The Secret to Effective Media Pitches
In the beginnings of PR, pitching to the media was all about getting the journalist you wanted to speak to on the phone. In the 1940s, landlines were our best form of...
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In the beginnings of PR, pitching to the media was all about getting the journalist you wanted to speak to on the phone. In the 1940s, landlines were our best form of...
Posted by Weslie Oeftering
Facebook was founded almost 15 years ago. Twitter came a short time later in 2006. Despite having over a decade to master communication on each of these platforms (and all of the...
Posted by Weslie Oeftering
Vacation should be about relaxing and spending time with the ones you love. Don’t let the pressure of maintaining your holiday PR campaign stress you out!
Posted by provercoffee
Twitter is an effective social media platform to help build and bolster the brand of startup founders and business executives. While it may not have as many users as Facebook or...
Posted by provercoffee
No matter how prepared you think you are, mistakes are bound to happen. As a business, you want to reduce the amount of negative attention you receive as much as possible. ...
Posted by provercoffee
Marketing a business requires the ability to adapt and stay up to date on a wide variety of marketing tools to keep in touch with current customers and find new prospects....
Posted by provercoffee
Warren Buffett said some time ago: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Well, now, thanks to the digital communication society we live in, it...
Posted by provercoffee
Over the past decade we’ve seen Facebook grow from a simple social networking site to a social media giant with over 1.6 billion users monthly. Since Facebook’s IPO 4 years ago,...
Posted by provercoffee
Social media can be a powerful strategy to pursue for your brand, but when used incorrectly it’s just noise, or worse, downright annoying. Whether you’re a small business, a...
Posted by provercoffee
Pitching reporters through social media can be tricky and you should proceed with caution. With that said, the process is not impossible. With the right tactics, social media...
Posted by ryangardnerc
In the beginnings of PR, pitching to the media was all about getting the journalist you wanted to speak to on the phone. In the 1940s, landlines were our best form of long-distance communication because they were our only form of communication (unless you count the telegraph, which was definitely on its way out at this point).
Then, in the 1980s, it became all about the fax machine, which much like the telegraph, was soon relegated to the status of Technological Dinosaur with the advent of Hotmail and other webmail services in the mid-1990s.
While it seems that email is here to stay in some form or another for the foreseeable future (although Slack and similar platforms have recently come onto the scene as potential challengers), social media is quickly establishing itself as the go-to medium for pitching media to journalists.
Getting and holding the attention of a journalist effectively enough to build a relationship with them increasingly means DMing them on Twitter or Facebook since that’s where they are now getting most of their stories from. Social media is where all news breaks first, so it makes perfect sense that media outlets would shift their attention there. The closer they are to the action, the more likely it is that they will be the first ones to get a scoop – it’s just the smart thing to do.
This change in the way media outlets source their stories matters for PR pros because it means that in order to effectively pitch media, you need to be able to effectively use your contact’s platform of choice. If you try to reach a journalist via email when they primarily source their stories on social media, then you are setting yourself up for failure. Your pitch is more likely to be successful if you play by the journalist’s rules.
However, just because journalists are switching to social media platforms for sourcing their stories does not mean that your entire communications strategy should focus exclusively on social media platforms. Although pitching to the media is a big part of PR, there is so much more to PR and marketing that is not online. This is just a new dimension of PR that the industry needs to integrate into it’s day-to-day; it is not a total shift in what PR itself is.
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Working with a PR firm can be an exhilarating time for a company (or nonprofit). PR can put you in the public eye like no other marketing activity. Indeed, your first time on...