Chapter 8: Going National

Overview

You’ve done it. You’ve found your angle, zeroed in on the right journalist, marked the clock, and made the right pitch at the right time. Now every newsstand, grocery store, and paperboy in the Bay Area is selling your story in the San Francisco Examiner. Great news, good work, bravo! With the paper’s circulation inching toward the million-a-day mark, you’ve got a lot of potential customers reading your story that day.

But you can’t rest yet. In fact, you’re in danger of becoming a has-been right now! The media game is all about momentum, so you’d better keep it going, or it’s sure going to evaporate fast. Every day the newspaper is filled with unique, entertaining, and newsworthy articles, and two-thirds of them end there. So move on … fast.

Once you’ve gained some coverage in your local press, you’re well on your way to creating buzz for your product. But now you have to take it to the next level. The way to get great coverage nationally is to take the exposure you receive in your local newspapers and sell it to the rest of the media nationwide.

Sound hard? It gets easier after the first time. But first, let’s bask in the sunshine of good press coverage for a moment. Go to the local newsstand and pick up ten copies—at least—of the paper! Your Mom will want a clip of you to show off to her mah-jongg buddies, and so will your Aunt Elizabeth for her bridge partner. Then there’s the copy you have to mail to your sister, and so on.

Those Who Hesitate Are Lost

Our media has attention deficit disorder. Like the rest of America, it remembers only the last thing out of Paula Zahn’s mouth—and because of our national ADD, everything else is a giant yawn.

The point is that when something comes along in the media that relates to what you do or what you’re about as a company, don’t sit around. Pounce on it, because if you haven’t made the story your story within a few hours, producers will simply hang up mid- sentence when you try to get their attention.

Today’s TV, radio, and print news is 24/7, not to mention pagers, phones, and the Web—you name it—also serving as news gatherers. In an average day, thousands of stories that pose as news pass our eyes, but we remember only a couple because someone gave them life past the first headline. The media’s a machine, and you need to crank the media up to the highest level!

Because there are so many different types of media competing for the public’s attention, you need to catapult the one news story that relates to you or your product right out of the airwaves, put your mark on it, and send it out there for the rest of the world to grab quickly. If your local paper reports something about your industry or about the need, say, for a product just like yours, clip the original, add a quick annotation about your company and products, plus your basic expertise, and send it to the nation’s wires, reporters, editors, and columnists before the clock strikes noon.

Take advantage, too, of the fact that different media fuel each other. These days, a story in the paper was usually born from a missive online, be it an e-mail report or a wire-service tip fed to AM news shows. TV broadcasters scour the morning papers and overnight online reporting to see what they’re going to report on. In turn, TV headlines translate into drive-time radio babble, the morning shows beget the noon news, and so on.

Therefore, if you see something in the morning that you can make an opportunistic yet crucial comment about, pitch yourself as the expert to every TV station around. Without an expert to add knowledge or insight on a topic, TV producers will pretty much skip on to the next story. Making yourself available (quickly!) will give the story—and you—a new and hopefully energizing life with the media.

Yes, the window is indeed small, but if you see the opportunity and seize it, coverage will come your way. Coverage is the thing we crave.

Four copies are for you. One copy belongs on the first page of your clip book—you do have a clip book, right? These are very important for keeping a record of your press coverage both for yourself and for customers, potential partners, and other important people. If you don’t have a clip book, that’s easy to rectify. Go to a local art supply store and buy a giant loose-leaf binder and a three-hole punch, plus some plastic page sleeves to keep everything looking good, or at least to prevent the clips from yellowing. You can also have the clips professionally mounted, which makes for a nicer presentation, but it certainly isn’t necessary.

Getting back to your newspaper copies, you should keep the second of the four copies in your files. The last two copies should be very carefully cut and mounted with the front-page banner of the newspaper for years of photographic reproduction. You’re going to need those crisp copies of your coverage to get more press and more business. Clips get damaged and disappear incredibly fast, so keep them somewhere safe, and always retain a few extras—someplace where you can find them again. That sounds simplistic, but you’d be amazed at how many people leave out that basic step, and they’re always dismayed when they can’t show potential new customers that they’ve received two years’ worth of great press.

It’s true, as we’ve said, that the immediate buzz from the story is ephemeral, but remember that media coverage is still important and useful for a long time after the print date. If you maintain good copies of your press coverage, you can use them to get much more mileage out of that Examiner story. So get that clip book going!