Sending pitches electronically is an efficient way to deliver a message to your media targets. But if that’s the last step in your efforts to gain press coverage for clients, you are forgetting a vital step in the process – the phone call. Relationships matter, and the best ones are built by using your voice, not your keyboard.

The topic of “How Do Journalists View Follow Up Phone Calls?” has been addressed by Jeremy Porter on his Journalistics blog – after surveying comments from more than 50 journalists, he found that 88% of journalists still say they welcome follow-up phone calls.

A direct approach via phone will help you to:

• Stand out from the crowd: Since e-mails outnumber phone calls, this step alone will help your pitch to stand apart from the rest and receive individual attention.

• Confirm the best contact: If you are pitching a particular editorial calendar topic, a call is the quickest way to find out who’s working on that article. This can save you time by ensuring that you are going after the right contact and avoiding follow-up with the wrong person on staff.

• Go beyond a press release: A conversation offers an opportunity to maneuver your pitch in the direction of the listener’s interest. By listening closely, you can pick up on cues about the type of article the writer or editor may be interested in. If you are following up on a press release, a future article may not have anything to do with the announcement. In this case, the release becomes a conversation starter and you’ll likely be sending follow up information.

• Build a relationship: This is an opportunity to engage the editor or writer in more than a conversation about your client. You are also building a relationship and establishing your credibility as a resource for information.

So you’ve decided to contact the editor of a target publication by phone. What now? You’ll need to prepare a clear, concise pitch that draws interest – you may want to prepare a written draft of your pitch in advance to refer to.

• Introduce yourself and the client that you are representing. Confirm that this is a good time to talk. If not, schedule a future day and time to call them back.

• In no more than 2-3 sentences, discuss your story idea and what makes it interesting or informative for the publication’s readers.

• If you know of a future editorial calendar topic that’s a fit for your idea, refer to the issue date and topic and explain that you are hoping to serve as a resource for that article.

• The editor will likely do one of the following: ask you for more information, tell you when she will contact you, refer you to another writer, or tell you that she’s not interested and why.

• Thank her for her time. If there’s interest, follow up with an e-mail that further elaborates on the details about the story idea and your client.

With these benefits in mind, a phone call is great investment of your time and effort. In best case scenarios, the press will be contacting you proactively when researching a future story.

Early in my career, when I first had the responsibility of hiring an employee, I spoke with a colleague who was a longtime HR director. His advice? Look for attitude above all else. Skills are important, he said, but can be acquired or enhanced on the job to some extent. Attitude, on the other hand, is tough to change.

In today’s economic climate, folks are either struggling to maintain their businesses, grateful for the job they have or anxiously looking for work or clients. It’s not an easy environment for a great attitude, I know.

Having a positive outlook is like jet fuel – it provides you with lift and can take those around you up a level as well. A good attitude inspires energy and enthusiasm on the job on the good days, and it keeps you moving toward higher ground when times are tough.

Think back to your first week at a desirable new job – you were excited to be there and eager to contribute and learn, remember? That’s the attitude that we should strive to keep. This is the backbone of working toward a common good with colleagues and clients alike.

What creates a good attitude?

• Enjoy what you do. If you need to revitalize your career, find something new to learn, whether it’s through a book, a webinar or a colleague. If you need a change, look into other options – action steps will improve your view of the current situation.
• Keep the team going. Work diligently and creatively. Be liberal with praise when it’s due. And if someone drops a ball, help them toss it back in the air.
• Find the silver lining. Even the worst situation will bring something positive, even if it’s only a lesson or new insight.
• Maintain a sense of humor. Laughter is a universal bond, and it keeps good energy flowing through the day.
• Balance confidence with humility. It’s important to believe in yourself and your skills, as long you don’t ram your accomplishments down everyone’s throat! Be aware for opportunities to assist the common good.

In the world of marketing, advertising and PR, a good attitude is essential since it transmits to a much wider audience. It eases collaboration in the creative process and keeps you flexible and patient through each round of edits or press pitches. And it’s absolutely mandatory in social media conversations. Remember that your words may be floating on the Web for years! Your thoughts and opinions are important but use diplomacy when sharing them.

So what’s the big deal about attitude? Everything. It’s something you carry with you, from day to day, job to job, person to person.

What do you think makes a good attitude on the job?

Donna had a great post last week about understanding the media’s perspective in order to be a better PR person. I loved her post and it got me thinking that her philosophy can be applied to far more than just media relations.

One of the reasons why CCA is able to be so successful is that we don’t just “talk the talk.”

Working in marketing, communications and social media without having real-life experience consuming the media that you are creating is a disaster waiting to happen. Imagine a reporter for the Boston Globe admitting that they just weren’t “a news person” and could go weeks without picking up a paper or going to the local news Web site. It would be pretty hard to trust their reporting credentials.

To that same point, wouldn’t you have doubts about taking advice on how to manage your company’s presence online from an agency that doesn’t blog, has one Twitter follower, can’t be found anywhere on Google and couldn’t find their way around an RSS feed?

