I’ve been seeing some terrible examples of online PR and promotions in some of my favorite message forums lately, so I’m going to give a basic lesson in online PR for these marketers/PR people that (still) just don’t seem to get it:
Don’t put your 2-page press release verbatim on a forum, no one cares – you have to tailor it for message boards in a shorter, more tactful manner. This isn’t a publication, it is a place for discussion – honestly you come off looking very unprofessional by putting your hyped up release in an online community, and it won’t create much interest in your product (or artist) – in fact you may achieve the opposite because it demonstrates you don’t actually want to participate in the forum’s discussion, you just want to spam it with items your clients are paying you for and not really contribute to the online community.
A brief summary with a link to the information is the proper way, you come off looking way too “salesy” with a full release posted on a forum…no one wants to read a 2 page press release on a message board – add a link and we’ll click it if we want to know more, and you should be actively participating in the forum if you actually want people to read your information and take you seriously.
As well, if you’re a big name artist who can afford some PR people to write up a slick release for you, great – just realize that most people (at least I think) see through your writers (sometimes not so clever) adjectives and adverbs hyping you up (do people really fall for this?). Let the product speak for itself, and quit hyping yourself up with thesaurus’d words. Pitch yourself to some publications/bloggers that will review your music and write about you, don’t simply plaster press releases about yourself on community forums – while people may reply to your thread and seem to support, really you are encroaching into a groups’ online community, and if you don’t actually want to participate and you simply want to sell yourself, then you really don’t understand their purpose, or the Internet at all, and will eventually just be blocked out altogether by them.
That’s my rant for the day, I love participating in online communities, and I like to pitch my clients, but I think some people really don’t get how to pitch clients in an online realm in the proper way.