Awards programs provide a great way for a company like ours to develop its own market reputation while also putting forth our work for peer review in a competitive setting. The whole process is an excellent learning experience and a way to stay toe-to-toe with best practices.

Last month, our team walked away from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Volunteer Chapter awards with 12 Award of Excellence honors, including “Best in Show” – a first for the agency – for the 2010 Dandy Lions Holiday Media Relations Campaign.

Since that evening, I’m often asked, “So, how do you win ‘Best in Show’ anyway?” Several factors were involved, but the following summary offers a glimpse into the “who, what, where, when and why” of the campaign.

In 2006, Blount County native and “mom-trepreneur” Joy Forster Carver opened Dandy Lions, a unique gift and stationery boutique in the heart of downtown Maryville, Tenn.  Dandy Lions carries baby, wedding, graduation and holiday gifts, along with home décor and a variety of distinctive items for special occasions, including an extensive selection of local and regional stationery.

In late summer 2010, Carver enlisted the services of Mary Beth West Consulting (MBWC) to build her base of customers locally and promote her boutique on a more prominent level, specifically during the 2010 holiday season.  The goal: to increase holiday-related sales from the previous year. Carver desired to become the area’s go-to “guru” for gifts and stationery needs. 

Because this initial campaign needed to focus on awareness-building for the Dandy Lions brand in the local media market, MBWC created a list of media contacts and publications that would benefit from Carver’s expertise.

In addition to researching media contacts and holiday gift guide criteria, MBWC researched the publications’ editorial calendars to see which special sections would be a good fit to highlight various aspects of what the store and Carver herself had to offer in gift-giving trends, product ideas and party-planning tips.

The research allowed MBWC to suggest and actively pursue special sections, including regional and statewide holiday gift guides for Dandy Lions to be featured.

The local campaign was planned to emphasize Carver’s event-planning, party hosting and gift etiquette expertise while the statewide campaign emphasized some of the actual holiday product purchases available at Dandy Lions.

Due to the successful targeted media outreach strategies, MBWC was able to secure four columns placed in the Sunday section of local paper The Daily Times; four holiday gift guide features in local and statewide glossy magazines (At Home Tennessee November and December issues, Knoxville Magazine and Cityview), one feature in The Knoxville News Sentinel, two mentions in Blount Today; and one television feature on the local NBC affiliate, WBIR-TV – the area’s number-one ranked news station.

According to published circulation rates, more than 2.7 million impressions were generated by the local and statewide exposure. The goal of the media relations campaign and targeted outreach was to promote Dandy Lions on a more prominent local and statewide level during the holidays. By the end of 2010, Carver had more than doubled her sales from the previous year.  

MBWC thoroughly enjoyed working with Carver to promote her extraordinary boutique. What an honor it was for our contemporaries to recognize us for those efforts with the J. Carroll Bateman “Best in Show” award.

A host of our colleagues also received Awards of Excellence, Quality and Merit for their outstanding work in 2010. For more details about the 2011 PRSA V Awards, please visit:  http://volunteerprsa.org/content.php?page=Awards_of_Excellence.

Already, we are poised to enter strong work again for the 2012 awards program, given the results we’re generating for clients in the utility, education, travel / tourism and retail sectors, to name a few, so stay tuned!

On a final note, Dandy Lions recently unveiled a fantastic new website . Be sure to stop by the next time you’re in Maryville.

By Amy Schwinge, MAOM

Recently, someone gave me a newspaper clipping that highlighted the dangers of letting an infant child sleep in the same bed with his or her parents and how this always should be avoided. It was no coincidence that I had just given birth to my son, our second child. It is amazing how much “advice” you get when you have a baby, especially the unwanted advice in my situation.  If you haven’t been through the process, you are in for a treat. By the way, I agree that the safest place for an infant child to sleep is in his or her own crib.

Anyway, getting back to the newspaper clipping, I noticed that the clipping was taken from an opinion/editorial column that a concerned citizen had written; it wasn’t even written by an expert, per se.  This hit home to me just how much influence the general public and the media have on some people. The person who gave me the clipping implied that it must be true since it was in the newspaper. I think that a person’s perception is his or her own reality, as the saying goes.

