So far, email hasn't lived up to the promise of "interactive" PR. In fact, it hasn't amounted to much more than another distribution channel. Granted, it may be easier for a
journalist to respond to email than to pick up the phone. But when it comes to facilitating in-depth interaction with reporters or offering feedback on your news, email has proven
uncooperative.
Until now. In recent months, the technology and techniques that allow Web site managers to track their visitors have begun to take root in the PR trade. Several vendors are
retooling their campaign management wares in order to give your email press releases a bit of a brain. These new tools can offer higher efficiency and better metrics - if used
correctly.
Click Back
Vocus Inc.'s iRelease is included in the company's VPR 3.0 suite (starting at $20,000). The system sends interactive press releases to your contact list with clickable links
for giving immediate response to the PR contact, requesting an interview or downloading a press kit.
It's the back end where this becomes interesting, however, because Vocus also tracks who is asking for what and reports this activity. "I can track every release and hook it to
articles that appear afterwards," says Barbara Williamson, media relations officer at the Office of Public Affairs & Marketing at Northern Arizona University.
The approach gives PR pros a template for creating their press release so that the messages mimic the look and feel of the corporate site and carry a series of interactive
buttons for the recipient. Most of the action buttons link to a Web site, where activity can be measured and even attributed to specific contacts, whether it is viewing a brochure
or requesting additional information. If the email releases have been personalized sufficiently, the report can list the individual contacts that took action.
This function can help "weed out" a media list, showing you who's really interested in your news. And because it offers information about how a contact has interacted with your
material, it does a little homework for you before you make the follow-up call, allowing you to establish a better dialogue with the journalist.
Better PR Through Targeting
Another vendor, CorporateNews, uses targeting in its press release distribution service to better target their efforts as well as boost interactivity with contacts. "We
actually have our clients select the editors they want to reach, says Sharlene Harvey, director of marketing. The company maintains a database of 30,000 editors, and clients
choose among topic categories. The releases are sent from the client, and templates allow for direct links from recipients to the PR contact or to a press center. CorporateNews
clients can sign up for three months of unlimited releases at a cost of $825.
Simple as the strategy may seem, and easy as it is for anyone to do in a press release, including a hyperlink within the email that lets recipients reply to the PR contact
quickly and easily is highly useful. "Editors really like that," Harvey says. This also makes it easy to track the effectiveness of the release.
Unless an email release is in full HTML format, it cannot communicate back to the sender whether it has been opened by the recipient, so the name of the game in tracking press
response is getting the contact to a Web site where it is easier to measure the level of interest in specific pieces of information. Many communicators are doing this by creating
mini online press centers with expanded information on news in the release. CorporateNews encourages clients to write more succinct releases that encourage journalists to take the
bait and do a little information gathering on the sites.
PR Newswire allows recipients of press releases to interact with a news release by using the "T-Button," a link to a mini-survey built into the release. "It lets the recipient
of the press release create a dialogue with the company," says Dave Armon, president of PR Newswire. "We have statistics that report back by press release on who is reading
it."
Many of these tracking capabilities had been focused on the healthcare and tech categories until now, says Armon. The company has been planning to relaunch its resource for
journalists, Newsdesk, during the summer and expand interactive functionality to all of its news categories.
At Newsdesk, journalists self-target and make their news-gathering trackable by registering with the site and declaring their interests themselves. "When reporters open the
story they leave a trail," says Armon. "Clients can see all their releases and all the hits and figure out why no one in Idaho cares about this release or why the TV stations are
gravitating to your releases."
Armon says that there is much more to come in online PR. "The addition of multimedia will be key - more digital assets accompanying press releases, and trackability is key."
Using the Numbers
If the Web proves anything, it is that being able to measure something doesn't mean that you make good use of the results. Advertisers have been privy to user interaction data
for years, but many either ignore the numbers or feel overwhelmed by them.
Whether electronic press release tracking becomes a standard practice among PR pros is anyone's guess. For now, users like Jennifer Culter, account executive, Townsend Agency,
find that the services are best used in particular cases. For many of her local email blasts in California, press release tracking is less valuable because she is already familiar
with the contacts. But the tool comes in especially handy when the net is wide, when she is releasing news into a new market or going international. "It gives us a good feel for
who is looking at our releases, and it gives us the timelines of who is looking at our releases at what time," she says.
Putting Your Release to Work
Our experts offer the following advice on how to use interactive press releases to their best advantage:
- Test pitched ideas. Send out several versions of the same news and assess which ones appeal to which audiences.
- Demonstrate to management what works. "Although I may have told my boss that stories about XYZ aren't 'newsworthy,' I may be asked to issue that news regardless of my advice,"
says Kay Bransford, VP, marketing and corporate communications for Vocus. "I can then demonstrate how ABC story produced interest from 50 percent of the targeted media, versus XYZ
news that got reviewed by 3 percent of the targeted media."
(Contacts: Dave Armon, 212/596-1500; Jennifer Culter, 858/ 457-4888 ext. 156; Sharlene Harvey, [email protected],
208/939-2564; Barbara Williamson, 928/523-6125)