If you’re in public relations, media relations or a related field, you know that one minor pitching misstep can easily become “the talk of the town” in the blogosphere or on Twitter – putting you or your client in a not-so-flattering light. I’m not going to re-hash recent offenses; nor will I name offenders’ names. (If you’re looking for that sort of thing, head on over to the Bad Pitch Blog.)

Instead, what I want to offer here are some media relations points and posts that I’ve found to be helpful reminders of how to achieve successful media outreach.

• Jeremy Pepper recently advised: “Turn it off and listen. Yes, we’re always supposed to be on – but turn it off, and be a person instead of a pitch machine.” He was referring to attending BlogHer (a trade event) but I think this can be applied to many other situations.
• In a guest post on Lauren Fernandez’s blog, Stuart Foster begins with “You should never write anything that you wouldn’t feel comfortable yelling as loud as you possibly can in a crowd of people.” He goes on to stress that, “Your outreach will be successful only when you can effectively blend your personality and the client’s brand personality into one and the same.” In other words, you must believe what you’re selling.
• With regard to business media, Jon Greer writes “… we can’t waste precious time pitching non-stories to over-worked journalists. It means that when we do pitch a story, we need to be ready to provide facts and figures, human interest, quotable quotes, photos, graphics and other sources for the story.” You might consider a multi-media release which incorporates all the information in a nice, tidy package.
• A few weeks ago @Journalistics‘ Jeremy Porter stated, “Consider doing role-playing on a regular basis…” The post was in reference to interns but I agree with him that it’s not a bad idea for the entire team. You don’t want to sound like a telemarketer.
• According to a recent post by Linda VandeVrede, “It used to be that you could create a target media list and focus on trade editors, bloggers, journalists, and analysts.  But that was so 2008.” Actually, it may be more like 2007, but in any event, creating that targeted list is only the beginning.
• On the Sword and the Script blog, it’s summed up that “Queuing up a press release and blasting it out to a list of reporters amounts to nothing more than sloppy and perhaps lazy PR work” which punctuates the previous point’s assertion.

Have more media relations tips or want to point readers to a compelling post or online article on this topic? Please share with us, here at BurrellesLuce, and all of our Fresh Ideas readers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 8:10 am and is filed under Media Outreach, Media Relations, Public Relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.