The more that a company or organization can build its brand within the media, the better its public perception will be, which ultimately will improve the bottom line.

The landscape has changed in today’s world as anyone in the public can make online comments on just about anything, including online newspaper articles, product reviews on retail websites and popular social networking sites.  With this immediate access, it is even more important for organizations to make a concerted effort to build their brand by tapping the voices of their supporters via public and media advocacy.  Research has shown that consumers trust each other much more than they will trust what a company says.

Jeremiah Owyang of Forbes shared the following five steps for an organization to develop an advocacy program: 

1.) First, get ready internally.

2.) Find the right advocates who will represent your brand.

3.) Build a relationship for the long term.

4.) Give them a platform–but do not pay them.

5.) Integrate them into your business and recognize them.

These steps seem simple in concept, but they will go a long way in terms of building an advocacy program.

by Tyra E. Haag
@tyratuckerhaag

Building solid relationships with the media can seem like you’re walking a tightrope – one shaky move and you’re done.

It’s easy to say, “I want to have a good relationship with the media,” but it’s another thing to actually have one.

There are a few ways to describe the daily encounters I face as a media relations coordinator — give and get, push and pull or yin and yang.

Building strong media skills takes practice, but it’s important to remember not to go at it alone because working with the media is not for everyone. That’s why professionals like us exist.  We’re here to help take the burden off our clients of what to say and do with the media so that they can focus on what they do best – run their company.

Here’s my personal media relationship-building philosophy:

• Be sincere: No one likes a fake. I can’t do my job without solid media skills, so it’s always best to practice the golden rule when it comes to pitching story ideas, following-up via the phone or exchanging information through e-mail. A simple thank-you can go a long way, not to mention a nice hand-written note of appreciation.
• Stay informed: Keep up-to-date with topics going on in mainstream media – locally and nationally. Utilize editorial calendars to see what is top-of-mind for these news organizations and fit them to your clients’ needs where appropriate.
• Do your homework: Don’t waste their time or yours. Be sure to research who you need to contact before picking up the phone or hitting the “send” button. Make sure what you’re pitching on behalf of your client is actually interesting and newsworthy.
• Get creative: Meet for lunch, go out for coffee or ask for a 15-minute chat with whomever you want to get to know better. A face-to-face encounter can take you from an unknown individual to a trusted and respected news source.

Bottom line: I can’t do my job without having a strong relationship with the media.

For more information and tips about building strong media relationships, please visit the following media-related topics previously posted on the MBWC blog:

• Media Relations: It’s a part of – but not the whole – PR toolbox by Mary Beth West, APR
• Putting the “Relations” Back into Media Relations and True PR: The Power of the Relationship by Amy Schwinge, MAOM

Media Relations: What Works (Part 1) and Media Relations: What Works (Part 2) by Tyra E. Haag

By Mary Beth West, APR

Today’s the day: November 2. 

By the start-up of this evening’s election returns, all the folks who live their lives in politics or in the heady realm of political reporting will be reaching for oxygen.  The rest of us on the media consumer side, who strapped on our masks months ago for survival’s sake, may have passed out anyway from campaign overkill.  Talk about relentless. 

In the face of acknowledging what’s been a pretty mean campaign season, I still can’t complain too much without feeling hypocritical. 

In the communications profession, I think we’re professionally bound to the principle of embracing the maelstrom for what it is – the marketplace of ideas . . . only in this marketplace, the clean-up needed on Aisle 4 is spread out all over every square foot of real estate, thanks to the changing face of media.  But this is America – we can handle it.  Mark it up to the rising cost of doing business.

Maybe it’s cynicism on my part, but for all the fretting and bemoaning we generate about the ugliness of politics these days, I’m not sure what realistic alternative people want when you have highly imperfect human beings fighting for competing ideologies that they’re willing to stake everything on as the correct path for a country they love and believe in. 

