Tag: journalist

We are an odd company at times. While we are definitely a marketing company, we are also media, a tech company and a educator. With 15 new clients being on-boarded in Australia in October, we desperately need a journalist to take over our magazine, and write content across multiple disciplines.

I remember our meeting fondly. He walked up to me, introduced himself, and said, "what do you do?"

I replied, "marketing."

"No, seriously, what do you do?" he said with a smirk. "Nobody really does marketing, they do sales or something else." 

It wasn't necessarily what he thought, just what he said. He wanted to provoke a reaction and he sure got one! Within minutes we were firm friends, and he was officially one of my first friends I had met since I had moved to Sydney, the big smoke. We both kind of got each other coming from small rural towns in Australia.

While a sex tape is a good way to get media exposure for some; Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and alike - it's not the right way to get the type of media exposure to escalate your business's chance of being written about.

When I first started doing PR, I used to write a media release and fax it to a media outlet - all with varying results. The headline, like it is today, is worth it's weight in gold, and if you have a strong first paragraph, you may get that call back you have been waiting for.

That was soon followed up with 'pitching' on the telephone and depending on what mood the journalist was in or your ability to 'sell' a story to them, you either walked away with a published article or your press release was thrown in the trash can.

In 1998, the faxing part changed to emailing which was fantastic because it was a much faster and less tedious way of getting a media release out to journalists. It also was a much more environmentally friendly way to operate and allowed for changes to be made to ensure that each email sent out to a journalist was a one-to-one marketing piece rather than an everything to everyone, hit and miss style approach.

Many people fly by the seat of their pants when it comes to interviews. There is no preparation, no coaching, no pre-empting of questions and no understanding.