Amen.
Despite the many alternatives to email, from cloud-based collaborative apps to social media channels to the telephone, tech journalists and bloggers say e-mail is king.
This news flash is according to the good folks at PRSourceCode, a service provider to PR professionals, which recently released this stunning news -- among other tidbits -- in its 5th annual "Top Tech Communicators" report.
A little about the PRSourceCode survey and report: a survey was administered to more than 800 tech journalists and bloggers in the third quarter of this year. The results were made public a few days ago.
The survey also asked the participating journalists from such industry stalwarts as Wired, CFO, Information Week, eWeek.com, and CIO, among others, their picks for top tech PR agencies and top in-house tech PR practitioners.
But for the purposes of this post, I find the recommendations for becoming a "2011 top tech communicator" much more interesting, at least until the time that 3Point Communications makes their top 10 list!
What I find most interesting from the survey results is that for all of the mind-numbing changes the PR professional has had to adapt to in recent years, the core tenants of how we find success haven't changed all that much.
In last week's post I sided with Ford Kanzler of Marketing/PR Savvy, who argued recently that content marketing has been a successful PR strategy for decades.
So this week it's only fitting that I'd report the same: that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The PRSourCode results help me make my point. Here they are:
- While the tech journalists and bloggers encourage PR pros to "experiment with new media," their emphasis is on e-mail based communications. More than 90% of the print journalists prefer e-mail communication and online journalists and bloggers are right there with them. A distant second is communications via Twitter.
What about in other aspects of practicing sound tech PR principles, like being proactive? Nearly 80 per cent of the participating journalists report that their sources and ideas for stories come to them via PROACTIVE pitches from PR folks. Oh, and ensure you read past stories from the journalists you're pitching so you learn what they're interested in before pitching them. The same rule applies to pitching bloggers. This is new? No, I don' think so.
How about this gem: journalists want PR pros to get back to them quickly because they have this thing called a "deadline." Oh, and don't promise what you know you can't deliver. Aren't these just the basics of doing business, whether your working in PR, journalism or most anything else? But the fact that the survey respondents point these issues out tells us that not every PR pro approaches the job in the same way.
I should note that the bloggers who participated in the survey prefer to hear from PR pros via Twitter and Facebook more so than their print and online colleagues. But as noted earlier, the vast majority of bloggers prefer e-mail above all other channels.
Click here if you want to view the full report. My guess is the 6th annual report will look pretty much the same.
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