Or, for whatever a politician’s or a campaign’s motives and tactics may be, I’m not sure how we neatly package the field of debate into what people say they want it to be (i.e. “respectful discourse”) when every venue – from local town halls to FOX’s vs. MSNBC’s evening program formats and associated ratings – tell a very different story. 

We talk about the acidity of politics as being a huge turn-off to people . . . but doesn’t the psychological reality suggest otherwise – that the bigger the fight, the more people will tune in to engage with it?  I’m not advocating that politics go the way of Jerry Springer or that we not keep the issue of ethics front-and-center whenever candidates or campaigns stray from truth and accuracy.  However, I think that some people may need to recalibrate their understanding of what politics really is about in this day and age and configure their expectations accordingly.

I loved George Will’s dose of reality – which every week I could just eat with a spoon – on this past Sunday’s “This Week with Christiane Amanpour”:

“Gridlock is not an American problem – it is an American achievement.  The framers of our Constitution didn’t want an efficient government . . . they wanted a safe government, to which end they filled it with slowing and blocking mechanisms:  three branches of government, two branches of the legislative branch, a veto, veto-override, super-majority, judicial review . . . When we have gridlock, the system is working.”    

So goes the field of political debate as well, in my view.  If it ain’t ugly, it ain’t working.  So pull up your waders and walk to the polls – it’s a trek well-worth making in this imperfect process, which I’ll take any day of the week compared to the alternatives.

    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.

    By Tyra Haag

To continue last week’s recommendations for managing a strong media relations program, consider the following additional points:

-Understand media outlets’ decision-making:

• If your story doesn’t air or get printed on the day they say it will, gently find out what happened and determine if there is an alternate plan for it to be carried. 
• If a reporter or outlet has committed to attending your event, but doesn’t show up, find out why, but don’t behave in a blatantly upset manner. All newsrooms have a “board” of what they plan to cover that day—sometimes particular events or stories make the chopping block due to last-minute scheduling changes, breaking news or even crisis events that take precedence.
• Every paper and TV station can’t cover every story you pitch, so don’t play your hand too much.

-Come prepared:

• Have a media kit ready at all events, and always be on time.
• Prepare talking points for your client, CEO or other spokesperson well before an interview, and if needed, run through a practice session or two to help that person prepare for on-air / on-the-record interviews, particularly if the subject matter is complicated or sensitive.
• Be known for your good follow-through—return each and every phone call or e-mail in a timely manner.

-Be social:

• According to the latest Infinite Dial study by Arbitron and Edison Research, the Internet has surpassed TV as the “most essential” medium.
• All news outlets and most media personalities use Facebook and Twitter daily. Request to be their friend and start following them on Twitter. Pay attention to what they discuss and how they cover certain situations.
• Give kudos when you really mean it, especially if a story has affected you in a certain way, but be sincere about it. Brown-nosing is not the way to keep in touch.

-Be a resource:

• Send non-client related info when appropriate if you think it’s newsworthy.
• If someone from the media calls asking about another organization in the area that isn’t your client, be helpful and guide them to the appropriate contact. 

-Show your appreciation:

• A card, cookies or a lunch date are great ways to show your gratitude.
• Accompany clients to interviews (when appropriate) to get some quality face-time and to inquire on whether or not anything else is needed.
• Remember to thank them for covering your story.

In a nutshell, any organization’s relationship with the media is not a one-way street. You must give in order to receive, or as Jerry McGuire implored, “Help me, help you!”

Engaging the media in an appropriate way leads to a stronger working relationship—not to mention gaining fair and positive coverage from time to time.  In the constantly evolving media landscape, being a media relations pro means more than just knowing how to write a good news release.  Here are a few insights I’ve learned along the way.

