By Jill Pyle
More often than not, influential trade media represent the majority of our clients’ top tier media targets. However, in recent months there have been several occasions where I was asked to track down contact information for editors at relatively small newspapers, as well as international newspapers.
We all know that media databases are less then perfect. When using them to search for newspapers that are distributed within a particular area, problems can arise if outlets are tagged with the wrong location or omitted entirely. As means to avoid handing your client an incomplete media list, it’s always best to double check your work and make sure you’ve gathered accurate and complete media contact information.
I’ve found the following sites to be quite helpful when compiling local media lists for areas I’m unfamiliar with.
US
USNPL.com
50states.com
Canada
List of Canadian newspapers on Wikipedia
JournalismNet
Global
Newspapers24
List of newspapers on Wikipedia
Newspapers by region at Yahoo
Newspaperindex.com
World Newspapers
Online
Onlinenewspapers.com
The Internet Public Library
NewspaperDirect.com
If you have any additional resources, I encourage you to share them with me so I can expand the list.
By inmedia
O&P Edge, an independent media company that covers the clinical, business, regulatory, and human aspects of the orthotic and prosthetic community, is featuring an article about marketing O&P practices. The article is a Q&A with our managing partner, Francis Moran. He provides insight into why marketing is important for this group and shares easy-to-follow marketing strategies. To read the article, click here.
By Danny Sullivan
After reading the recently unveiled 101 Dumbest Moments in Business of 2007, assembled by the recently defunct Business 2.0 Magazine, I was struck by the thought that most of the events likely resulted in extensive hair loss for the PR folk involved.
Crisis management is a core competency of any decent PR firm, but I’ll be surprised if you can find many folk out there who actually enjoy that particular component of their work.
Most of the events described in the list probably had the same effect on the respective PR departments as dropping a tube of mentos into a bottle of Coke. A panic explosion. Emergency meetings to decide what kind of spin to place on the situation to fix things… herds of flacks running around shouting on phones… that sort of thing.
But the mad panic usually isn’t worth the blood, sweat or tears. The media froth around an issue will almost always disappear in fairly short order (unless it appears again in these end of year lists) and the best way to handle the short term frenzy is to treat it calmly and honestly. If a business blunder has truly been committed, then it’s best to face up to things and draw a line under the matter.
Far better to spend your time discussing what approach should be taken after the storm has passed than pulling out hair trying to influence the immediate situation.
Still, I hope 2008 is a crisis-free year for me, and I hope it is for you too. Happy holidays!
By Francis Moran
Francis’s Favourite PR Fictions started out as a presentation I used to give to technology company executives who always reacted strongly, and, surprisingly, usually positively, to the subtitle of the presentation, “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives.” This fiction, that successful public relations relies mainly on the existing relationships I might have with the media and analysts my client needs to reach, has always been top of the list because, as I wrote in a previous post, it continues to persist despite ample everyday evidence to the contrary.
I am moved to come back to it today because belief in this fiction leads to the extraordinary comment I heard a few months ago from a highly paid marketing consultant and author who said she had to hire a new PR agency every 90 days because that’s how long it took each agency to exhaust its contacts. She was openly skeptical of my contention that a good PR agency was worth much more than just its contacts, and should be able to pitch her story anywhere it deserved to be covered. She couldn’t see how her own approach to agency selection was guaranteeing the lousy results she had come to expect. However, I wrote it off at the time as just a more extreme outcome of this favourite fiction of mine.
Then I was gobsmacked to read more recently that this idea that PR agencies must be replaced every three months or so enjoyed a wider currency, and even more astonished to read it in a blog post by respected social media commentator and publisher, Jeff Pulver. While I can easily endorse much of what Pulver wrote about his interactions with public relations agencies, especially his demand that they state up front what they are going to achieve in return for a client’s investment, I am in profound disagreement with his comment, “Most PR firms are good for one time thru (sic) their rolodex which translates into a 60-90 day shelf life.”
Now, Pulver is a success, and I assume he got there because, among other evident talents, he is a professional. I state this caveat not to brown nose but because I’m about to hoist him on his own petard and I’m hoping he’s professional enough that it doesn’t come back to bite me.
Here’s what I mean.
A little over a year ago, we were retained by a new client whose voice application technology meant that Pulver’s VON Magazine and VON trade shows were critical targets for our efforts. This was new space for us, however, and, as with many new clients, we did not have existing relationships with the journalists we would be targeting, including those at VON. While we work very hard to establish effective working relationships with our key media targets, having them is not a prerequisite, and that’s what makes this “It’s all about relationships” such a fiction for us. This new client was no different.
Starting with our very first pitch and continuing over the past 14 months, we have engaged successfully with four or five people within VON, from the editor in chief to the keeper of the briefing schedule for VON reporters attending the organization’s trade shows. Armed with no rolodex entry, just our client’s good and deserving story, our own thorough and hardworking approach and, of course, VON’s interest in what we were pitching, we have generated articles in the magazine, news briefs and other coverage on the web site and briefings at trade shows.
And the results continue, long past the three-month mark.
All in all, it has been an excellent, mutually beneficial interaction, exactly how things should be between flacks and hacks.
Bottom line, Jeff, is that even within your own organization your belief that PR agencies are only as good as their rolodexes, and then only for a few scant months, is being proven a fiction. I do hope this doesn’t mean we can’t continue to work together…
By Jill Pyle
Every business has a story to tell and every story has some level of news value. Some stories are of interest to a large number of media, while others appeal only to a limited group. Determining which set of media should be interested in your story is a job best handled by an experienced public relations practitioner. Above and beyond developing a media list, any practitioner worthy of your business should be able to identify the set of media that have the potential to move your market and push forward business objectives.
With the launch of each new client and product, there are several types of media outlets a public relations agency might consider targeting. There are trade magazines, consumer magazines, local newspapers, national newspapers, web sites and blogs, to name a few. And for each type of media outlet, there is a wealth of publications and a plethora of writers and editors.
Specializing in public relations for high tech B2B companies, we usually rank trade magazines at the top of our media lists. So what exactly are trade magazines? Well, they’re the exact opposite of consumer magazines. They are magazines that often are an authoritative resource for business managers and employees who work in a specific field. They cover industry trends, include case studies, profile new products and highlight industry leaders.
There are two kinds of trade magazines, vertical and horizontal. An example of a vertical trade publication is the National Locksmith, which exclusively covers issues that are relevant to locksmiths and professionals concerned with physical security. Unlike vertical trade magazines that focus on a specific topic, horizontal trade magazines cover a broader topic area, usually attracting a larger audience. eWeek is a horizontal trade publication, appealing to the large audience of IT professionals, corporate managers and technology enthusiasts.
With the audience for many vertical trade magazines numbering 10,000 or fewer, keep in mind that it’s the quality of the audience that matters. Findings from a recent Forrester study noted that 40%-45% of purchasing decision makers rely on traditional industry-specific media to validate their purchase decisions, which is why trade magazines often rank as top tier targets for many of our clients public relations programs.
