Media Relations in Five Easy Steps

Despite the Web, Relationship Building is the Key to Coverage

Jun 3, 2008

If you can communicate clearly, you can achieve media coverage for your company. This article offers a straightforward, five-step approach.

Like optimizing a website to climb search engine rankings, building effective media relations requires the consistent long-term execution of a few straightforward steps.

Steps to Effective Media Relations

You first must create a message and determine the ideal tool for its delivery, (e.g. press release, executive article, case study, whitepaper, Podcast, etc.). Press releases often announce new products, appointment of personnel, recent deals, and capitalization events. Think about your product, service, or expertise and the type of business you wish to attract. What would you like people to know about your organization that they might not be aware of? Any tie-ins with current events or prominent people, places or anniversaries? Such questions can provide the right content and context for your message.

To get your story to the right people, you need comprehensive media and contacts lists. Services such as MediaListsOnline enable you to build, purchase, and download spreadsheets of key contacts (including email addresses) at newspapers and industry trades. Companies such as Vocus and Cision provide software for news distribution, media relations, and monitoring in one module. Another source is Gale’s Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media, available at most libraries in print and electronic formats. Other key recipients might include industry analysts, bloggers, and your own company and its customers.

Once finalized, the release should be emailed to each media list member, posted on your company’s website, and, if possible, distributed through a service such as Business Wire or PR Newswire. Distribution services will, for fees starting at about $200, disseminate releases to all media in a geographic region and submit it electronically to thousands of news sites, databases, and publications, both mainstream and trade. Releases issued this way get instant posting on Yahoo, CNBC, Factiva, et al, raising a company’s online profile, search engine rankings, and website traffic. These services also provide reports on release views and postings.

Wire services can send releases around the world, but media coverage only comes through direct contact and relationship building with editors, writers, and analysts. Each should receive a personal email for each release that communicates how your news fits their publication (e.g. ties to editorial calendar items) or provides value. Persistence is paramount: editors may not respond for months; phone calls go straight to voicemail (which is usually full). Meeting editors in person at seminars, on press tours, or at tradeshows connects a name with a face and makes it harder to ignore your future calls. The best way to get noticed, however, is by providing useful information.

Once a release is out, track its effectiveness with searches on Google, data repositories such as Lexis/Nexis and Factiva, and the websites (and print versions) of top industry publications. Publish hits in your blog and online pressroom. Communicate results to key individuals. You can also contract with clipping services such as Burrellesluce or Vocus, which charge per-month and per-clip fees.

Don’t expect major results in the first month. It takes time to prime the pump. Consistently providing useful information, however, is often rewarded with unexpected opportunities. Media relations should be seen as a yearlong process, whether you issue one release a month, or three per week.

The copyright of the article Media Relations in Five Easy Steps in Marketing/PR is owned by Andrew Leibs. Permission to republish Media Relations in Five Easy Steps in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.