Get This Party Started


When you’re searching for the right journalists with whom to source yourself, leave no stone unturned. And think about your industry—hard. You might want to go after the so-called trade magazines and newsletters. Hit the generational press—if it’s a product for a younger market, go to generation X, Y, or Z magazines. If it’s a garden product, you can source yourself as a horticulture expert. And don’t rule out the alternative media. Those biweekly and weekly “rags” are often free, but nevertheless they’re places where people get their news, and yours might be just the mini profile article that these folks are looking for.

The Initial Mailing

Start with an intro mailing that has basic information—and perhaps something of “new” interest to the reporter. If you’re already somewhat known in a field, then you want to make sure that trade or industry publications are kept abreast of the latest accomplishments under your well-armed belt. Do you have awards? Famous clients? You have a product that’s received a mention in a magazine? Got a famous dad or partner? Have you discovered something new about the field that this reporter should immediately be made aware of? These are the facts that trade publications want to know. And by trade publications, we also should consider what’s on the Internet: Use Google.com to search under “X industry trade magazines” and “X industry online magazines” (almost always trades).

Here’s what you will need to put into your media mailings, regardless of your fame quotient. With these mailings (mostly online or e-mail in this day and age) include the following coolly developed items, handily attached:

  • Your story in one paragraph (the “lead”). Why you decided to do what you’re doing. In our shop, we refer to this as the easiest job on the planet for a source. It’s the one thing you love the most: your favorite subject—the work you do. Be passionate.

  • A brief biography. Something that quickly (three paragraphs at the most) explains who you are and what you’ve done.

  • Any news clipping, no matter how small. We would insist you leave out high school athletic clippings, however, unless you stole the championship and your current field is sports-related.

  • And then a suggestion—or maybe two, related to the news. This warms our hearts. This part of the mailing should suggest a trend, issue, or problem within a particular industry; and show how you’re going to solve that problem, or what you can say about the trend.

Do not make this document formal. Many people think it’s important to follow a standard formula for such mailings, but formula writing is not the way to get attention. The stiffest letters are the easiest to ignore; you read—and ultimately respond to—the ones that make you think, smile, or perhaps chuckle. Get the words out fast, in the lead, and go for the gusto. Time and time again we tell people: You are writing about the subject you love the most, besides your life partner or goldfish. Just spew it out, passionately. And then edit the heck out of it! Mark Twain said, “If I had had more time, I’d have written less.” He knew what he was talking about.

Examples of prime announcement subjects are partnerships, new product debuts, new executive hires, new office locations, and so on. But don’t engage in arbitrary mailings. Target. Don’t blanket. In other words, if you throw every piece of news at reporters, they won’t be interested in anything you have to say. Also, try to include a news peg—that is, a date on which the news is breaking. This minimizes a reporter’s tendency to procrastinate and sit on the story as if it were a dinosaur egg. Of course, you could tell the reporter that someone else will run the story on day X, but that is, of course, the last resort. It’s a negotiating tool.

The Mechanics of Follow-Up

After you’ve sent out your mailing, follow it up with a phone call a few days to a week later. We once did a press event for a major satellite company launching its first high-speed effort in Washington, D.C. We managed to get fifty reporters to come to this morning event and actually cover it on the day before the oddest Presidential election in history. Months later, we were meeting with a software firm in Seattle (not Microsoft, thanks) and they read our case study of the event. They asked us, “How did you get so many folks to show up?” The simple reply: “We called them.” So don’t forget to call.

After you’ve done the initial mailing and your follow-up phone call, wait. Because if the source filing works, and it will, you will get return phone calls before you expect them to start. But please don’t leave voice mails. In the media relations business, that’s as good as not calling. Do not sound desperate. Just explain your angle as simply as possible, so that the reporter or producer realizes that she “has a shot” at something. If you’re telling the truth, she’ll bite. And, if you are at your wit’s end and can’t get her, hit zero when the voice-mail system picks up, get through to an operator and ask when the journalist will be there. Then call her at the prescribed time.

After that, with luck, a meeting ensues—perhaps even one on the phone. Don’t be disappointed if the journalist has only enough time for a phone call. You can accomplish a lot on the phone if you pretend the meeting is in person. Have an agenda handy (although you may want to keep that to yourself), get through your points, and get off the phone, so you can let the journalist reflect on how fascinating you and your company are.

After you’ve had that friendly call, let’s talk about furthering your source filing. How about a small piece of mail—anything, really, that explains what you do, on a postcard, but one that looks awesome? Don’t forget that no matter how good your product is, you only have a fraction of a second to register its existence with today’s media-saturated consumer.

Or perhaps you need to find something with which to source file yourself, something that demonstrates what you do so well. For example, in 1995 Tower Air, a low-cost airline in New York, came to us when it ran into some image problems in the media after its baggage handlers lost passengers’ pets three times in a row. Our job was to get the media to stop giving them a hard time for, well, losing pets. The passengers eventually got their pets back, but the media referred to them as the airline that lost pets, and that is not exactly the image you want to convey to American families.

So Tower enacted Pets Fly Free Day. This was a day in April when anybody who flew with Tower could fly their pets for free. Tower received a ton of press and press acclaim, and in general, a lot of buzz in the tri-state area. Source filing was a nice way to get people to stop talking about the negatives and to start looking at Tower more positively. What Tower did was to put out a message that said, essentially, “We recognize that we have a procedural problem with the handling of pets and we are fixing it. And in the meantime, we are trying to make amends for the inconveniences people have suffered.”

About two months later, at a Tower board meeting, there emerged an unusual and serendipitous angle: Tower traveled to the Middle East every day, but in that time period, it had had to severely curtail its flight schedule because of Ramadan, the month of fasting and reflection for thousands of Muslims in that region of the world. It occurred to us that this might have been the only airline in history to change its schedule based on the lunar calendar. This bit of information was leaked to the Wall Street Journal, which saw it as a first for airlines, and suddenly Tower had taken another important step in source filing itself with the media.




Full Frontal PR[c] Getting People Talking About You, Your Business, or Your Product
Full Frontal PR[c] Getting People Talking About You, Your Business, or Your Product
ISBN: 1576600998
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 105

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