Warming Up

First, be prepared. The fastest way for any PR professional to get off the ground is to prep for the pitch. Therefore, before you even consider picking up the phone, make sure you know your story inside and out. Have all the facts and figures at hand. Without the numbers, such as how much of your product has sold in the last month, quarter, or year; the percentage of increase you’ve experienced; or how many doughnuts your machine spurts out an hour; you’ve got zip. More than anything else, reporters hate being wrong about those factoids, and you’re the one supplying them. So get the facts straight.

E-Mail: The Subject of It All

En masse, the media have come to accept e-mail as their preferred communications tool. Pitching, planning, even video footage and B-roll (filmed background material)—all are shared over the digital wires. Unlike a phone call, e-mail lets you be direct and cut to the issue at hand. You don’t have to ask how the kids are and what the weather’s like; you just have to ask your question or get right to your pitch and press Send. There’s no room for small talk in our lives, and there’s even less room for it in your Outlook Inbox.

Now that we understand that the entire industry is sending, receiving, pinging, and ponging, how do you actually get journalists to read and consider your pitch via e-mail? Journalists penning well-read columns get an influx of a few hundred e-mail pitches a day, and 90 percent of them are surely garbage. Some of our friends who work in the media get so many junky e-mails that they don’t even see ours sometimes. Understandably, then, they take their sweet time wading through these while working on other stories. The secret to getting yours opened, read, and considered is in those first viewed words in the under-remembered subject line. Hmm.

Mastering the subject line is becoming an art form. Look at your own inbox. Tricky marketers send subject lines that ruse you into opening their latest mortgage payment scheme or porn site. They put your first name in it (Subject: Bob! I Found Your Keys!), put your friend’s name in it (Subject: Mary Thought You Would Like This), and offer wads of cash (Subject: Collect Your $5,000 And Don’t Hesitate Or Else). Therefore, to intrigue smart journalists, who are faster on the delete key than the rest of the populace, you have to be not-at-all deceptive and a heck of a lot more creative.

When Mary Jane Journalist is rummaging through her e-mail inbox, she’s searching for something to catch her eye. The type of thing that catches any journalist’s eye is a subject line showing that you know what she covers, the ins and outs of her column or beat, and her particular style of thought.

Now, what about a story you know is perfect for a journalist, but you aren’t sure how to get it in front of him? If you’ve worked with him, and even one pretty great story has come from the experience, stick your name right in there, “Subject: Mikey from RLM here.” If those stories went as well as you think, your idea will get some play. For those who are always complaining about being too busy or never having enough time, try, “Subject: 30-Second Pitch.” Who doesn’t have half a minute? (For anyone who responds “me,” we will tell you without hesitation to grow up real fast.)

Comedy goes a long way in the in-box, too. Anything four-or-so-words long that can get a chuckle will convince a journalist to dive deeper. In 2000, RLM put together a media barbecue with Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos (for discussion, see Chapter 4). Hell-bent on getting some beefy press coverage, we sent out e-mails with funny subjects, because the event itself was a bit of a joke. Lines like “Subject: Beers, Burgers and Bezos!” and “Subject: Jeff Bezos Has Great Buns” definitely caught the eye of the media, which has come to expect very buttoned-up transmissions from Jeff and his cronies.

Another tactic for subject line mastery comes straight from the 101 sales manuals. Remember, you’re always closing, and instead of debating if a journalist should even meet with you, why not debate over the time and place? Then you can worry about wowing them in person. When we hit a city for a brief media tour, instead of shooting off e-mails with subject lines like “Subject: Fungible Audio Service Launches In D.C.”—jeesh! How boring!—we send out e-mails with subject lines such as “Subject: Coffee Thursday.” It’s personal, it certainly makes them curious (did I forget to update my Outlook calendar?), and it propels the conversation straight to availability; we aren’t even considering the announcement itself. This works, and it isn’t manipulative. After all, Mike and Richard are e-mailing this book copy to our editor. She’s paying attention. “Subject: Sorry We Are Late!”

Let’s go backwards for a moment. When you make mistakes at work, the guy in the next cube probably knows, your smoke-break buddy definitely knows, and maybe, if the planets align against you, your boss finds out. That’s bad enough, but if a journalist at the New York Times flounders, millions of people see the blunder, and that’s tough to cover up! And you will surely get in trouble with that journalist. But even when your facts are totally correct, backing up your info with numbers from a source other than yourself will make an interested journalist at ease with the story and more willing to write it up.

The next thing you want to do after you’re sure you can prove your theory or story with quantifiable data is to punch all the holes in it before someone else can. From the start, every ship is a leaky vessel. Before they roll a steamer into the harbor, they employ a team of pluggers in the hold to root out any bolts springing a leak and in need of tightening. Nothing’s worse than having a journalist buy into your story and start reporting on it, only to leave it foundering out in open ocean. If they find too many variables in parts of the tale you’re telling, the reporters will consider the concept you’re pitching dead and consider you unreliable (or dead).

And when you leave the story for the media wolves, or when you get too caught up in your own story to see the holes in it, you have a pure PR nightmare. In 2001, rumors of a new vehicle, known as “IT” and “Ginger,” buzzed through the media and into the pages of most of the country’s daily papers and weekly magazines. Its inventor, Dean Kamen, is a modern-day mad scientist with a reputation for flying helicopters and taking jetpacks to his office. His inventions in the past were in the realm of medical science, among them a series of motorized wheelchairs that can balance on two wheels. He garnered a great deal of early acclaim, but when it came to IT/Ginger, Kamen stumbled on his own hype.

When Kamen began filing patents by the fistful for a transportation device, claiming that it would completely uproot the way major cities are mapped out, that it would be the most important development in personal mobility since the sandal (as his PR told it), and other colorful assertions, obviously the press took note. Harvard Business School Press reportedly paid a relatively unknown journalist a quarter of a million dollars to report on Ginger, on the strength of the hype.

Inquisitive journalists asked repeatedly if they could have a look, a test drive, or even a small quote, and Kamen refused every time. He did let buzz-laden pals like Jeff Bezos and uber-capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers go for a spin behind closed doors, and they whipped up plenty of hype about the upcoming Kamen adventure. “Amazing!” “A thrill-a-minute ride into the future!” “Nothing like it, ever.” “I laughed, cried, and cheered.”

The speculation got more and more intense. The media was sure Kamen was going to introduce the first hydrogen-powered contraption for everyday use, thereby saving the planet and all of civilization in a technological display of genius. When the big day came, the inventor shared his ambition on Good Morning America, where Charles Gibson himself took the first public ride on what was called the Segway Personal Transportation Device. What was this but merely a self-balancing, battery-powered dorkmobile for pocket-protector geeks too lazy to amble? In seconds, the media community pounced on Deano for his gumption!

During the months that followed, papers, magazines, and TV programs scoffed at the scooter, making fun of it every chance they got. New York lawmakers even passed a law forbidding the Segway on sidewalks, or in the city for that matter, before it even rolled off the assembly line.

The problem was that Kamen believed his own hype way too much. He was so confident that the scooter, which he spent days and nights and OPM (other people’s money) creating, was so fabulistic that no one would ever question its usefulness. When they did, he didn’t have a compelling-enough answer.