step two is doing something with what you’ve learned. Onwards!

Flexible working: Profiling Sam Howard

Time to read: 4 minutes

Asah Adolphe joined us for the month of July 2020 as an intern. Many of the team were involved in giving her some experience of different aspects of our work. Sandra Vogel, head of tech content and flexible working journalist, volunteered to guide Asah through conducting and writing up an interview.

The process involves several skills, including:

1. Researching your subject
2. Working out interview questions that will get you the answers you need
3. Crafting an article out of what you learn

Below, you can read the result of Asah’s interview with our founder Sam Howard.

It was never about PR at the start

It has been eight years since Sam Howard started The Comms Crowd, and it has never been more successful than today. She discloses everything in this interview, from her favourite procrastination habits to her greatest career achievements. She even admits that her initial career plan was never to work in PR.

Earlier in Sam’s professional journey, she did not consider PR as her future career path. Indeed, she resented the suggestion when her boss provided it. We now know that the software CEO had the right idea. His encouragement led her to where she is today – the head of a thriving comms agency.

A new breed of communications agency

As the creator of a ‘new breed of communications agency’, Sam’s main responsibilities were ensuring the company was healthy and financially balanced with happy clients. As she emphasises, ‘good enough is never good enough.’

Her determined mindset filtered through every response she made to my questions and accentuated why the company and her professional career have been such a triumph.

The key to developing an efficient team

When asked about the key to developing an efficient team, Sam explained that each member must be articulate, maintain a technical understanding, and exhibit an interest in their role. All three contribute to smooth business sailing. After all, an enthusiastic team builds the foundation for a successful, prosperous organisation.

In any professional field, every individual is guaranteed to face hurdles and experience failure. Sam acknowledged that to fail ‘is how you learn to become better at what you do’. I could not agree more. When I queried the award-winning writer on the topic of failure, she confessed that she had failed numerous times, which is understandable when you have twenty-plus years of experience in B2B tech PR.

She recalled one unpleasant experience when she was relatively new to the industry and was approached with a role in the city that she was unprepared for. Honoured to be chosen for the job, she ignored the required skill level and was devastatingly inadequate. However, she added that headhunting is common in the industry, so it is tempting to take a role you are not yet qualified to fulfil.

Sam’s greatest achievement

As much as it hurts, failure can open the door to success. Sam’s professional experiences reinforce this, as she has accomplished much during her time in the industry. Her greatest achievement, she claimed, was her having the incentive to start the Comms Crowd. In 2012, traditional work environments made it mandatory for employees to work in offices for long hours. Even getting a 4-day week or working one day a week from home was frowned upon.

Sam decided to go against this model entirely and set up a fully virtual agency with no office and none of the overheads (so no extortionate agency rates). Sam has been able to manage a dynamic, efficient, and professional team that operates from various locations across the country.

The determination and passion that built a tech comms agency stemmed from Sam’s desire to collaborate and work with people she respected. She recognised early on that it was unfair for the PR industry to have impractical expectations of its mainly female workforce. She aimed to embrace these expectations and create a flexible, supportive environment. Sam is adamant that “your personal life, family, and pets are as important as work. Anyone who thinks differently is kidding themselves.’ Clearly, staying true to these values is what inspires her drive.

Challenges are plentiful

Sam was not reluctant to shed light on the challenges she has encountered in her career. She revealed that when working in PR, “It is vital to learn how to adapt. Every client is unique, and getting it spot-on with a client can be tricky.” However, this doesn’t deter Sam and her team from reaching their goals and ultimately impressing their clients. In her view, the most rewarding element in her role is witnessing her team blossom and how they manage to impact their clients positively.

The Chief Storytelling Officer went on to describe her typical day. I must admit it is very productive, considering she works from home, but it is a routine she has evolved over the years of running The Crowd.

She gets to pick her working hours, which begin at 1 pm and end at 7:30 pm. Sam clarified that she is in “deep concentration” during those hours. However, she starts her day at 8:30 am when most people are commuting to work. This allows her to get an early start on her domestic tasks before taking her dogs for a walk. After that, she normally gets in some exercise, such as Pilates, swimming or cycling.

