The time has come to spam journos with video
Am I missing something?
A fully-functioning synapse or two? Or the point, perhaps.
I just read a piece on TheRealPRMoment about research from press release distribution company RealWire, which states “news releases including video content achieve three times more coverage than releases without multimedia content.”
It goes on…. “For those releases with editorial or blog coverage, the average number of pieces was 17.1 for the releases with video content. This was almost three times the figure for the sample without video content of 6.2 and four-and-a-half times more than the distribution industry average of 3.8 pieces.”
Drawing a comparison with the last such survey, the story tells us “Adam Parker, RealWire’s chief executive, attributed the lack of adoption of video to (among other things) the barriers that existed such as the prohibitive cost of some distribution services.”
Bit of a so-far-so-obvious, you may be thinking.
Here’s the thing I’m struggling with.
This is the same Adam Parker and the same RealWire behind the (always struck me implausibly-named) “An Inconvenient PR Truth“ campaign, which put forward a bill of rights (frankly, I’ve never known whether to laugh or weep at that, and I still can’t make my mind up) regarding the manner in which PR people send information to journalists.
Let me break it down for you.
It’s a campaign that proposes 10 so-called rights intended to make PR people treat bloggers and journalists with more respect and, at its heart, stop spamming them with unwanted press releases and other forms of contact.
For the avoidance of any doubt, I dislike the campaign. I wrote about it here.
I’ve never claimed to be possessed of super-human intelligence, and what I’m now struggling with is that on one hand RealWire/Adam Parker (wearing the Inconvenient Truth hat) have advised me (and the rest of the PR industry) to tread carefully. On the other hand, the one that’s promoting distribution services via a news item about a piece of research, I’m now being advised to use video in press releases.
Too many people in PR can recount stories of journalists becoming quite irrationally upset just because there was a jpg or a pdf attached to an email.
Step forward if you’re brave enough to start punting video at people.
I’ll be the one eating popcorn and watching what happens.
