Here’s an edited excerpt where Nicole talks about a media tour:
For PR people, media tours are a very disheartening process. They’re really exciting when you get good meetings with people who are relevant, reporters who are interested in you, especially new relationships.
But you have to call them and you have to pitch them. It’s like doing a cold sales call. It is absolutely no different. You look at what a reporter wrote. You see if there’s something that relevant to what you’re pitching. Their email is usually down at the bottom, it’s not too hard to find a reporter’s email.
It’s also not too hard to search and find a general phone number for Newsweek or Businessweek, or any of those. If you know the reporter you’re looking for, you call them, you catch them live, and say something like, “Hi, I’m calling from the Rubicon Project. I saw your story about media’s transition to digital and ad strategies. I wanted to talk to you about the Rubicon Project and the success we’ve had for Ganet, and USA Today….”
It’s a pitch process.
You send emails too, but keep them short, especially when the CEO at a small startup is doing double duty as a PR person, they tend to get overexcited and want to put everything into an email. And there’s nothing more scary to a press person than opening an email and seeing a wall of text.
The full program includes:
- More about media tours.
- Specific tools for doing public relations.
- How to use awards to build your brand.
- Discussion of what PR means today.
- Andrew freaking out that PR is not a simple process.
Give your feedback:
Your turn to teach. If you’ve had a PR success or failure, tell us about it in the comments so we can learn from you.