Thread by @damienmulley

I did the PR and Media skills workshop last week. I'm going to do a thread on what works for me and others.

Getting the attention of a journalist
means doing some research on their area
writing a good subject line and opening

them understanding what you do
them trusting you to give you coverage
the information you are offering is going to appeal to them, their editor, their audience

Think of the general reader of the Irish Times or someone listening to Morning Ireland. Can you, in one minute describe what your business does? Can the person that heard you say what you actually do remember what you just said?

Framing/Positioning
People understanding what you do is really important. If your idea is too new and they have no reference, they just don’t get you.

We are AirBnB for spare meeting rooms
We are the uber for
We are the JustEat of ..
We’re like a Spotify for training classes

The information you are offering needs to appeal to them, to their editor and to their audience. This is where you /almost/ write the story for them. Without being too harsh to you, it’s not their job to be Google Translate for your content.

the default good content:
Jobs, money, valuation, growth, disruption

Here are some good content/PR ideas from over the years
Tie into a Zeitgeist:
Schools are back, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, 1916, Vegan everything.

A few years back for April 1st, Irish NGOs started tweeting real harsh facts using #notanaprilfool a press release was sent out explaining what it was about:
thejournal.ie/notanaprilfool…

Devil’s Advocate - Being the Opposite:
Bad weather in Summer
During one particularly wet Summer @puddleducks did a release showing there was an increase in sales of their all-weather gear for kids. When it rains … gains. This was interesting enough to get into a newspaper

@puddleducks Pick a Fight:
One of the oldest ways to get attention is to pick a fight with someone much bigger than you. Their gravity can be used to get you attention.

The Paddy Tax. o2 brought out the iPhone in Ireland that had a terrible text and calls package, a more expensive cost even with sterling and VAT conversion and no data.

web.archive.org/web/2008042002…

web.archive.org/web/2008042019…

Patriotism/tribalism:
The Cork Passport was a way to get Cork people excited that we could have our own passport while at the same time the rest of the country would be outraged at this idea. Double win for media coverage as a result.

web.archive.org/web/2015090600…

#corkpassport trended because people talked about it
#notcorkpassport trended because people were wound up about the Cork Passport. And that got more media attention.

breakingnews.ie/ireland/counci…

Public data/Government Reports:

We took Comreg’s quarterly report, found the stuff they weren’t mentioning. We got the bad news and put it together in a briefing note and sent it around to everyone. Worst phone prices in Europe. Front page coverage.
irishtimes.com/news/ireland-t…

Using FOIs - Web Summit money. FOId Government organisations on how much money they had given Web Summit. When the Web Summit had a hissy fit about lack of Government support, this made great copy for the media.

independent.ie/business/techn…

Or the Govt website that cost €4M and was shite and was shut down irishtimes.com/business/websi…

Or using other publicly available data:
Using Facebook Data
More pensioners on Facebook than teenagers - data from Facebook ad system
independent.ie/business/techn…

Make your own data

(Tied into valentines). The SME Awards emailed family run businesses asking them the issues around missing important family and calendar events and if it was hard working with family. Superb replies, shared with media.
irishtimes.com/business/work/…

There is loads you can do to create "content" that the media would love to cover. It takes practice to be good at doing this but worth doing.

Credibility/Trust
How can a journalist trust you? They’ll need to be able to verify your information. Where did you get the data? Is the data accessible somewhere, do you have a website, a landline, online reviews, other media coverage?

Media organisations have different email structures so it is good to know what they are.

Hunter.io (free sign up) allows you to figure out the email of journalists. It has a good hit rate of correct emails.

Press Release Examples
PR Newswire is a service that allows you to send out press releases, it also has an amazing archive broken down by topic you can go through to see how press releases are written by PR people.
prnewswire.com/news-releases/

That's me done for now. That workshop last week was probably the last public one for 2019. mulley.ie/pr-and-media-w… I'm not a PR person though and there are firms that are masters at this you should talk to. I just advise clients that PR is as important as marketing for them.

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