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Client Highlight
National Print Coverage
Today’s “print” publications include hard-copy newspapers and magazines and the burgeoning online news industry. This powerful combination has the potential to reach millions of loyal readers and to build your brand’s credibility as a trusted and respected news source.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is an essential and effective marketing tool, but most brands simply don’t have the expertise to capitalize on this newest communications tool. We make social media easy by professionally managing your campaign on a daily basis — growing your following and your revenue potential.
TV Appearances
Being a featured guest on a local or national TV show positions you as an authority to viewers. Television allows your personality to shine through, giving the audience a real taste of you and your brand. Pair this with the fact that video is so popular online and it’s easy to see why brands everywhere seek this medium.
Talk Radio Interviews
Talk radio is an excellent place to showcase your brand because the strong relationships hosts have with their audience fosters a strong third-party endorsement. This dynamic medium allows you to build brand recognition and trust with potential customers.
The PR Insider
In The News
Is Global Recognition Important to Your PR & Marketing Strategy?
When economists and business people say the world is flat, they aren’t talking about concerns our ancestors had about sailing off the edge of the earth.
Instead, “the world is flat” in a business context means that, thanks to rapid advances in technology and communication, entrepreneurs and companies are now part of a global marketplace. For many of them competition isn’t just the business across town; it’s businesses a continent or two away.
At News & Experts, we know that this can apply to our clients’ PR and marketing needs as well. For example, we recently arranged interviews on a global scale for a client who discussed the protests happening in Hong Kong and how such demonstrations historically have been reflected in the stock market.
While he and his passport never left the U.S., his image and expert commentary did some serious globetrotting as Bloomberg conducted a live video interview with him from Hong Kong and Beijing. Then there was an added bonus as Yahoo Finance picked up that interview in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Singapore!
Meanwhile, he was also interviewed by a journalist writing for the South China Morning Post, giving his organization’s publicity campaign yet another dash of international flavor.
So, if your business has a global reach your publicity should have one, too. But Miguel Cassellas-Gil, our senior public relations manager (and resident international traveler), cautions that it’s not enough just to have a strong opinion about world affairs. To be taken seriously, you must have a global message that resonates with the different regions of the world you are targeting – and the credentials to show you know what you’re talking about.
With that in mind, I asked Miguel to share some tips that will give you an advantage if you want to go abroad with your publicity campaign.
- Knowledge of the world. For a true global presence you need knowledge of other countries and regions of the world and how world events affect them. For example, Miguel says, a doctor in the United States might have a good grasp of the Ebola virus from a medical standpoint, but the media are unlikely to be interested unless that doctor also has a working knowledge of the African countries where the virus is doing its damage. “When you go global you must have knowledge about the country or region of the world you’ll be discussing,” Miguel says. That’s why the pitch we did for our client on the Hong Kong angle worked so successfully. As an analyst who studies economic trends worldwide for a research organization, he had data on how the markets have reacted in the past to political unrest in Hong Kong, and he could extrapolate on what that might mean with today’s protests. He also had ready-made charts and graphs that he could provide to the media.
- A presence beyond your home country. If you are, for example, a businessman with no business interests beyond your own country, then you will struggle to get much traction pitching to the media in any country other than your home one. The media are unlikely to care what you have to say because there are plenty of more knowledgeable people they can find to answer their questions. But let’s say you do have business ties in foreign lands. That means you likely have a well-informed opinion of the happenings in those lands, and the media are more likely to give you a look.
- A PR representative with global knowledge. If you’ve hired a PR agency to represent you, they also need to have knowledge of and interest in the global market. Your agency needs to understand the news cycle in the region where they are pitching you and be able to grasp what the non-American media might want from you. Remember, you’ll also be working with time zones far out of synch with your own; 3 a.m. EST is 3 p.m. in Taiwan! So, you and your PR person should be prepared to respond to the media all hours of the day and night.
All of this is a good reminder that publicity and the media don’t end where the oceans begin! There’s a whole world out there where you can circulate word about your expertise and/or your company brand.
Want To Grab Journalists’ Attention? Let Them Tell You How
People often say that the only thing that’s constant in life is change, and over the three decades I’ve been in the public relations business I definitely have found that to be true with the media landscape.
Those of us in PR are always eager to keep up with the latest media trends, of course, which is why just recently several of our team members at News & Experts sat in on a webinar titled “The State of Journalism 2019.” The webinar, produced by Muck Rack, a company that connects PR professionals with journalists, covered the results of a survey in which journalists explained how they find their news, use social media, and work with PR teams.
We found the webinar so enlightening that I wanted to share some of that information with you so that you, too, are up-to-date on the “state of journalism” and can put that knowledge to use in your own publicity efforts.
Here are just a few of the points that I think are especially valuable for you:
• Where to find journalists on social media. If you want to follow journalists on social media (and you should!), your first stop should be Twitter. It’s by far the most popular platform for them, with 83 percent of the journalists surveyed saying they find it valuable. A distant second was Facebook at 40 percent. (The survey allowed journalists to name more than one platform as valuable, so the numbers add up to more than 100 percent.) LinkedIn came in third, but a site worth keeping an eye on is Instagram, which could be gaining ground. Although right now it ranks fourth as most valuable for journalists, 36 percent of them said they expect to spend more time on it this year. Compare that to Facebook, which is going in the opposite direction; 44 percent say they expect to spend less time on Facebook.
