Serena Ehrlich of Business Wire was at the Mixergy PR event. She offered to tell me more about PR. I got on the phone with her and here are some of my notes.

Build relationships with reporters:
Be aware of who’s covering your industry. Set up Google news alerts to tell you when someone’s writing about your industry or your competitors. When you’re alerted to a story, add the reporter’s name and contact information to your media list.

When you notice a trend in your industry, email reporters in your media list and let them know about it. This outreach is about building relationships, not getting stories written about you. If your company doesn’t fit in with the story you’re suggesting, don’t force it. (Type of trends you can watch for: new kind of technology is entering your industry. Your industry is consolidating.)

Building relationships like this will help your story get heard when it’s time for you to pitch the media on a story about your company.

Serena’s tips for writing a press release:

  • Keep your headline short
  • Put your company name in our headline
  • Don’t put the trademark symbol in your headline
  • Put your logo in your release
  • Have someone ready to talk to the media when you send out your release
  • More in this PDF attachment.

Develop a hook for your story:

Serena gave me a great example of how a company got media attention by developing a hook.

Around the time the movie Pirates of the Caribbean came out, her company worked with a social network site for kids. The site noticed that the main character in Pirates had scurvy and sent out a press release to say that their site teaches kids how to prevent scurvy.