Here at CCA, we are fortunate enough to be in the position where we get to learn on a daily basis from other marketing pros. Not because we are simply sharing war stories from the trenches through various discussion boards or LinkedIn groups, but because they reach out to US on behalf of THEIR clients to tell their stories for them. Trust me, getting a phone call from another PR agency trying to convince you to blog or tweet about their client while you are doing the same for your own client is an out of body experience, and one that isn’t all that rare around these parts.

We blog,  manage Twitter followers by the thousands, build communities on LinkedIn, Ning and share videos to our YouTube subscribers not just for the sake of creation, but as a gigantic and constantly evolving social media experiment. Read all the books you want on effective social media marketing. While you are curled up on the couch reading the latest insights from 2009, we’ll be in the “lab” testing our latest experiments created to help us understand anything from Twitter trending topics to blog syndication strategies. Then we get to turn that all around and bring back all those lessons to the client with the freshest understanding of online behavioral trends.

Now how do YOU experiment and test your ideas online?

PR communications to the press have become instantaneous through e-mail distributions, social media interactions and Web sites. Yes, it’s efficient. But in an effort to hasten the steps that drive publicity, some PR practitioners or self-promoting businesses have gotten sloppy.  They are depersonalizing the recipients/users of the information they are producing.

The reality is that the publishing world is suffering in this economy too.  Editors are taking on more work as their staff of reporters and writers is smaller than ever.  Some are editing multiple publications simultaneously.  And all of them are striving daily to meet deadlines with quality content.

Savvy PR professionals can take advantage of this editorial state of affairs by falling back upon the core methodology of our trade:  content is king.

This means you should:

• Personalize each individual pitch. Spam e-mails inundate writers and editors and can harm the reputation of the sender and the client they represent.
• Make their job easy.  This means that your media contacts should never have to dig for basic information.  A company backgrounder should present the basic facts about a business: including its history, competitive niche, products/services, key executives etc.
• Present story ideas proactively. Sending a pitch with a tenuous tie to an editorial calendar topic for the publication is weak draw for publicity.  Do the research on both competitors and previously published articles to know what’s missing from the publication’s content.  Then present options for the reporter to use your client as a resource OR offer a by-lined article.

It’s a version of the Golden Rule.  Pitch onto others as you would have others pitch unto you.

The thing that I’ve seen consistently raise eyebrows when presenting marketing communications strategies to clients is the idea that social media programs do NOT have to live in their own isolated bubble.

“Wait, you mean the intelligence that I gather through my email campaign can be used in my PR/Facebook/Twitter/SEO programs (and visa versa)?!”

Yes.

Each medium does have its own challenges. You can’t treat people the same over email as you would over Facebook. It just doesn’t work. BUT, the information you gather from how your audience best responds to email campaigns to what keywords they search and have alerts set for to what types of blog posts they are most likely to “like” on your Facebook fan page has no boundaries (other than extrapolating to unrelated audiences).

Audience behavior intelligence is universal.

Don’t just collect all that information and stare at it. Use it! Understand the way that your audience behaves on Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Linkedin/Google so that you can be exactly where they are, in ways that they want to see you while encouraging the behavior that you want them to express  (phone calls, link sharing, blog post publishing…).

For a lot of marketers, social media technology itself still seems pretty foreign, but let’s not forget that behind (most) of those Twitter accounts is still another human that has the same basic needs and desires as any other person.

Because when you break it all down, your Twitter followers aren’t all that different from your Facebook fans and your YouTube channel subscribers. They just choose different channels to engage with your brand and the content you produce.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wackystuff/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

With every brand, big or small, clawing to create some tangible value out of all the buzz around social media marketing, let us not forget that traditional media is far from dead.

After yet another year of being declared buried and forgotten, television, radio and even newspapers are still alive. Sure, newspapers weren’t exactly in great shape before the recession. Yes, they’ve been hurt like every other business and yes, just like every other business they’re refining their business model. But before you write up a death certificate for traditional media and leave them out of your marketing  plan, consider this:

• Television: 99 percent of video viewing was done on a television in the past year; less than 5 percent of TV viewing was DVR or TiVo playback. (Source: Ball State University’s Center for Media Design)
• Radio: Broadcast radio (free AM/FM radio) has the largest listening audience of all audio platforms (satellite, iPod, CDs) with 122 minutes of daily use, while CDs are at 72 minutes and portable audio players (iPods/mp3 players) are at 69 minutes. (Source: Ball State University’s Center for Media Design)
• Newspapers: 74 percent of adults read newspapers both online and offline. In addition, 82 percent of households with incomes of more than $100,000 read the paper online and/or offline and newspapers are starting to successfully attract 18 to 34 year-olds to their Web sites. (Source: Integrated Newspaper Audience Report from Scarborough.com)

Traditional media isn’t dead, its role is simply evolving as new technologies emerge and the competitive universe grows increasingly crowded.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/steeljam/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

From the October 5th, 2009 New York Times:

“On Monday, the F.T.C. said it would revise rules about endorsements and testimonials in advertising that had been in place since 1980. The new regulations are aimed at the rapidly shifting new-media world and how advertisers are using bloggers and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to pitch their wares.”