• Elements that make a story shareable on social media. The largest number of journalists surveyed said the top two things that make a story shareable are that it contains an image (78 percent) and that the subject can be connected to a trending story (77 percent). They also emphasized the importance of localizing your pitch when appropriate so that it’s relevant to their target audience (59 percent). One other thing worth noting: About one-fourth of the journalists said brevity helps make a story shareable. This is something we’ve noticed as well. Readers often are in a hurry, so articles that sum up the pertinent facts in fewer words tend to be more popular.
• How to pitch them. Most journalists prefer to be pitched through email, especially a personalized one-to-one email (93 percent), but some are open to being pitched through social media. One of the webinar participants had a great suggestion about social-media pitching: Don’t wait until you have something to pitch to interact with the journalist. Share their posts and, when appropriate, comment on those posts, especially when you have a shared interest that can create a connection between the two of you. When you share or comment on a post, the journalist gets a notification. That way, when you do pitch them, you are a familiar name and they may be more open to listening.
And when do they say is the best time to pitch them? 65 percent prefer the morning, specifically before 11 a.m.
Also, keep those pitches short. One-third of journalists prefer pitches that are just two to three sentences long, and another 61 percent don’t want pitches to go over three paragraphs.
Finally, 47 percent of journalists believe that the way most companies share information with the media is outdated. All the more reason to stay up-to-date on the latest trends in the ever-evolving media landscape!
The times they are a-changin’!
Marsha
P.S. If you’d like professional help getting coverage in the press, or being interviewed on radio and TV, give us a call. We’ve been providing this service to clients for 29 years. We also offer a comprehensive social media marketing program for select clients, where we do it all for you. If you’re interested in our help, please call us at 727-443-7115 Ext. 0, or simply reply to this email. We’d love to hear from you!
Is Global Recognition Important to Your PR & Marketing Strategy?
When economists and business people say the world is flat, they aren’t talking about concerns our ancestors had about sailing off the edge of the earth.
Instead, “the world is flat” in a business context means that, thanks to rapid advances in technology and communication, entrepreneurs and companies are now part of a global marketplace. For many of them competition isn’t just the business across town; it’s businesses a continent or two away.
At News & Experts, we know that this can apply to our clients’ PR and marketing needs as well. For example, we recently arranged interviews on a global scale for a client who discussed the protests happening in Hong Kong and how such demonstrations historically have been reflected in the stock market.
While he and his passport never left the U.S., his image and expert commentary did some serious globetrotting as Bloomberg conducted a live video interview with him from Hong Kong and Beijing. Then there was an added bonus as Yahoo Finance picked up that interview in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Singapore!
Meanwhile, he was also interviewed by a journalist writing for the South China Morning Post, giving his organization’s publicity campaign yet another dash of international flavor.
So, if your business has a global reach your publicity should have one, too. But Miguel Cassellas-Gil, our senior public relations manager (and resident international traveler), cautions that it’s not enough just to have a strong opinion about world affairs. To be taken seriously, you must have a global message that resonates with the different regions of the world you are targeting – and the credentials to show you know what you’re talking about.
With that in mind, I asked Miguel to share some tips that will give you an advantage if you want to go abroad with your publicity campaign.
- Knowledge of the world. For a true global presence you need knowledge of other countries and regions of the world and how world events affect them. For example, Miguel says, a doctor in the United States might have a good grasp of the Ebola virus from a medical standpoint, but the media are unlikely to be interested unless that doctor also has a working knowledge of the African countries where the virus is doing its damage. “When you go global you must have knowledge about the country or region of the world you’ll be discussing,” Miguel says. That’s why the pitch we did for our client on the Hong Kong angle worked so successfully. As an analyst who studies economic trends worldwide for a research organization, he had data on how the markets have reacted in the past to political unrest in Hong Kong, and he could extrapolate on what that might mean with today’s protests. He also had ready-made charts and graphs that he could provide to the media.
- A presence beyond your home country. If you are, for example, a businessman with no business interests beyond your own country, then you will struggle to get much traction pitching to the media in any country other than your home one. The media are unlikely to care what you have to say because there are plenty of more knowledgeable people they can find to answer their questions. But let’s say you do have business ties in foreign lands. That means you likely have a well-informed opinion of the happenings in those lands, and the media are more likely to give you a look.
- A PR representative with global knowledge. If you’ve hired a PR agency to represent you, they also need to have knowledge of and interest in the global market. Your agency needs to understand the news cycle in the region where they are pitching you and be able to grasp what the non-American media might want from you. Remember, you’ll also be working with time zones far out of synch with your own; 3 a.m. EST is 3 p.m. in Taiwan! So, you and your PR person should be prepared to respond to the media all hours of the day and night.
All of this is a good reminder that publicity and the media don’t end where the oceans begin! There’s a whole world out there where you can circulate word about your expertise and/or your company brand.
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