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PUBLIC RELATIONS IS A FORGOTTEN ART
By Ernie Saxton

When Stew Doty included a PR Refresher article in a recent edition of his highly respected newsletter ‘Racing Promotion Monthly’, we immediately asked for permission to use the article. As a longtime member of the media, I continue to be amazed at how many do a poor job on their public relations efforts.

Doty’s article was centered mainly on short track racing operations, but there is a great deal of information that can be used by everyone that is ever asked to do PR work. And since PR is such an important part of sponsorship marketing, I felt it important to include this article with some of my own comments.

Doty started off his article by telling promoters to share the information with their staff and then use it as a yardstick to check their work, ensuring that they make the most of the opportunity to get publicity for their track. Set PR goals, communicate them to your PR person, and personally review the work of your PR person. (One of the biggest complaints we hear from PR people is that they often have a difficult time getting information from the promoters, organization officials and clients.)

What I often find is that short track operators and many organizations pay minimal salaries or get volunteers to do PR work. That is a mistake. This is an area where only a good, qualified person should be used. This is a person who will be carrying the message of your organization forward… carrying it to the media. And hopefully everyone understands just how important working with the media can be. But, then again, there are a lot of well-paid PR practitioners out there that do not use the basics and often times we find PR people who do not understand the business and seem unwilling to learn.

Your PR person should have a couple of books. One book is “The Associated Press Stylebook” and the second is “Elements of Style” by Strunk & White. Excellent reference tools.

DO THE ADVANCE WORK. Get to know the sportswriters and/or editors. And don’t limit it to sports. You can add entertainment writers. If you are involved in sponsorship marketing, you should be including business writers and business publications.

MAIL OR E-MAIL? I am a firm believer that only timely information should be e-mailed. Please don’t clog up my system with newsletters and copies of ads. Newsletters and promotional materials should be mailed.

RECOGNIZE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEDIA OUTLETS. Use two “contact” lists, one for ‘deadline’ media and another for ‘long-deadline’ or ‘non-deadline’ recipients. The first list included daily newspapers, TV, radio and website. The second list includes trade papers, even contingency sponsors ad others with a vested interest, but non-deadline interest in results and pre-race information.

We do it a little different in that we offer a new release that has a ‘short version’ for TV, radio and columnists. And a full story is included in the same release.

FORGET FANCY GRAPHICS. We cannot emphasize this enough. Media outlets do not need fancy graphics, logos, letterhead, etc. All that is a waste of time and space. In a digital world it’s more important to send information quickly in a format that REQUIRES NO WORK BY THE NEWS DESK. Graphics are deleted and slow down transmission. THE SIMPLE FACT THAT EXTRA WORK IS REQUIRED BY THE WRITER OR EDITOR WILL OFTEN GET A NEWS RELEASE DISCARDED. Keep in mind that information on local auto racing is not priority at most media outlets. Don’t give the media an excuse for not using your material.

NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER USE ATTACHMENTS. Send you material only in ASCII format, preferably with line breaks, or in the body of an e-mail. Never send news releases in word procession programs. For the most part, editors no longer convert documents. The air time or space will go to those who send their news material in the recommended way. ASCII eliminates viruses, which hide the code of the programs. There and a couple of news release services that send all their releases as attachments or in word programs. We ignore them.

HIDE THE ADDRESS LIST. We don’t want to know who else gets your press releases. There are programs to hide address lists. Send your releases to yourself with all the other recipient addresses as blind carbon copies. Sending the list of recipients at the top of your new release is unprofessional and creates a lot of extra work for the recipient that might want to use the information. Why should we have to print out a page of addresses to get to your news?

RACE RESULTS. End them in a timely manner. Race results should go out within a reasonable time after the races are complete. It is amazing how many PR people send results for speedways, their organizations and their race teams a couple of days after the event is over. Why waste your time and mine? If you cannot get the information out within 12 hours of the event being completed, you are not doing your job properly. And why we get a release that is two or three pages long to tell us that JOHN DOE finished 15th is something we may never figure out. Actually it is pretty much done to please the boss and lead the boss to believe the PR person is doing a great job based on the size of the release.

DIGITAL IMAGES. If sending digital photo files, take the time to learn imaging programs to reduce the size. Or, even better, work closely with a good photographer and have the photographer send out the images. Check with the outlets to make sure you know how the photos should be sent.

Please do not send photos as part of new releases. If you feel you have to send photos, send it as an attachment and tell the recipient how they may get the photo of they want it.

As a columnist for a number of publications the last thing I want to receive is a news release with photos. It is time consuming and aggravating and we delete the information 99% of the time.

WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY. All that information should be in the lead paragraph of your news release or at the very least, the first two paragraphs. Please don’t make the reason for the news release a guessing game. We should not have to read the entire release to find out who won the race or the name of the new sponsor that was just signed.

As punishment for not following this format, a PR person should be forced to do the agate results at a daily newspaper (as I have done) to get an idea of how difficult it is to get the top ten finishers in the feature events from speedway news releases.

AS I SAID… some of this is just for PR people who work for speedways and sanctioning organizations providing deadline information. However, there are a lot of BASICS here that can be used by everyone in the PR business.
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ernie Saxton is editor/publisher of “Ernie Saxton’s Motorsport Sponsorship Marketing News and offers assistance to those seeking sponsorships. For info call 215-752-7797 or see www.saxtonsponsormarket.com. 
 

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