A perfect yet quirky coping mechanism

Maintaining a successful work-life can be stressful, especially you’re a company executive. Nonetheless, Sam has the perfect albeit quirky coping mechanism which she describes as “very calming”.

*Drum roll*…

creating spreadsheets!

Yes! It is multicoloured spreadsheets that relax her after a demanding day at work. I guess everyone needs a stress reliever.

Before conducting this interview, I realised that Sam is ardent and committed to encouraging the next generation of talent. I asked her for any advice she could offer a young person considering a career in PR or the media industry. She responded that individuals who wished to pursue a career in Media and PR must have a ‘strong work ethic’ along with determination and an understanding that the industry is fast paced. She also stated that the person must consider their skills and mindset, as the industry “is competitive and changes like the landscape”.

In this interview, Sam shared the concise mental abilities needed to be successful in the Media and PR world. She has shown us what it takes to be a part of the industry and the positive, resilient, and tenacious attitude one must possess.

What Does a Great Blog look like?

Time to read: 3 minutes

So you’re a B2B Tech firm and your marketing team has agreed that a blog is the way forward (and indeed it is). This is the blog you need to read next. Sandra Vogel, who heads up tech content for The Crowd and ghost blogs for a range of firms, passes on her advice.

So what does a great blog look like? The answer depends on what you want to get out of a blog, so for the sake of argument let’s say you run a business that sells goods or services. There’s a lot of competition for whatever it is you do, and you need to remind people you exist. You use a range of different methods to do this – a blog on your web site is part of the mix.

To meet the requirements of your business, your blog needs to keep people coming back. It’s a tool for you to deliver useful information to existing and potential customers or clients. It’s a way of showing off your organisational personality. And it’s a way of helping people understand more about your products, new launches, upgrades, exciting ideas and plans you have for the business.

That’s a lot for a blog to do. Here are some guidelines for better blogging:

• Keep it short. In general try for no more than 600 to 700 words. People will get bored if they have to read more than that, and you might easily stray off the topic at hand.
• Keep it simple. Don’t try to cram all your wisdom into a single blog. Have a point to make, make it, expand a little, maybe give some examples. Develop your point of course, but be careful not to make things too complex.
• Do you need a call to action? I see some blogs that include a call to action every single time. As a reader I know how the blog will end – it’ll be ‘now go and look at our great product’. If that happens every time readers know a blog is a glorified advertisement. They’ll get bored, go away, and maybe never come back. Calls to action are important. But you probably don’t need one in every blog.
• Connect well with the rest of the site. Do you publish white papers, news releases, new product updates? Of course you do. Tie blogs in so that there is continuity, and so you can link to other resources where possible. Don’t leave the blog out on a limb.
• It’s a good idea to have a forward plan so that you don’t get to ‘blog day’ and sit staring at a blank screen wondering what to write. If you work with an agency – and that’s a really sensible idea – then they’ll help with this.
• Be regular. It’s a good idea to have a schedule. Perhaps you want to put a new post online every two weeks. If that’s what you want to do, stick to it. When you make your plan (above), make your schedule too. Both plan and schedule can change in the light of events, but if they’re not in place a blog is the kind of thing that an organisation can let slip if it is busy. A blog that’s not up to date is arguably worse than no blog at all.
• Look from the outside in. Visitors might not use your product or service, might not know your business at all, might just be passing by. Think about it from their point of view. This can be hard to do in-house. It’s another area where an agency can be really helpful.

There’s another guideline that’s overarching on all of the above. It’s about the writing quality. The tone, writing style, grammatical accuracy and readability of your blog speaks volumes – it’s probably more important than the content. Really. You might have the most fantastic point to make, but if the message is garbled, nobody is going to get to the bottom of the screen.

If a blog is going to work for you, you need to put energy, effort and expertise into it. Writing a blog is hard work, and it is a skill people learn and hone through years of experience. Ensuring that the blog plan and schedule are well managed and that topics are spot-on can also be tricky in a busy business. There is no shame in lacking the skills or the time that’s needed in-house. Bringing them in from outside can take your business blog to the next level.

Our Top 10 Tips for live tweeting

Time to read: 3 minutes

Sandra Vogel, editor-in-residence, issues her survival guide for live tweeting.

