I wrote earlier about some truly atrocious PR. In order to address the balance somewhat, I asked Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR to give Mobile Weblog readers some good advice. Rainier really know their tech stuff and no, they’re not paying me to write nice things (unfortunately!).
Here’s what Stephen says about managing press relations at the current Cannes MobileFest:
It is day two of 3GSM. 652 exhibitors. 880 press releases. How the hell do the 800 or so journalists visiting the show dig out the interesting stories? Inevitably it is the big brands that the get the attention – at least in the traditional media.
Today’s Financial Times reports on two stories from 3GSM. Nokia and Microsoft, which will see Windows Media Player ported to Nokia phones and Verizon has acquired MCI in a $6.75bn deal.
Rainier PR has four clients at 3GSM for which we’ve been scheduling press meetings. But the volume of announcements means that many journalists had their press meeting schedules booked full at the end of January.
The traditional media, particularly print, are limited in the amount of space that they can give to news from a show such as 3GSM, leaving niche web sites and bloggers to report on the more innovative stories.
If you want to drive press coverage don’t issue news announcements around a show – unless you’re a big brand. Instead use exhibitions to network informally with the press and save your news stories for when there is less competition for press attention.
Next week will be a quiet week for announcements from mobile firms.
Good advice indeed, just about redeeming PR as an industry 
Having said that, Rainier’s own survey into the state of the PR industry revealed that “35.8 per cent of journalists found PR agency staff were ‘muppets’ with little knowledge of either their needs or their own client.” So we can’t be totally surprised by the Orange story earlier.
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