If you want anyone’s attention these days, let alone a reporter, you’ve got to look, act and be believable – online and off
The default reaction of the majority of your target audience is distrust.
Survey after survey shows people do not trust their government, media or scientists. Employers don’t trust their employees and vice versa. Customers and prospects do not trust marketing messages.
Journalists, too, are rightfully skeptical of PR pitches. That’s not new, but it’s almost certainly increased as automation and DIY PR have contributed to the deluge of pitching.
There’s an old saying in interpersonal communication that ‘you never get a second chance to make a first impression.’ While many of the channels we communicate on have migrated online, that axiom applies to digital communications, too.
Why? People, and especially reporters, will have a look around. If your digital presence looks off or strange, or isn’t easily verifiable, many will decide against entertaining your idea.
You have to look at this from a journalist’s perspective: they are on deadline to produce, there is today a ton of conflicting information, and they experience a lot of earnest people begging for their attention on issues of varying importance.
No reporter wants to get burned by writing a story from an erroneous source. Reputation is everything to a reporter and nobody watches the media like the media. If you make a mistake, you are the talk of the water-cooler for a while. Reporters have to make quick decisions, amid the deluge, and move on to producing news of interest to their audience.
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Non-negotiable digital trust signals
When people interview for a new job – they put their best foot forward to make a good impression. They dress up. They research answers to common questions. They have proof of their accomplishments in their hand.
They do all of these things to prove the person interviewing them can trust them to do the job. Businesses have to do that online in their digital presence, too. It’s exactly the same thing.
That’s why trust signals are so important. To be sure, these are the baseline – they won’t get you covered – but you make it harder to be covered without them.
1. Have an address clearly visible online
As remote work took off, many businesses found themselves without a physical office. As a result, they took their address off their website. I marvel at the number of business websites without an address anymore.
Would you do business with a company in an undisclosed location? I wouldn’t because it’s a compliance risk.
Put your address on your website. If you are a virtual company, then just say that, but also include the state of your incorporation or a PO box. You could go further by noting that you have employees in several states.
If you have physical offices, list those on the site as well.
2. Create compelling ‘about us’ pages
People do business with people they know, like and trust. The first place to get to know someone is the “about us” page of your website.
Unfortunately, many of these have been watered down and lack purpose, passion and personality. I don’t mean purpose in the “save the world” sense – I mean in terms of the problem you solve.
Businesses are often started by founders who experience a problem and see a market for a solution. They are usually incredibly passionate and often eccentric. The classic PR answer has been to smooth the eccentricity into mundane corporate drivel like everyone else.
This is backwards. The “about us” page is a chance to tell your story, to share why you started your organization and what drives you today. Eccentric is unique. Unique stands out.
People are a big part of that – especially faces. A client I worked with years ago had a professional sports team as a customer. That sports team ran experiments that found that when they used player faces on marketing material, as opposed to logos, sales grew.
It’s not luck, it’s psychology. Your “about us” page should have a story, bios and lots of smiling photos.
3. Curate a solid online newsroom
Online newsrooms used to be the most visited section of a website, because they were one of the few sections that regularly had fresh content. That content gets indexed and returned in the search results.
That changed when blogs got big, and today, most online newsrooms are a disorganized mess. They are mashups of all kinds of different content – that isn’t related to company news. Your online newsroom should be pragmatic, simple, well-organized and easy to navigate for a reporter. Make your news easy to find and verify!
At a minimum, include the following:
- Media contact information at the top;
- Chronological list of press releases;
- Separate section for “in the news”;
- Photos and images; and
- Subscription for reporters to sign up for media updates.
For contact information, I recommend establishing a distribution email address with several key players on it. Then the contact information is good for perpetuity. If you fire your PR firm or change the in-house personnel, the email is still valid; you just have to change the distribution list. This is a perfect solution for press releases too, which brings me to the next point.
4. Put contact information and multimedia in your press releases
There’s a very strange phenomenon taking shape in press release distribution: I see press releases published every day, on major distribution sites, with no contact information.
I do not understand why. The absence of contact data on a release of information to the media suggests that the business doesn’t know what they are doing or isn’t interested in a dialogue.
