By Amy Schwinge
We hope you have found our blogs focusing on media relations for the month of May useful and interesting.
Not trying to toot our own horn (well, maybe a little), the team at Mary Beth West Consulting is honored to have received multiple awards from the Public Relations Society of America this spring, including several for media relations and related strategic communications tools.
I thought I would share a little background on what we did to receive some of these recognitions, particularly with respect to managing media relationships effectively.
As a first example, we kicked off our public awareness campaign for the Blount Education Initiative (BEI) with a news conference. On that front, make sure you have content to support inviting media to a news conference. In this day and time of limited budgets and resources, the last thing you want to do is ask a journalist to leave the office for a news conference if what you have to share could be sent via an e-mail.
The BEI news conference was appropriate, because we had newsworthy – and rather detailed, statistics-driven information – to share, along with introductions of the leaders driving BEI’s mission to make education the local community’s top priority. We released compelling results of a new survey outlining current perceptions as related to education and quality of life for the area. We also introduced the media to the “faces” of the Blount Education Initiative as they explained the reason and need for BEI’s existence along with a summary of BEI’s strategic plan. This news conference also allowed us to meet many of the journalists face to face with whom we would be working during the public awareness campaign.
For LeConte Wealth Management, we met with members of the media individually whenever possible to introduce and recommend LeConte as financial experts on a host of topics and advocates for financial literacy. We also shared numerous consumer finance issues-driven news releases to spread the word.
As a third example, we had a dual strategic plan for national publications and local coverage for Todd Richesin Interiors, and we didn’t have the luxury of meeting the national media face to face. In order to cut through the clutter of other media pitches received by such publications as Traditional Home and House Beautiful, we launched our relationship building with editorial decision makers by carefully ascertaining what specific types of projects and design personalities they were covering and queried them on both subject matter and information-receipt preferences they found useful. We then sent photo-intensive information kits about Todd and his work, including written “case study” profiles of his work style and individual approach for each project. We were able to forge relationships with local media and national publications alike, resulting in Todd receiving a great deal of local and national coverage, such as:
- An eleven-page spread highlighting one of Todd’s projects in Key West, Fla., in Traditional Home (June/July 2010 issue)
- Traditional Home (March 2010 issue): “20 Young Designers to Watch”
- House Beautiful (December/January 2010 issue): “Next Wave of Top 20 Designers”
Collectively, these examples show that each client is different, so a different media relations approach is warranted for each. Don’t try cookie-cutter formulas; they don’t work. Remember, it is called media “relations” for a reason; you must take the time and effort to establish genuine relationships with your media contacts, focused with their own audiences in mind.
