All Ears to You

So how do you beat the odds and get article after article on your product while others are getting nowhere? Simple: If it’s newsworthy, people with pens and PCs will listen. So what’s newsworthy to a reporter? There’s no list or set of guidelines, but incorporating some of the criteria mentioned below cer- tainly helps.

A Local Angle

Journalists have a target audience to please, so if you have news that relates specifically to what all those thousands have in common—location—you’re already ahead of the game. Recently the Jersey Journal ran a front-page story about a 344-pound black bear found hibernating under a home. This, my friends, is definitely not national news. But for the people of Piscataway, New Jersey, a bear under a local stairway is pretty darn relevant. And if your company happens to specialize in making products that safely repel nuisance animals, you have a built-in news hook. (For more details on finding the perfect news hook, see Chapter 4, “Finding the Right News Hook.”)

There’s a local angle for every business story, too. In the spring of 2002, Jazzercise, the $50 million purveyor of dance aerobic classes, was brought before the San Francisco Civil Rights Commission by a local woman named Jennifer Portnick. Portnick claimed that she was denied an instructor’s position with Jazzercise due to her weight and state of physical health. Jazzercise later revised its criteria for hiring instructors. (The case was never tried.) In the days after her story hit the local papers, Portnick’s own fitness franchise saw a sizable spike in new members from the San Francisco area. Portnick benefited from her local story by signing up a wave of weighty new customers who sympathized with her plight and by damaging the competition’s image in the neighborhood. Well, no one said getting coverage was always going to be pretty.

The Power of the Press

Why is the media the best way to spread the word about your product, rather than advertising? The simple reason is that press coverage is implicitly more powerful than advertising. Most small companies want to get noticed, and with “free media,” you can do so much more than if you spent oodles of cash on an ad.

Why is media better than a full-, half-, or even quarter-page ad? Ads can cost a lot of money, of course, but they are also the part of a publication that the public most disparages. Ads are so much a part of our lives that at this point we are jaundiced and always judgmental of them. When we look at an ad, we might have a reaction, such as “that’s cool” or “what?”, but only rarely do we immediately run out and purchase the item.

Our love/hate relationship with the ad also makes the advertiser suspect. The subconscious reaction is, “You paid for the advertisement only because you want us to spend money on your product.” By contrast, the free press actually validates what you say about your product. No matter how cynical the reader is, he has a general predisposition to love what he reads—and best of all, to believe it’s for real, if the reporter says so.

The danger, of course, is that an article may “read” like an ad, or vice versa, creating a strange, hybrid animal that is usually called an advertorial. Although they may sound appealing to you, you should avoid advertorials, because they communicate to the reader that you have paid to have someone validate you and your company. One-sided articles that say you are the “most” are poorly conceived pieces of fluff that you should avoid at all costs.

Go for the legitimate press, every time. It pays off in spades. As an important side benefit, you can save money and take some of the pressure off your overworked staff. It is truly the most effective way to generate buzz and interest in your product.

Relation to a Bigger Story

You or your product, service, pastime, or passion might not be big news on its own, but it may be “guilty” through association. Here’s our favorite example. A logistics agency that helps trucks get from here to there faster ordinarily wouldn’t be at all interesting from the media’s point of view, but the CEO of that company might indeed be much more compelling during an emergency flood, earthquake, or tornado. That’s when the evening news anchor wants to know how local and state agencies can mobilize enough food and supplies for 5,000 families affected by a sudden California earthquake.

At that moment, the CEO’s and company’s expertise—there all along—is suddenly hot news. The goal is to figure out how you and your company relate to what’s on the front page of that day (put another way, “How topical are you?”) and then to make a quick call or three before it’s old news.

Celebrities

Man, people love those folks. They love to look at them, see them, blab about them, hear about their exploits and romantic pursuits …. You get it. Attaching your product to a celebrity is a time-honored tradition, and you can use it to generate your own press—for anything. Do you make hats? Well, make one for Cher, Madonna, even Sandra Bernhard, or—what the heck—Gwyneth, J.Lo, Britney, Russell, Liam, whomever. Send a few of them—gratis, of course—to some of those celebs. If you get even one of them to say something nice about your creation—to you or their representative—you have instant-gratification press! That gives you names to drop to local or national gossip columns, which are always looking for an association. Gee, you have the hottest people wearing your wares in the hottest places for all the papers to see. (Later in the book we discuss using the clips from that press coverage to get more of the same.)

One of the qualities that will distinguish you from the rest of the pack is an ability to see beyond the day’s events and turn them into an angle that will perk up the ears of journalists everywhere. To do this, you need to be a voracious reader, able to skim the day’s news and spot a trend in its infancy. A good PR person—you—can take the same collection of facts as someone else and rapidly see a completely different, more noteworthy event happening.

And that’s not all. To turn that idea into a flesh-and-blood story, you also need a solid grasp of an individual journalist’s style and content. Translation: Whether you’re skimming the headlines of the New York Times or your local weekly rag, don’t stop thinking when you finish reading the story. Try to see beyond the day’s events and find a way to tie those trends to your business. You’ll hook those journalists, every time.