It’s effectively saying, ‘Here’s the announcement. Write about it or leave it.’
I promise you more journalists will leave it and they’ll write you off in the future too. Few will give a second chance to a source that has proven to be unreliable.
I’m no journalist, but as a blogger, I’ve passed on writing posts many times when there’s no contact information and I can’t get a question answered.
The other aspect of this is multimedia – images, graphics, photos and videos. These complement an announcement and add credibility to what you are saying. Further, chances are good those assets will be used in coverage.
There’s a ton of data that’s been published over the past decade that shows press releases with multimedia outperform those without it. It’s true of the volume of views, duration of views and eventual inclusion in bona fide editorial.
Too many in PR resist or ignore this, which is great for you. Take advantage of the situation and use multimedia.
5. Add dates and bylines to your content
Companies routinely publish blog posts without dates and bylines. The lack of dates stems from the SEO community, which has advised people that removing dates keeps the content “evergreen.”
However, that is a premeditated effort to mislead and data shows even search engines view it as untrustworthy. Datelines are more important over time. Why? Ideas and opinions change. Having a dateline places that content in that historical context.
The lack of bylines can be attributed to a number of reasons, ranging from concern for personal privacy to attributing big ideas to a junior employee managing the blog. Those may be valid reasons, but the perception from the reader’s side is this: no one is willing to put their name on it, which means it must be garbage.
6. Clean up neglected corporate social media channels
There’s a new social network every few months and businesses rush to make corporate accounts. Everyone wants to be early on the ‘next Twitter.’
Over time, businesses start having large collections of social media sites – where nothing has been published in the last eight months. It looks like an abandoned digital billboard.
It’s a sloppy look and people don’t trust messages on old abandoned billboards. If you are going to have these sites you should do one or two things:
- Use it regularly and keep it fresh; or
- Pin a post telling people this site is just a placeholder and let them know which social channels your company keeps active.
Does it matter to the media? Yes!
A survey of 2,400 reporters a few years ago found 86% say they consult the company’s social media channels at least some of the time. Further, 58% “usually” or “always” check those sites in the course of developing coverage.
7. Review the veracity of your claims from the receiver’s perspective
This is perhaps the most important section of this post, especially for B2B tech firms. Businesses use the same language these days, and while it’s often an effort to be relevant and related, it winds up sowing confusion.
People can’t distinguish between businesses. The value proposition, buzzwords, and acronyms have all been massaged to the extent they all sound the same. Forrester calls this the “sea of sameness,” and it’s a legitimate problem when every technology company claims to be ‘the leading provider of XYZ.’
Leading by what? Revenue? Customers? Employees? Technology? The latter is highly subjective – and the company itself has to earn a provable right to say it – if you want people to believe you as opposed to dismissing the things your company claims. Too many don’t, but they still say it, so people write it off as noise. The brain is a fantastic biological filter of noise.
This shows up in the value proposition as well. I’ve been in a lot of meetings over my career where marketing and product have a heated debate about what a product can or can’t do; or whether it meets this analyst’s definition or not.
The biggest factor isn’t what you think sounds true – it’s what someone who doesn’t know you but fits your ICP would think is true. That also extends to journalists.
Again, think about it from their perspective: every pitch they get is someone claiming to be the leading provider of something. They cannot validate every possible claim, so they skip those that put them in that position.
This applies to quotes in press releases, blog posts, media statements, and contributed articles, too. Avoid filler words like “very pleased” in press releases. Instead, present a fact and use the quote to provide commentary about the fact – say what you think it means.
Analysis is useful and potentially insightful. But only if it’s believable.
Building trust is a bit like search optimization
Being believable and building trust is a bit like SEO. If Google can’t crawl and index your site, none of the on-page optimizations you make will have an impact. The same is true if your digital presence even gives the appearance of being untrustworthy.
Similarly, there are a lot of little on-page optimizations you should do consistently over time to improve search. These won’t make an observable difference on any typical day, but over time, they add up to a big difference. The same is true for digital trust signals.
Marketing and comms must start prioritizing trust over reach for the foreseeable future. The message, the medium and the measurement matter little if no one believes it.
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Image: Gemini
