Showing posts with label Media Relations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Media Relations. Show all posts

Thursday, March 2, 2023

Day in the Life: What does a Media Relations Expert Do?


What does a media relations manager do?

When asked what I do for a living I typically reply with “public relations,” and if people don’t know what that means, to simplify the conversation I’ll say “marketing.” Both are true. But as anyone who works in this space will understand, the full truth of it is “media relations.”

Basically, my role acts as a liaison between my clients and the media, facilitating interviews, writing pitches, and ultimately managing relationships with editors and outlets. There are a lot of moving parts.

What’s the typical day of a media relations professional like? Let me break it down:


 
 
 

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Avoid These Common Mistakes on Award Applications

 


Winning an award is a big deal, especially in the health tech and life sciences space. The exposure not only earns a company, thought leader, or product media attention, but the prestige of an award also carries bragging rights that open doors for new partnerships and customers across the healthcare ecosystem. As with anything coveted in this world, winning an award is hard work and not everyone gets to leave with a trophy. However, a great application will maximize the chances of winning.

Nearly every healthcare award requires a written application – a chance to inform the judges on who you are, what you do, and why you deserve to win. If you want an award application to stand out from all of the others in the stack, it’s best to identify these all-too-common errors and remedy them before you hit submit.


Read the Full Blog Here 

 

 

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

Leaping over Media Interview Pitfalls

 

A media briefing or interview is an important chance to reach a wider audience. Furthermore, it’s a chance to exercise your communication skills, enhance your message, and go beyond the press release. Every interview is a chance to have a conversation with another knowledgeable person and develop your resume as a notable thought leader.

Over my time as a newspaper correspondent, magazine editor, and media relations professional, I have conducted and sat in on hundreds of media briefings and interviews. And, honestly, most of them go fine. The ones that don’t go well (where it isn’t the media member’s fault – which it sometimes is!) usually are a result of a spokesperson tripping into three common pitfalls:


Read the Full Blog Here

 

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Branding: Be Yourself, Earn Engagement

 


In public relations, there’s a lot of talk about a company’s brand and its messaging – the ideas and public imagine the institution and its representatives. The value cannot be overstated.

Messaging and branding give a company its identity, making it appear “human” in the eyes of people. It gives anyone interacting with a company or organization an identity they can latch onto and work with.

A loyalty to your messaging and branding as a company is important. However, things are changing. If you’re an individual, even a CEO, the rules are not quite the same.

Read the Full Blog Here

 

 

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

In 2020, a “Thought Leader” is just a Regular Person


The phrase “thought leader” is one that is thrown around a lot in public relations. And it’s understandable: For any public facing organization or business, it’s important to have experts on hand who can speak to the public.

However, as someone involved in day-to-day media relations operations at an award-winning PR and marketing agency, I have a major gripe with thought leaders, and I wrote this blog specifically for them and their coaches.

In short, my gripe is this: You need to be able to talk about something else other than your products and services. You must be able to speak about something other than your business and your brand.

If you can’t do it, you’re not a thought leader, you’re a spokesman. And there is a difference. 

 

Read the Full Blog Here


 

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Ethical Wins: Navigating Media Relations in a Pandemic


In this time of uncertainty over the Covid-19 pandemic, the seriousness of the issue presents a variety of social, economic, and health challenges for all of us.

While practicing “social distancing,” many of us are often glued to news services, looking for the latest updates, valuable survival tips, words of wisdom, and glimmers of hope. For me, as media relations professional, it presents some distinct challenges both functionally – that is, the success of my ability to pitch media and earn placements – and ethically, since I’m a person with a social obligation to my peers.

I want to offer some tips to navigate a unique media landscape where only one story is on everyone’s mind. Now, more than ever, all of us in marketing and public relations must think about everything we’re doing before we do it.




Wednesday, December 18, 2019

The Basics of Healthy, Happy Relationships


Building relationships with journalists takes time. Smashing them to pieces takes little time at all.

One terrible, irrelevant pitch and you could end up on a journalist’s blacklist – and that isn’t where you want to be. Because as any good media relations guru will tell you, we need journalists more than they need us.

To build strong relationships – and maybe fix bad ones – there are some basic rules of the road anyone out there sending pitches should follow, lest you end up in the SPAM folder – where email goes to die!




Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Guidelines for a Darn Good Press Release Headline



Editors and journalists get a ridiculous number of press releases in their inbox every day. It isn’t just this week’s news that a press release completes with – it’s releases from prior weeks, being re-sent and re-packaged to find new coverage. It’s a tough, competitive world for each press release. Even if you have a newsworthy story, getting eyes on it isn’t always easy. For yours to win, you need a great press release headline that grabs attention, tells a complete story, and makes a reader want to know more.


Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Embrace the Paywall Future – Because it’s Coming


For several years now we all have lived in luxury, enjoying free content on the Internet that’s paid for through ads and data mining, with no paywall to contend with. But, as many prominent media outlets have noted, things are beginning to change.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Unless You're Monitoring the Media, You're Missing Out


In college, I had a journalism professor ask our class how many of us had signed up for Google Alerts as a media monitoring tool to support our coverage areas. Aging myself a bit, Google Alerts was a relatively new idea then. All the same, when no one in the class raised their hand, we all got scolded. It’s a painful memory.

Luckily, I never forgot the core tenets of that lesson. Media monitoring is crucial for anyone with a media life, including healthcare tech companies. If you don’t know what is being said about your area of expertise, it’s hard to keep up with the conversation. And, more importantly, unless you’re actively keeping an eye on what the web is saying about you, you can miss out on valuable media coverage, not to mention all the insights hidden within the coverage you didn’t get.
 
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Agility PR



Wednesday, January 24, 2018

What Star Wars and Loot Boxes Can Teach Us About Avoiding a PR Crisis




If you follow the world of video games like I do, you’re familiar with Electronic Arts (EA), a wildly successful, publically traded, developer/publisher whose industry prominence has earned them exclusive licenses to some of the world’s biggest brands, including the NFL, UFC, and Star Wars. EA is no stranger to controversy, be it a conflict over pricing or their purchase of smaller development talent. However, in late 2017, the company’s stock took a $3 billion hit after their latest controversy became a full-blown PR crisis, prompting legislative action that equated EA’s business practices to gambling, in addition to a major drop in consumer sales.

While the situation now stands as a shining example of a communication failure, the truth is, things should never have spiraled out of control. Hidden within this PR nightmare are lessons to be learned for communication professionals in every industry on how to better manage a crisis.
  

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Customer Spokespersons: The Path to PR Success


For companies looking to breathe new life into a PR or marketing campaign, product launches are exciting, as is news on awards or other recognition. But, nothing is more powerful than an advocate who can praise your company without sounding like an insider – yes, I’m talking about customers. Customer spokespersons are the special sauce of any PR campaign.
  

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Media Relations Pitching Pitfalls that Kill Relationships


Media relations pitching is challenging to say the least. Editors are busy people. Writers and journalists are often on the run, facing tight deadlines and email boxes that absolutely never get read down to zero.

When pitching a potential story, getting an editor to open your email is already a challenge, albeit one that can be overcome with a good subject line and some follow-up phone calls. But believe it or not, that’s the easy part.


 

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Tips for Social Media Success



For many, social media is a mysterious beast. In part because it’s such a new means of communication, but also because the primary social media platforms we all use and love – Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter – can feel like a sea of noise in which developing best practices to engage human users (as opposed to the spam bots) inherently brings with it some challenges. That said, social media marketing in today’s world is a must if you want to engage potential clients, spread the word about what your company is doing, and support your brand with a robust online presence.