PR AGENCY DIARIES: MEDIA MOVES. WHO’S IN, WHO’S OUT, WHO’S WHO AND HOW NOT TO RILE THEM
We’ve all been there and learnt from those mistakes. Up against the clock with a news hook that’s tenuous at best, brutally rebuffed by your first bets despite your carefully worded pitch. Forced to succumb to the old ‘spray and pray’ method with only a handful of news aggregator sites picking up what you’re putting down.
If keeping up with the Kardashians is confusing, we raise you with keeping up with media movements. Yet most agencies do not put the effort in.
One of the most overlooked weapons in a PR’s arsenal is the most essential - actually knowing the media. Putting in the painstaking hours to develop a media strategy, picking up or tuning in to your target outlets, ascertaining the exact placement and writing notes as to why it is contextually significant for this title, and tracking down the correct contact for that pitch. Then tiering them, offering exclusives, finding case studies etc etc etc..
This takes hours, sometimes days. Not minutes. And it most certainly cannot be done with an iSentia login or a save over job from a 2018 project in the same category.
As an agency that literally scours new sites every day, rotates radio stations (in office and on the road), mines for mobile phone numbers over newsdesks, has its own self-built CRM system and fancies itself one of the best agencies for earned media, here a few ways to make sure you aren’t shooting with a blindfold on into the media abyss.
If you can get past the over-indexing of cat content, pretty much every journalist (particularly in news, tech and gaming) has some form of Twitter presence. This is the very best way to understand the motivations, interests and connections of your media target, and potentially find some evangelists too.
If nothing else it will allow you to reference some common ground in your communications, and it will give you some tip-top info on who orbits with who for your event invite list and seating charts.
Write notes
Every agency has either one ‘base list’ or in our case broader category lists that try to cover off every potential target within the tech, food & drink, business and so on space. These are then overlaid with many other tactics when crafting a client strategy.
Here’s a hot tip - writing notes in these base lists is key to delivering them ‘of interest’ materials and getting your news shared. No point sending breaking news on a Monday if they don’t work that day or pitching to someone who has outlined they aren’t covering businesses over or under a certain cap. When journalists share this type of info, don’t look the gift horse in the mouth. Share it ‘round your office, learn, commit to memory and write it in your notes for reference when you inevitably forget.
Save face by showing face
With NZ media going through a massive switch up, use the opportunity of new roles, outlets and teams to firstly congratulate and then arrange a coffee or a drink to learn more.
Be interested and interesting. Don’t go in blind or empty-handed as we all know time is money. Go in with the intent of working through what this new role or outlet’s goal or USP is, and how your client stable (if an agency) or business offer (if in-house) can help them provide epic content that demands eyeballs.
We have created a handy onesheet that outlines all our clients, what we do for them, and the key contact from the agency for their reference. It is often shared further around the network or publishing house and has sparked some of our most quick-fire and successful partnerships and collabs to date.
It’s getting in front of contacts generally that is where the real relationship (often friendships) is forged and why people use comms professionals. One of our managing director’s best media friendships came from meeting up for coffee to front-up about a slip-up on our part.
“Just following up”
Don’t start an email with this. A trope of PR calls the land over and the surefire way to be blacklisted.
Instead of interrupting the journalist’s flow, from having met the journalist and writing your notes following your meeting (see previous points), you will already know the best form of contact that suits them (be it email-only, text, Inmail or call – or they have told you that no response means ‘I’m not interested’).
Irrespective of the medium, get straight to the point, give them the headline/story in one succinct statement (facts/figures/opportunity), and offer proof points that makes it a story not a sales pitch.
Otherwise, they will tell you to run an ad. Or hang up on you.
Think niche
More and more, the larger news outlets are sourcing their stories from forums, the comments section, Reddit threads and niche communities that the internet has spawned. Understanding and nurturing the relationship with that fledgling podcast can easily whirlpool up to a mass media story.
But what some clients might think as niche is not also necessarily the case, so it is the PR’s role to educate their client on the demographic of that specialist outlet and why it’s more important than a front-page NZ Herald story.
And if you are schooled up on the interconnectedness of these outlets too, you will understand that female-geared Capsule (run by a powerhouse of publishing’s elite) has a content partnership with Stuff and its regional newspapers that can equal millions of syndicated horsepower, and on the flipside, a news in brief in the Newstalk ZB news bulletin can see your audience extend all the way through NZME – from hip-hop station Flava to Hauraki.
It is a jungle out there, so of course we recommend using people who can weed-whack appropriately. Get in touch if you have something that needs special attention brought to it.