So the jig is up. Advertising claims and the people who love them are once again under the microscope.

While I’ve used some pretty bodacious adjectives and gussied up a few product shots to bring out the best in my clients’ offerings, I’ve always tried to live by the slogan of one of my previous employers: truth well told.

Truth well told was originated by McCann-Erickson at a time when many products were making some pretty questionable claims. Even big companies were guilty: a 1914 ad for Ford’s Model T featured the headline “Buy it because it’s a better car” and suggested the reader get the particulars from a Ford dealer. Um…okaaaay….

Fast forward about a century. Laws and guidelines are in place to protect the public from misleading advertising claims and fuzzy endorsements. And generally speaking, I think the ad world does a pretty good job of policing itself as well. But, thanks to the anonymous nature of the internet, we’ve taken a few steps back.

I think the general public will always be wary of advertising but let’s get back on track. Let’s put our clients’ wares out there in the most honest, best possible creative light we can.

Let’s try the truth well blogged.

CCA recently received the honor of joining the 2009 Inc. 5,000 list as one of the country’s fastest growing privately held companies. After a rigorous vetting process, we are very proud to announce that we have been named to the prestigious list for the second time.

While we are proud of our accomplishment, it is our valued and respected clients that entrust us to build their brands—along with the talented team at CCA—that enabled us to not only be in the Inc. 5000 list in 2007, but again in 2009. Our thanks and gratitude go out to all of our past, current and future clients for your commitment to our brand of marketing and client services.

Especially in a time when marketing teams are constantly forced to defend their investments, we couldn’t be more humbled by this accomplishment. We are truly lucky to have such an amazing stable of companies that we view more partners than clients. It is these valuable partnerships that have allowed us to grow even under the toughest economic conditions.

Thanks to everyone to has helped us make this accomplishment possible. It has been a true team effort.

You’ve heard it. Maybe you’ve even said it yourself, but lets just throw it out there and figure this out together. The question on the minds of many of our clients (and likely yours at some point as well):

“But do you really think that Twitter is going to last?”

A completely honest question from any marketer concerned about:

1) whether the audience they are actually reaching out to is on Twitter in the first place and

2) if I make the investment to build up a solid presence there, how long will it be before everyone flocks to the newest social network (see: what Facebook did to MySpace) or someone buys it out and it all drops off the face of the earth?

One thing to hold under consideration is that compared to when Twitter first launched, it has seen pretty dramatic changes in both in functionality and how people have managed to use it to communicate and market. The one thing that remains (and this just isn’t with Twitter) is people’s desire to connect with each other.

If there is one thing that the entire social networking phenomenon has taught is that no man is an island and we all naturally thrive on building meaningful connections with each other. Whenever we meet each other in person, we usually begin with a casual “What’s up?” or “How’s it going?”. More often than not, we actually want to hear a genuine response.

The Web (whether it is Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or anything else) has simply become a means to get that same natural satisfaction from getting information about other people’s lives and sharing our own stories no matter where we are.

So if you are still concerned about how long Twitter is going to last before it all implodes, think about it this way. If something helps you build meaningful connections with employees, customers and prospects: use it, be human and place nice.

But most importantly, focus on the relationships and connections that it allows you to build. Technology will change, but genetics will take much longer.

Long after they have forgotten your latest marketing promotion, email campaign and viral video, it will be the ability for you to satisfy their genetic need for building valuable connections with others that will last.

Connections Matter.

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A recent study was published about the use of Facebook, blogs and Twitter by the Fortune 100. While the usage stats in themselves are interesting, I think that there is something all together that is missing here.

First, the numbers:

• 54% of Fortune 100 companies were using Twitter to engage with their stakeholders
• 32% were using a blog
• 29% were actively using a Facebook fan page
• 22% were using two channels
• 76% of the “one channel” companies use only twitter
• 17% were using  three channels

While I’m excited to see so many huge companies jump on the social media bandwagon, it is clear that there is a heavy case of “shiny object syndrome” going on here.  I have a hard time that twitter is the most effective social media communications platform for the 76% of companies that are using it as their sole channel.

This also forces me to assume that a vast majority of these companies can’t be doing nearly as much listening as they are talking.

While Twitter may be the hottest new thing since Facebook’s traffic beat out MySpace, but just because every morning news program spouts on about Twitter every 30 seconds doesn’t mean that this is where your audience is.

The New York Times recently had an article out exactly who is driving Twitter’s popularity. Some of the numbers would likely surprise a lot of those Fortune 100 Twitter account managers.

After all, the most important rule of any communications strategy, digital or analog is L-I-S-T-E-N!