Media Relations

At the beginning of September, the White House announced South By South Lawn (SXSL), an innovation-themed event slated for Oct. 3 produced in tandem with—and based on—the iconic South by Southwest (SXSW) music, technology and film festival. The timing of the announcement gave SXSL planners only a month of lead time to build buzz and encourage audiences nationwide to tune in for the live stream, which garnered hundreds of thousands of live viewers.

It’s become part of the journalist’s editorial calculations by necessity. If they cover you, how many page views can you deliver to them?

There’s no surefire way to win media coverage for your brand, but strategic timing can help you avoid wasting hours of research and writing pitches that are routinely ignored by journalists. It pays to resist the pressure from senior leaders or clients to send that pitch right now and instead be a part of the news cycle’s ebb and flow.

It’s true – a lot of people just don’t understand what PR people do. They think it’s about pitching the media, chasing positive coverage, then rinsing and repeating. Certainly media relations is an important component… Continued

One of the biggest trends PR faces is too much noise. I mean this for reporters who are inundated with pitches that might not be appropriate for them as well as the competition we face within the television industry for viewers. We’ve developed three strategies for facing this competitive environment.

While it’s almost time for school to begin in many parts of the country, there’s still a bit of time left in baseball season. And since the topic of today’s post is media pitching, our baseball-addled mind, or what’s left of it, thinks of relating media pitching to baseball pitching. It’s also a chance to, er, throw in a bunch of baseball references.

Through coordinated messaging and content efforts, PR pros can develop a unified voice for a brand, even if there are multiple departments in the organization. To do this successfully, media relations, PR and marketing activities should be developed and executed in tandem. Coordinating these efforts, steered by a messaging framework that maps the organization’s brand story, will help bring cohesion and direction to a multi-department organization internally and in the marketplace.

Brand communicators seek to influence the undecided and convince them of the value of the product or service they’re representing. They try to accomplish this through third-party media coverage, the sharing of their own content… Continued

Sand between your tanned toes and the relaxing sound of waves hitting the shore. Happy hour that begins at 4pm (it’s 5’oclock somewhere). Visiting new places. Dealing with crowds (literally, being able to deal with… Continued

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump ignored a staple of political communications in his announcement of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate. The news ran on different platforms at different times, and lacked the cohesion that typifies many political campaigns. After the announcement, the seemingly disjointed communications continued in their first interview together in a 60 Minutes segment aired July 17.