Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
It’s no secret that social media has drastically changed the PR landscape and how PR professionals engage with media. Twitter, Facebook and other social media services can provide great vehicles for connecting with journalists. However, with the social media trend generating so much online chatter and shifting at a rapid pace, it’s important to not get completely caught up in the latest social media fads and forget the basics of building meaningful, mutually beneficial relationships with media.
Back in 2009, Communiqué PR offered insight into how PR professionals can build better relationships with reporters in a blog titled, “The New Rules of Media Relations; Have They Really Changed?” With the continued proliferation of both old and new media, we feel it’s important to revisit the basics and help ensure we continue to master the fundamentals of building relationships with media.
• Research, research and then research some more. You’ll never build sustainable relationships with reporters if you’re pitching a product launch to a reporter who covers policy issues. It’s critical to understand what the reporter covers and what his or her interests are to ensure what you have to say is valuable to them. And researching doesn’t just mean pulling their name from a database that says their beat is technology. You need to get your hands dirty and do the legwork to read their articles, follow them on Twitter and think about how you can add value to their coverage.
• Pick up the phone. Yes, remember, the telephone? It’s the device that sits on your desk with a receiver and some numbers to dial. While you need to be careful not to inundate busy reporters with constant phone calls, actually having a conversation with someone can have a big impact. Reporters are more likely to remember your phone call over your one email in their inbox of over a thousand. Introduce yourself with a few suggestions of stories or angles that would be of interest to them. Having in-person meetings can also be extremely valuable. Go for lunch or grab a coffee. Believe it or not, face-to-face meetings still pack a lot of punch and will give you a chance to connect on a more personal level rather than reaching out only when you’re trying to pitch a story.
• Stay relevant and add value. We’ve heard it all before: “Spray and pray” isn’t an effective media relations strategy, so don’t spam a bunch of reporters and hope that your pitch is relevant to just a few of them. The best way to create mutually beneficial relationships with journalists is to find out what they want and help provide it. Make sure your pitches are creative and to the point and be as helpful as you can in providing resources they may need such as images, statistics, contacts, etc.
While most of us can agree that social media has offered huge benefits to the PR industry and another tool to build relationships with reporters, make sure you remember what life was like pre-Facebook and Twitter. At the end of the day we need to remember that journalists are just people. It’s rare to build and maintain meaningful friendships based solely on social media interaction, so it’s natural to assume that the same is true when building relationships with journalists. Building and maintaining any sort of relationship takes time and proper investments.
With the invention of email, reporters got the proverbial short end of the stick.
They are targets of many organizations who want to share information that may be of interest to the reporters and their audiences. Unfortunately, this means that reporter inboxes are filled each day with mail that they need to sort through for the few, exciting nuggets that will make the day’s news.
How can we, as public relations professionals, help reporters? It’s simple: stop spamming.
This doesn’t mean stop sending news and information that is meaningful. It means knowing their beat areas and sending relevant information. That is a PR 101 lesson. But the next lesson isn’t as easily accepted: know when to refrain from hitting “send.”
Overwhelming a reporter with massive amounts of information will get you noticed – just not in the way you’d intended.
A recent example of this involved the White House. Following President Barack Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress in early September regarding the Administration’s jobs plan, the White House sent nearly 50 emails to reporters overnight with statements of support for the proposed plan. Yes, reporters each received nearly 50 emails in about a 12-hour time period.
“The White House Press Office has vomited all over my inbox,” wrote Talking Points Memo’s Callie Schweitzer following the deluge.
It’s a great example of what not to do, and had a very poignant reaction. When your actions cause someone to associate negativity with you, the organization you’re representing or the matter at hand, you have failed in your job.
When a reporter receives information, it should be useful. I don’t know of any article that has quoted 50 sources, or even 10 sources. In fact, rarely are even five different sources quoted in one article. The White House spammed reporters by sending some 50 unique emails identifying individuals and organizations that were supportive of the Jobs Act.
It brings to mind a great quotation I’ve held onto from the 19th century English playwright, actor and composer Sir Noel Coward: “Consider the press. Treat it with tact and courtesy. It will accept much from you if you are clever enough to win it to your side. Never fear or despise it. Coax it, charm it, interest it, stimulate it, shock it now and then if you must, make it laugh, make it cry, but above all…never, never, never bore the living hell out of it.”
And bore the media is precisely what the White House did with nearly 50 emails reiterating the same message.
If you have the desire to overwhelm the media to prove a point, reconsider your tactics. The point you may drive home could impact your credibility and reputation.
What are some other bad habits practitioners should break? What are some best practices you have for engaging the media?
Half of the battle of pitching is getting a reporter to open your email. Now-a-days like many industries reporters are doing more with less. That means less time available, they need the information fast and efficiently. Before coming to Communiqué PR, I was a reporter at a small TV station and managing my inbox was a challenge. It is not uncommon to receive hundreds of emails in a day. I would scan my inbox and open messages that intrigued me, contained key words that I was interested in covering, had a personal touch or seemed to sell a sexy story.