-Listen to what they want:

• If one media outlet prefers harder news, don’t bother them with purely feature-oriented material. 
• The most courteous question to ask a reporter, assignment editor or news director is when to contact them—i.e. day of the week, time of day, etc. Daily morning and afternoon meetings are always set in stone, so find out what times those occur so that you can avoid contacting them at an inopportune time.
• Several media folks rely on news releases and advisories sent via e-mail. Long gone are the days of faxing a release (although most outlets still allow you to communicate this way). Most also prefer that a release be sent in the body of the e-mail rather than as an attachment to avoid your message getting spammed.
• Keep releases one to two pages in length and advisories to a page or less.  Create a substantive “hook” for the subject line and make the first paragraph interesting enough to keep them reading.  Editors receive hundreds (or more) announcements, pitches, news releases and advisories a day. Make yours grab their attention.

-Find out what frustrates them:

• Nothing seems to aggravate newsroom professionals more than a product placement disguised as a news pitch. Advertorials and news releases don’t mix, so don’t confuse the two.  Also, include a human element to your pitch or release when possible.
• Show sensitivity to media outlets’ competitive concerns relative to other media. Don’t expect the media to care about you or your clients if you aren’t even familiar enough with who they are as a news organization and what kinds of audiences they specifically serve.
• Admit if you’ve made a mistake and move on—no sense in dwelling on what might have been.
• Any media outlet’s goal is to cover news and generate content that their own audiences will find of keen interest, so if your story isn’t newsworthy, don’t expect them to cover it.
• Avoid asking for too much during “sweeps” months—lunch date, station tour, etc.

-Do your homework:

• Get on the radar screen of reporters who cover the “beats” or topics from which your clients have their own stories to tell.
• Don’t blindly e-mail blast releases.  Make well thought-out pitches and send news releases and advisories to the appropriate contact; otherwise, get ready to be “blocked” from their e-mail list or risk your message getting deleted immediately without even being opened.
• If an organization is hosting a “Media Training,” make every effort to attend. These forums provide a great way to gain knowledge directly from the source and meet the expert panelists.

Productive media relations require give and take – and it’s critical to take that process seriously. Be sure to check out next week’s blog post for more tips on what works in media relations.

For anyone who has worked in the public relations field, it doesn’t take long to realize that this profession is widely misunderstood, as it has been since it formally became a professional discipline in the mid-twentieth century.

One of the main reasons for this mystification is that so many people singularly define public relations as what they see firsthand, most often in the form of what’s known as “media relations” – the communications process of working directly with reporters, editors and media outlets to achieve an organizational goal. 

And, unfortunately, what people readily observe in the media relations sphere is commonly not that flattering to the profession as a whole.

Turn on the TV most nights, and you’re faced with various spokespersons on the verge of fisticuffs, political press secretaries succumbing to the day’s feeding frenzy with the slip of a half-truth (i.e. a half-lie), or – my personal favorite – Hollywood characters from “Spin City,” “Wag the Dog,” “Sex and the City” or the like who define their PR success by how much they’re pulling the wool over someone’s eyes, or, in Samantha Jones’ case, pulling it off. 

So to help set the record straight about media relations done well, “In the Profession” will focus this month on best practices for this segment of work. 

I hasten to emphasize that media relations is one tool in the public relations and marketing communications arsenal – it’s not the whole of the PR toolbox itself, as some tend to assume.  It is, however, the most high-profile and publicly visible tool.  As such, a big part of representing the value of public relations accurately starts with making sure that media relations’ purpose and parameters for success are understood.

I’ll kick things off with our first piece of advice for the month: respect the First Amendment, freedom of the press and the role that media play to ensure that we live in an open and as-transparent-as-possible society. 

Unfortunately, many businesses – and even many people working in a public relations role – view news media as the enemy and something to be feared.  True, there can be some reporting tactics out there that are problematic (we’ll discuss those this month, too). 

However, the best place to start in working with the media from a position of strength and confidence is to understand – and to respect – the media’s greater First Amendment-driven role in society . . . and in so doing, to seek a relationship with media contacts that facilitates a free flow of information, achieving your organization’s objectives while serving the public good.  Pretty rewarding stuff all-around.

We look forward to sharing more on media relations in the month ahead, and we welcome your comments and feedback.