For context:

• 500 million tweets are sent every day
• 5,787 tweets are sent every second
• 326 million people use Twitter every month

There are some more mind-blowing stats here.

Now, of course, we’re not all exposed to every tweet. But sometimes, it is necessary to tweet on behalf of a client, and these are useful stats to bear in mind.

Here are two more:

• The half-life of a tweet is approximately 24 minutes. If people haven’t read your tweet within half an hour, then the averages suggest they are not likely to get to it. A tweet gets half of all its interactions within half an hour of posting.
•  Tweets with an image get 55% more engagement. So, the image can matter even more than the words.

Nowhere is tweeting for a client quite so important and quite as stressful as when you are live tweeting an event. A lot will be riding on your work because live-tweeted events can deliver great profiles and original and interesting content. Events can be fast and furious, and staying on top of everything is difficult.  You only have one opportunity to get things right.

10 things to do before you go live

Get the detailed insider version of the event programme

Include any special announcements or launches that the public won’t be privy to till they happen. You can pre-prepare a tweet or two with appropriate images so you are not caught on the hop.

Know exactly who is speaking on stage at every moment

Prepare a file that includes their name – spelt correctly – their job title in full, and their various social media handles. Include any nuggets of info that might be useful for a tweet. Make this file easily accessible at the event so you can flick in and out of it when you need to.

Get the lowdown on any special announcements during scheduled sessions

If awards are given, get the list of winners, nominees and runners-up – whatever will be announced live. Get photos of the people in case it’s not possible to obtain live shots at the time. Pre-write your posts so they are ready to check through and fire off as announcements are made.

Get as many graphics as you can

Are there slides from presentations that will be useful in a tweet? Get them. You don’t need to have a post prepared and ready for every image, but the images may prove useful when you are live tweeting. Especially if it is tricky getting live photos.

Prepare at least one tweet for every session you are covering

You might not use it on the day, but then again, it might just be what you need to get you out of a problem moment.

Sort out your hashtags

Several hashtags will likely be used throughout the event. Agree on the list with your client and anyone you expect to be tweeting the event live from the client side. If some hashtags must be used in particular sessions, note that beforehand in the document you use to store the speaker details. Keep it structured so it’s easy to find what you need when you need it at speed.

Set some standards for language and tone

The client may already have established words or phrases. Make sure you are aware of them, and if you think you might lose touch with them in the heat of the moment during the event, put them in your handy reference document. Agree on the use of punctuation (exclamation marks are the domain of 13-year-olds, not professionals), any acceptable or non-acceptable abbreviations, any words that are never to be used and so on.

Have an open discussion with the client about logistics

Who is tweeting, what are they tweeting, and how will you divide and conquer? When are you going to get your breaks? Sometimes, a client is looking for back-to-back live session coverage. Is that practical? Plan your schedule carefully. You can’t be in two places simultaneously, so where will you be? If two or more sessions running at the same time need to be live-tweeted, how is that going to happen? Get full sign off on the schedule.

Do you need access to a backup person?

Or even two? Maybe back at the office, who you know will be on hand to do whatever you need, from double-checking facts to doing on-the-spot research or taking over from you if there is an emergency?

Set things in place to head problems off before they happen

Preparation will help you deal with on-the-day problems either because you’ve already thought of them, so they’re not problems at all, or because the process of all that preparation has given you added confidence that you can handle anything. 

Journalists working with PRs – how to avoid conflicts of interest

Time to read: 1 minute

Can a journalist comfortably hang out with PRs? 

Our in-house writer and working tech journalist Sandra Vogel explains how it works for her…

Some say journalists and PRs are chalk and cheese. They want different things. They see the world in different ways, and it is impossible to work in both camps.

But that’s not true. It is possible to be a freelance journalist who also works with PRs. There can be significant benefits to working in both camps.

