JustPR Blog

It's not easy being a PR consultant. Journalists in Sweden have offered some good advice that businesses wishing to do PR in the Nordic region really should take notice of.

Fredrik Sjöshult at Expressen is in his blog retelling Dagens Industri's News Editor Jonas Jonsson's tips for PR consultants:  http://bloggar.expressen.se/fredriksjoshult/2011/09/dagens-industri-laxar-upp-pr-konsulter/

Here are some examples:

PR consultant school, part 1: Never again pitch a jubilée, for example a printing company celebrating 50 years in Sweden.

PR consultant school, part 2: Don't call us about inaugurations, for example "hotel opens its doors".

PR consultant school, part 5: 439 deleted press releases in the editorial inbox today - learning? Don't send rubbish.

PR consultant school, part 6: If you are young and new at, for example Bite PR - at least try and learn the script your boss gave you before calling the media.

PR consultant school, part 7: Vice Presidents from American IT companies may talk a lot and take a lot of space. That doesn't necessarily make them interesting.

PR consultant school, part 8: A no is a no. There's no point in continuing to nag.

PR consultant school, part 14: Never again try and pitch a people story by saying "it's a woman". So 1999.

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Harsh? Yes but also very true.

Jörgen Lindqvist at Computer Sweden, is describing a similar issue in his column:

"And then I explain that we're also interested in good case stories, launches and interesting trends. But old technologies with a new name or stories describing you as selfappointed market leaders in your niche are stories you wouldn't even want to read yourselves, unless the article happened to be about you."

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So what do we PR consultants think of journalists?

Give me a critical and professional journalist who knows his stuff - love it!

Unprofessional reporters who are out to get the story they have decided on, without checking facts and without offering an opportunity to comment. That stinks!

It's not so different is it?

Prebriefing media under embargo is something PR professionals do all the time. But prebriefing in the Nordic countries can be precarious. The deal only lasts as long as the relationship is better than the news story. If the story is big enough some journalists will run with it and sodd the consequences. Right on I say, they are journalists after all. But for us PR professionals it makes things difficult. We have great relationships with journalists, we are interdependent. But this is a much more reluctant dependency than in many other markets. Would they not be happy to blow the relationship if they get a really good scoop?, Yes they would. So judgement depending on the situation is definitely called for. Most of the time it's absolutely fine. However ask me if I would recommend my clients to prebrief Swedish media under embargo on a regular basis. No I would not.

We are very proud today. After a competitive pitch in Sweden we have retained the Google corproate and consumer account, and proving that a cloud model works really well for even the largest and most demanding customers. Believe me they don't come more challenging and fun than Google.

This is what Dagens Media writes about the selection, which they refer to as one of the most "prestigeous accounts in Sweden"

http://www.dagensmedia.se/nyheter/pr/article3102015.ece

We often discuss PR with international companies and everyone always refers to "the Nordics" or "the Nordic region". From an international PR budget terms Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and to a lesser extent, Iceland, get bunched together and seen as one regional market.

If you ask a Dane or Swede, Norwegian or Finn about how often they think about themselves as being Nordic they say "hardly ever". On one very general level we are very similar across all these countries, but look closer and we are also very different. Some of the media may be owned by the same publishers, like Schibsted and IDG, but from a PR perspective there is very little crossover of news stories. Swedes, Danes and Norwegians may understand each other, but often discussions between these nationalities happen in English, and everyone feeling a little bit ashamed that they don't understand the other languages well enough. Finnish is totally different from the other Nordic languages so here English is definitely necessary! If you ask a journalist or PR consultant in Sweden about the media situation in Denmark, he may know the big newspapers but that's as far as it goes. PR agencies in one market very rarely work across the region, and if they do it's almost always via a partner or through a separate office. Even on existing longterm clients there is no more contact between the different national PR teams than there would be between a PR team in the UK, France and Germany. So is there no Nordic sense of belonging at all? Well, yes there is, in the same way as we all feel European, we can feel Nordic. One example is looking at research results or surveys. If we've only been covered as "the Nordic region" we will show interest. But present individual research results for Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland and we will immediately get excited, start comparing and appoint winners and losers!

Quality rather than Quantity

How come it's so hard to get media coverage in the Nordic countries? We get asked that a lot, and it's true, it is harder than say for example in the UK, or Germany.

It has one very simple explanation and a lot of subtle ones. The simple explanation is the number of people who live here, 9 million in Sweden, 5,5 in Denmark, 5,3 in Finland and 4,7 in Norway. So compare this to the UK for example....62 million. Now translate this into number of media and you end up with 3-4 main national or regional newspapers, 3-4 additional business focused dailies, weeklies or monthlies and for IT and tech another 3-5....per market. Most international PR people knows that it can be hard to get any coverage in the major national or regional dailies business sections, but it's as hard to get coverage in the main IT titles because the wast area they have to cover. There are no specialist IT media in these markets, they are mainly split up in a couple of titles for consumer IT and a couple for B2B and then each of these magazines cover the entire range of IT, Internet and technology solutions.

At the same time a lot of international companies have the Nordic markets on their target list, this is a very technologically affluent region, people are well off so have money to spend. However interestingly enough even if you have, which many have not, a big budget to spend, you may not get as much coverage as you were hoping for. So is there any point doing PR here at all then? Of course there is! Our recommendation is to aim for quality not quantity. Think stories with news value and local angles rather than distributing product press releases and the journalists will be happy and you will get coverage that is worth a lot.