By Leo Valiquette
Summer, as I wrote in my last post, is no time to slack off from a marketing and PR perspective, but this raises the obvious question, what to do through July and August?
Most community business networking events are on hiatus. So too are conferences and trade shows. On any given week key spokespeople and thought leaders in your organization may be on vacation.
It may be a quiet time, a down time, but there are still things you can do.
The most obvious is focus on your social media channels and your blog. Throughout most of the year, busy marketing and communications teams struggle to keep these machines fed and use them as they are intended to engage in valuable dialogue with target audiences on a consistent basis. So use these summer workdays constructively to create and ingrain good social media habits into your organization. And if developing a sound and comprehensive social media strategy is one of those things that just keeps sliding off of the plate, now is the time to tackle the project in earnest so you are ready to pull the trigger when everything shifts into top gear again following Labour Day.
But it’s on the PR side where I find most organizations struggle during the summer months. I wrote last time about the misperception that it is somehow a waste of time, effort and money to engage in public relations activities in the summer. In the two weeks since then, I have had three different clients, on three separate occasions, question the value of PR activities during the summer. (They obviously weren’t reading this blog.) But on any given week, perhaps 12 per cent of a media outlet’s audience, (or, for that matter, the media outlet’s staff) will be away on vacation. That still leaves a quite sizeable audience to absorb your message and they may have more spare time during the work day to do so.
The media themselves are often struggling to fill their pages. The world just moves at a slower pace during the summer. There is less business news, less sports news and less political news. (Which is why the Mike Duffy affair here in Canada continues to garner so much ink.)
In other words, the media is hungry for story ideas, but no matter how peckish they are, they still want good ones.
But, you say, we’ve no news to announce.
Perhaps not. But effective PR isn’t just about pushing out transactional news that is stale by the end of the week. It is about engaging in dialogue with key journalists to understand what they are looking for and how the ongoing story of your organization may be of interest to them. The key thing is to have something of value to offer every time you reach out.
That’s where the pitch comes in.
Rather than trying to create something from nothing for a formal media release, opt instead for a pitch, a simple email of a few paragraphs. In the same way that you would look for timely and relevant topics for blog posts that are intended to position your organization or one of your people as a thought leader in your space, you are looking for interesting talking points that are timely and relevant to the media outlets that you want to reach out to.
How do you know they are timely and relevant? Because you are doing your homework, as you always should be, to acquaint yourself with those target media outlets and the kinds of stories they are covering.
Perhaps your CEO can talk about a major milestone in your industry that is celebrating its 50th anniversary this summer. Perhaps your organization is in the software development business and can take advantage in some way of the recent coverage about BlackBerry’s bad fiscal quarter or Microsoft’s troubles with consumer adoption of Windows 8. I am not suggesting that you position yourself to take jabs at these other vendors, but individuals within your organization may have interesting insights to offer that can put the big-picture trends and issues revealed by these specific stories in perspective.
This is just a quick example, but you get the idea. As long as you have something to offer that is interesting and timely, you have a valid reason to reach out to those journalists. They will appreciate that you are coming to them with something tangible in hand. Even if they aren’t interested in your specific pitch, at least you have initiated contact, which could lead to a conversation that unearths some other opportunity.
So get pitching.
Image: Brendan Stanton