Continue reading…

How to get the best out of your virtual agency

Time to read: 2 minutes

OK, so she gets out of bed for less than £10k. Here, Comms Crowd content writer Sandra Vogel sets out her virtual agency terms for keeping us all singing from the same song sheet…

Over the years, I’ve been commissioned by some of the biggest names in Tech, national newspapers, and some of the best-known technology websites. I’ve also worked with many small companies, mostly from a technology angle, with voluntary organisations, virtual agencies, and communications agencies. I’ve found good and bad clients across the spectrum. It’s not the size or sector that matters – it’s the approach and attitude of the client to using freelancers. Good clients support and nurture their freelancers; in particular, they get three important things right.

Are you emotionally suited to be a freelancer?

Time to read: 3 minutes

Our new content creator, and sax enthusiast, Sandra Vogel looks at the attributes you need to sustain a life as a freelancer.

they may not look like self starters, but when that postman comes…

Freelancing doesn’t suit everybody, but it sure suits me. I’ve been freelance for 20 years and can’t imagine working any other way. But it’s not for everyone. You know those buzzwords – highly motivated, self-starter, flexible attitude. Well, they apply to freelancing big time.

Highly motivated

Um – yep. Motivated to sit at the computer when the sun is out, the sky is blue, there’s a deadline to meet, a client call to take, and a couple of pitches to get in. Well, that’s one way of looking at ‘highly motivated’. And there are times when it most certainly applies.

However, there are other ways to look at motivation. I’m motivated to make as much of my free time as possible. That means there are times when I can – and do – drop everything and get outside on a weekday to have fun. The trick is keeping that motivation in line with working. That does take a particular personality type. It’s the type who can manage their time well, not be too ambitious about what can be achieved in a couple of hours, and ensure that time is allocated to fun as well as work.

If that means being motivated to work on Saturday morning to free up a Thursday afternoon, so be it.

Self-starter

People often see this as synonymous with motivation. In fact, it is different. A self-starter just gets on with stuff. They’re the opposite of the procrastinator who always looks for reasons NOT to do things. The procrastinator says, ‘Oh, I won’t write this blog today, because I’ve got a slot in the diary tomorrow’. The self-starter says ‘if I write this blog today then that diary slot tomorrow will stay free, and I can do something fun in that time.’

Self-starters have initiative, and they make things happen. Importantly, they don’t walk away when things get tricky. That’s a really important personality trait for anyone who wants to be a freelancer. There’s no manager sitting nearby to provide feedback that you’re doing OK, or give pointers if you’re not doing OK. You just have to figure it out.

Being a self-starter shows itself in all kinds of things, not just hunkering down to tasks in the diary. It also applies to bigger-picture stuff like hunting down new potential clients, following up on possible work leads. Even having a view of the universe and where you want to be in it, and then working out how to get there.

But being a self-starter also means doing things that might not feel very exciting, but that nobody else can do for you. There’s nobody around me to say ‘Sandra, I think it’s time you filed your tax return and updated your CV’. But when these things have to be done, they must be done.

Flexible attitude

I’d say this is a vital attribute for any freelancer. I’m a pretty controlled kind of person. I like checklists, and I like to have things planned out. Most days I sit down to work knowing what will happen during the day. I also want to have my week planned out fairly fine. Fridays are important and different from the other days of the week. I don’t like having meetings on a Friday, and I usually have no work scheduled after noon. The last work thing I do on a Friday is plan the following week.

How is that flexible? Well, while the aim is to take Friday afternoon off, it’s also ‘available’. So, Friday afternoon is a bucket that work can slip into if necessary. It might slip into the bucket because schedules have overrun. Maybe a client has come up with something for me to do on a short deadline. Or, because Wednesday afternoon was beautiful and I went out for a bike ride, everything in the diary was pushed ahead half a day.

Being relaxed and able to handle stress

A freelancer has to be good at that. There are often multiple demands on my time, and only I can decide the best way to resolve them. So, when two clients want something done right now and I must negotiate a way through that, I need to be calm and considered. When my computer decides to give up working and I’ve no spare, I just have to handle it. When something comes up that takes me away from work unexpectedly, I need to handle both the work and the out-of-work situation equally well.

Like I said at the start, the life of a freelancer isn’t for everyone. But if the cap does fit, it’s a great way to make a living. I’ve worked with some wonderful people (and my current Comms Crowd colleagues are among the best of all), done work I’ve really enjoyed, and spent more weekday afternoons in the cinema than I probably have a right to. What’s not to like?