The Colab Brief - 128: The Many Major Missteps You’re Making with the Media 🙊

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We’re going back to our roots with this one. 

It’s been a hot minute since we’ve had a week without some earth-shattering, life-changing news. So, to give a little reprieve from the weight of the current news cycle, we’re taking it back to some good ole’ fashioned PR tips for your reading pleasure. 

Read Time: 5 minutes.

There’s a lot that goes into PR that results in meaningful coverage for your clients or your company. There are about a million things that go into the final, published piece, and there are a ton of missteps you can make along the way. 

For your easy reading, we’ve broken them down into lil’ sections so you can reference back and copy and paste the next time your client or exec tries to commit one of these cardinal PR sins. Here we go! 

Pitching Plights:  

• Rusty Research: As a PR person, it is your responsibility to know who you’re pitching, what their coverage areas are, who their audience is, what their tone is like, etc. When you don’t research a reporter’s coverage area before pitching them, and you reach out with an irrelevant angle or with an angle they’ve already covered, you’re going to tick them off. The same goes for pitching repeat reporters over and over again, giving them no reprieve from your client roster. Be highly targeted in your outreach, customize your pitches, and don’t take the easy way out. 

• Humdrum Hook (how long do you think I can keep this up?): Your company simply existing and doing what it was always intended to do is not news. Your product features, website updates, and platform enhancements are also not news. We’ve said this before, but your pitches need to be timely, objective, relevant, and unique. Without those elements, you’ve got nada. 

• Crisis Commandeering (I’ll be here all day): We get it - your CEO is smart, has tons of experience, and can definitely add value to that insane news cycle you’re trying to jump into. But be wary of leveraging a crisis as a comms strategy. Chances are you’re one of 100 people pitching the same topic, so you better have immediate and unmistakable value to add before response-pitching that global calamity. Instead, let the dust settle and provide a thorough, comprehensive, and retroactive look at what happened later down the road.  

• Futile Followups: Reporters get between 500 - 1,000 pitches per day. That’s a lot. Wherever possible, give reporters time to review your pitches, and don’t follow up too quickly. When it’s time to send that next note, make sure you’re adding value to that original pitch. Avoid words and phrases like “just following up here” or “checking in” - it’s desperate. And for the love of all things Holy, don’t just pick up the phone and call a reporter if you don’t have an existing rapport. Learn the ways your target reporters want to communicate and meet them where they’re at. 

• Droning Details: The average person gets ~200 notifications per day. If you have Slack on your phone and an Apple Watch, you can pretty much 10X that number. So it’s important to be direct in your pitches. Keep it to 3 -5 sentences, at most. Get to the point and get out. 

• Canceling Calls: If you offer an exec an interview and retract the opportunity once you’ve scheduled it, you can kiss that relationship goodbye. Similarly, if a reporter reaches out to you asking for an interview and you handle it like this, you’re likely not going to get coverage in that publication any time soon. Stick to your commitments, or don’t pitch them out at all. 

Interview Issues: 

• Perspective Probing: As a PR person, it’s your job to come up with an enticing and timely angle for reporters to cover. Asking a reporter what their slant is once they’ve agreed to an interview can definitely ruffle a few feathers. Do your research, know the story that they’re after, and don’t ask the reporter.

• Scheduling Snafus: When pitching an angle to a reporter, it's your job to ensure that your executives are ready and willing to take the call. Repeatedly rescheduling or asking the reporter for additional availability to meet your busy executive's schedules will likely cause you to lose the interview. 

• Personnel Party: Although you may think the topic is relevant to a handful of people on your team, don't bring them to the interview. You should, at most, have the spokesperson and a PR person on the line to moderate. Any more than that’s a crowd, and the reporter won’t appreciate the audience. 

• S#!T Sandwich: When you book an interview or an email Q&A on a certain topic, your executive better be ready to speak to it. One of the worst things you can do in an interview is to go into it unprepared or go into it only ready to speak about the happenings inside the four walls of your company. If a reporter asks you a question, either in an interview or an email Q&A, they assume you have something valuable to say - so give them something of value! Don’t give them a lackluster response that even Joe Schmo could have come up with. Give them something great, and they’ll certainly want to work with you again.

Coverage Conundrums: 

• Review Requests: Asking to review earned editorial coverage before it goes live is a no-no. It automatically puts the integrity of the journalist into question and gives them the idea that you don’t trust them to write a factual, honest article. The rule of thumb is if you’re not paying for it, you can’t review it. 

• Content Corrections (can’t believe we made it this far; alliterations are arduous): Once an article is published, you can’t write a reporter and ask for any changes within. Unless there’s a factual inaccuracy in the article, you’re stuck with what they published. This is why your PR team should be doing everything on the front end to ensure there are no inaccuracies after the article goes live. 

These are just the cardinal offenses you need to watch out for. Building relationships with the media, serving the journalist, and creating a symbiotic relationship with reporters are all also critical in driving successful coverage outcomes.

Until next week,

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