By Leo Valiquette
Nothing develops deeper familiarity with the lay of the land than on-the-ground reconnaissance, a truth that was impressed upon me over the weekend.
Last week I spent several days in Atlanta with one of our clients, Touch Bionics, maker of the world’s first fully articulating prosthetic hand, the i-LIMB. We were attending the annual conference of the Amputee Coalition of America.
Now, in the two months since I joined inmedia Public Relations, I’ve been familiarizing myself with, and working fairly extensively on, the Touch Bionics account. In fact, it’s the first client account with which I was involved. My second week with inmedia was spent on a road trip to the U.K. that included a stop at Touch Bionics’ corporate headquarters in Livingston, Scotland. I’ve worked on media lists for Touch Bionics, coordinated media opportunities, including a live segment taking place this morning on the CBS Early Show, interviewed i-LIMB users and written profiles from those interviews.
It’s been a hands-on learning experience, but hardly exhaustive. In fact, spending a few days at the conference in Atlanta, where I could speak with other prosthetic manufacturers, distributors, amputees and clinicians and see the i-LIMB in use, provided insight and context to match, even exceed, everything I had learned in the preceding two months. It’s an invaluable experience that has dramatically increased my understanding of the Touch Bionics story, the competitive market landscape and the amputee community.
Most importantly, and this was my primary reason for going down there, it’s allowed me to cultivate face-to-face connections with new media channels beyond the obvious ones. It’s intelligence that could only have been garnered on the ground.
There are a lot of PR shops out there that lure their prospective clients with lines like, “Well, we already have all these contacts,” or, “We have all these existing relationships” with the key trade or industry press in which the client’s story needs to be told.
Considering that in any given scenario the key media could number in the dozens and be scattered across a country or eight, it’s hard to see that as anything but a line of bull. What’s important in a PR agency is its ability to seek out and cultivate the media channels that best serve the client’s interests beyond the warm and fuzzy comfort of whatever relationships already exist. It’s our specialty at inmedia and it can only be accomplished through research and no small amount of cold calling. And as I learned last week in Atlanta, it can’t always be done from behind a phone and a desk.
