by: Fariez Abd Wahab
Being creative about PR means having some dynamic idea of what works and what doesn't. Either way, in PR, creativity needs to be applied wall to wall. Reaching out for new media is one creative action; evaluating the mix of print, broadcast, and online media is another. Creation and production of video news releases usually bring out creative PR agency resources, but what about targeting online streaming audio? IMG2, for example, has "The Webmaster Show," a nationally syndicated radio show that broadcasts to between four and five million people every week via streaming Internet radio. Or, how about a creative day picking through the current crop of e-zines or studying writers' beats? This is an easy area in which to be uncreative. Sorting through email, fax, phone, and hand-delivered distribution options, we often make the knee-jerk choice. Here's a case where I blew it through uncreative, in-the-box thinking.You have to be on the receiving end to realize how pathetic press releases really are. The odds that any basic product release will fall into the editorial schedule of an editor or writer is about the same as those faced by a lowly spermatozoon swimming hostile waters north to the ovum.
Even knowing this, under severe time pressure, I shelled out more than $1,000 to distribute a release through one of the two major news distribution services. It bombed. Totally! All pickups of the story were a result of personal contact, direct emails, and heavy phone work. Sure, there are specific reasons to use news-release distribution services, but general distribution of a product release is not one of them. The writers, the readers, and the media have all changed. It just doesn't work like this anymore.
These are obvious areas for creative work: headlines, subheads, leads, and email subject lines. In fact, though, the dead hand of tradition rules here with a blue pencil. What you generally see are boring releases filled with gobbledygook, boilerplate, and quotes nobody this side of election debates would ever actually utter.
When it comes to production, there is a crying need for creative input. Should we use HTML or plain text, or should we email full PR releases or link to web pages? What about photos, color, themes, jokes, dark humor, or stark seriousness? At one time or another, all work.
Maybe the most important thing a PR group really does is help a company nail down its positioning: what this company is in the world and how its product stands apart from others in the field. The few words expressing the corporate essence are at the heart of strategic creativity.
Source : www.clickZ.com
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