Tips for Smart Media Relations: Be Reachable, Be Clear, Be Persistent
Not everybody in any medium suits your business to establish a relation with. In any medium, look for influential individuals.
Establish a relation with each medium in a way that their impression of you becomes an impression based on your professionalism and method of communication.
The way you treat media indicates how professional you are.
Before doing anything, facilitate media's access to you. For example, have a special phone number and email address for media so they can find you via them.
When someone has to call a headquarter line to contact you, it means you have failed to define a proper method, and it results in losing many media platforms. Define a special channel for communicating with media.
For example, give a special email address in which the word "media" is embedded, or use a phone line on which a voice on the answering machine greets the media. By creating an email account or an exclusive phone line for media, you both define a convenient method of contact and perform time management. As someone who runs multiple businesses, I must tell you that our response time is less than a minute in our job. When you respond quickly, the press reporter will be surprised and embrace your move.
Keep the news section of your website up-to-date. In this case, the media realize they can always refer to this section and check the latest content in there.
When you have a complicated and hard-topresent service or product, you shouldn’t expect any medium to report it. Reporters can only write a proper report when they have a proper understanding of your service and product. If you only distribute catalog, you shouldn’t expect a reporter to figure out what your product is. Rather, you should have elaborately described your complicated product. Give a comprehensible one-minute explanation to the reporter so he/she understands what you say and what you like him/her to write about you. You're not going to give a speech on stage! When you start explaining, be aware that the reporter has come to you for inquiry and preparing a report and you can't take his/her time. Therefore, avoid explaining too much, but speak precisely and clearly.
Your strategy for establishing a relation with small media must be different from the one you have for large media. In most cases, relation with small media is much easier.
Media relations must be continuous. You shouldn’t use a medium one time and cut your relations. Be present persistently and follow up. This persistence turns into a relation and others believe that you don’t consider media as an expendable tool.