As a PR professional now, I’ve used this experience to guide me while crafting subject lines. In addition, I came across an article from Ragan PR called, “Pitching a reporter: 7 tips for crafting irresistible subject lines” that offers good advice.
Consider the following tips next time you are tasked with putting together a pitch.
- Plug a previous story. By referencing a previous story that the reporter you are targeting has already covered not only demonstrates that you are pay attention to this reporters work, but increases the chance of the reporter opening your email. Ragan gives the example, “News tip per (Insert two to three words on story subject) story.” However, when using this tactic be cautious. Do not pitch an identical story to the one the reporter previously covered. Instead, work off of a relevant trend and ensure your pitch is adding additional depth or a new angle. Or, use the opportunity to connect with the reporter for future stories on the topic.
- Word trending. Pitches that stand out from the pack are those that are creative. Pay attention to what is happening in the word and play on those trends. Reporters will likely have key words top of mind that they are looking for when evaluating stories. For example, at the height of the recession, any story that included mention of how a business was booming or looking at the bottom line caught an editor’s attention. Ragan’s recommends TrendWatching.com as a resource for newsworthy trends.
- Play on reporters’ beats. Pay attention to a particular column or segment that a writer repeatedly covers. If you call out a column such as: “Money Matters Tip: (include four to five words summarizing your pitch)” you show the reporter the pitch is meant for them.
- Wordplay. Have fun and be creative with keywords and create new ones. For example, combine baby boomer and entrepreneur to make boomerpreneur.
- Latest slang. There is always a new funny word to work with and the media is usually pretty hip to the lingo. For words like “blamestorming” or “Belieber,” Urban Dictionary and BuzzWhack can help you locate these words to insert into your subject line. Just make sure it is intentional and relates to your story. You do not want a reporter to feel deceived.
- Read headlines=Writer better subject lines. A great resource for improving subject lines is to read more headlines. Headlines have the same goal as a subject line. You want someone to read it and want to know more. Who knows, your crafty subject line could end up being the headline. For examples of good headlines read my previous blog post, How Headlines Shape Perception.
- Stay fresh. Nobody likes the same old subject line. Once you create an eye-catching formula, make sure to update it and insert new ideas each time, especially if you are pitching the same reporter.
You want your headline to sum up your pitch in a few words and grab the reporter’s attention, so don’t make it an afterthought! Give subject lines as much thought and consideration as the body of the email. We often develop the subject line when crafting the pitch and include it in our internal review process, to get input from the team. It may seem like a lot given a subject line is only a few words, but if it doesn’t scream “open me!” the reporter may never see the strength of your story.
Teamwork. Some people love that word. Others despise it. Regardless, teams are a part of life.
As an employee, your individual success will in part depend on your ability to exist as part of a team. As a manager, the success of your department, work group or organization is a function of how well you use teams as a tool. However, most people form teams – or add to them one person at a time – without considering one key element: talent.
Talent is what drives people’s behaviors. It’s their natural strengths. This is different than skills and knowledge, which can be learned. Talents can be strengthened by an organization’s leaders to optimize employee performance.
Why is this important? Tom Rath, author of StrengthsFinder 2.0, provides valuable insight: “Unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths, much less the ability to build our lives around them. Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers…we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected.”
If you have the freedom to choose from among a variety of employees to create a team or add to your workforce, take the time to think about the specific talents of individuals as they relate to the tasks they will need to perform. If you do not have the freedom to hand-pick members, you should still take stock of the various talents to help you decide how to develop the individuals and the team.
The Communiqué PR team is growing. As people have joined the organization, we’ve adjusted roles and responsibilities. But we decided to take team building a step further and analyze our strengths. Using StrengthsFinder 2.0, team members took individual strength assessments. The results were very interesting.
While team members have many common skills necessary for public relations work, such as written and oral communications, developing relationships and strategy formulation, the team had a wide array of strengths. Among the six of us, there were 20 different strengths. Some were shared, but every team member had at least one unique strength.
How do these unique talents benefit a team?
Imagine you have someone on your team with an “ideation” talent. A person with this strength may do exceedingly well at providing new perspective on familiar activities. She is known for being creative, original or conceptual, and for her passion for gathering knowledge that may fuel new ideas.
Now imagine another teammate has an “analytical” talent. A person with this strength questions and challenges others in order to strengthen ideas. She connects seemingly disparate patterns and provides insightful analysis that leads to application and implementation.
Individually, these two team members may garner great results. Together, they can forge a powerful partnership.
At Communiqué PR, we’re excited to have this new-found information about our team that will allow us to combine strengths to better serve our clients.
What are some of the ways you’ve assessed talent within your organization, and how have you benefitted?
Part of delivering excellent client service is to solicit feedback. But this can be tricky. How do you set the stage or get busy managers, directors or VPs to take a few minutes to tell you how you’re doing? I have found this five-step process to be very helpful in effectively soliciting specific feedback so that we have happy clients, repeat business and good referrals.
- Determine your intention or goal for asking for feedback. Maybe your intention is to find out what your client values so you can look for additional opportunities to assist him or her. Perhaps you want to find out if your writing contains the right messages from your client’s perspective so you can improve over time. The first step in soliciting feedback is to think through what you want to accomplish.
- Communicate your intention and be as specific as possible in your request. For instance, you might write, “I want to continue to build our skills around writing effective press releases for your company and I am wondering if you could take a few minutes to provide me with feedback on our recent work. I have three areas of focus today. Specifically, I am interested in getting your thoughts on our technical accuracy, creativity and positioning. On a scale of 1 to 5, how do you feel we’re doing around developing creative and compelling press releases? How would you rate the technical accuracy of our materials? To what extent do you feel the right positioning was included in our materials?” From my experience, I am much more likely to get meaningful feedback when I explain why I want the feedback and provide some direction on the areas where I would find it constructive.
- Make it easy for the other party to give you feedback. Remember, if someone has an issue with something you are doing or not doing, it may not be easy for him or her to express it. Some people have difficulty being candid, or they are afraid if they are critical of work it will create tension or hurt feelings. If you think you’re dealing with a client who is reticent to be candid, you may want to address that issue by saying something gently yet direct, such as, “I know it is not always easy to give feedback, but I really want to make sure we’re meeting your needs. I am of the mindset that there are always ways to improve and am wondering if it would be helpful if we had a discussion about our presentation.”
- Consider the timing of your request. Try to put yourself in the shoes of the other person. Will he or she have time to consider your request for feedback in a thoughtful manner? Will he or she want to gather feedback from other folks? Be sensitive, but if you truly need feedback, suggest something like, ‘I know your time is at a premium with your conference looming, but we truly value your feedback. If we can squeeze this into our next conference call, we’d be grateful.”
- Ensure you understand the feedback you receive. My final recommendation is to make sure you listen carefully so you understand the feedback. This is critical so you can begin to generate possible solutions or alternatives. As you move into this phase you may also want to brainstorm with your client, develop an action plan, and make sure you have shared expectations about how you’ll address the feedback.
We have found feedback to be an essential part of our ability to continuously improve and deliver meaningful, ongoing results. Clearly, each client is unique and each of these steps needs to be tailored appropriately, but regular discussions and assessments of what is working and where we can adjust our activity to be more successful are essential.
With the recent headlines around the Netflix/Qwikster PR blunder, we are reminded once again the importance of developing effective messaging when communicating to key influencers – particularly consumers. Whether you are announcing a change in your business model, introducing a new product or an update to an existing service, effective messaging allows organizations to articulate its position and reasoning to influence consumer behavior, drive sales and ultimately, achieve success.
Where could have Netflix improved its communication efforts? First, the company could have developed stronger messaging that emphasized the benefits of the changes specific to consumers, not to the company and its investors. This messaging would have provided a stronger, clearer explanation to consumers that while the price change may appear exorbitant, it will enable the company to license even more streaming content for consumers to access.
In July, Netflix first announced to its 25 million subscribers that it was adjusting its offerings, separating the subscriptions for physical disc mailings from its online streaming services, and raising its prices for the monthly plan by 60 percent. In this announcement, the company did not offer any clear reason for consumers to understand the price increase beyond, “it no longer made financial sense to offer streaming and DVDs for $10.” As the U.S. economy waivers on reverting back into recession, consumers have become more conscious of their spending, and the price hike on Netflix’s service propelled many to cancel their subscription.
In hopes to regain the trust and loyalty among its consumers, Hastings utilized the company’s blog and sent an email apology to consumers, acknowledging they have been listening to their feedback over the past two months and offered to explain the changes further. Instead, Hastings combined this message to communicate another disruptive change to its service – the introduction of Qwikster, the new name for Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service. Unfortunately, the message was not positively received by consumers, and only continued fueling the disdain for the company.
Had Hastings used the opportunity to articulate how these rather significant changes would ultimately benefit the consumer, it may have helped to justify the reasoning. Instead, Hastings said the price increase was to remain intact and introduced yet another change: Netflix will spin off its DVD-by-mail feature to a completely separate entity called Qwikster, where consumers will need to create an entirely separate account to manage their DVD movie subscription.
Ask any PR professional and they will say the tactic to address consumers directly to quell any misgivings created by Netflix’s initial announcement was the right move. However, it is equally important to develop effective messaging at the beginning of any campaign, as it is for any follow up communication to key influencers. We have often shared tips on how to identify and develop key messages for any company or product in our blog, which is the fundamental “strategic foundation for success.”
What are your thoughts on how Netflix could have communicated its changes to consumers more effectively? What would you have done to address consumer concerns?