6 Ways to Improve Your P.R. Pitches

Thanks to Vocus for sharing Scott Strattten, author of Unmarketing and The Book of Business Awesome, via a webinar entitled, “Unpitching — How Not to Suck at Pitching.”

I’ve had the opportunity to see Scott in person and his acerbic wit and personality is just as entertaining on a webinar.

According to Scott, P.R. no longer just stands for “public relations.”  It also stands for: “people react,” “people respond” and “people reach-out.”

Here are the six ways I took away that we can improve our P.R. pitches in the age of social media:

1. Target the press release.   Just like email, the content must be relevant and targeted to the journalist or it won’t get read.  Find people who want your pitches.  Build relationships with journalists so your name will get the release opened, not the subject line.
2. Measure what you are trying to influence.  What are the goals of your efforts?  Mine is typically to build awareness of our products and what problem they solve.  As such, I’m looking at media hits, impressions, web hits and phone calls.
3. Engage the media the same way you should be engaging customers and prospects.  Have a dialogue with them.  Understand their needs and wants.  Build an awesome relationship with the media so they remember you and look forward to hearing what you have to say.
4. You cannot make something go viral; however, the more awesome you make something, the greater the opportunity for it to go viral.  Do this by creating an event or story that you tell your friends, and they as so impressed they tell their friends and so on.
5. With the advent of social media, everyone in the company is involved in P.R. whether they are communicating something on the company’s behalf or expressing their personal opinion and people know who they work for.  As such, you need to ensure your employees know the vision, mission, values and strategic positioning of the firm.
6. A crisis requires an immediate response.  It must be authentic, sincere and appropriate.  You will be forgiven if you make a mistake and apologize for it.  If you don’t, you’ll be a pariah.

Social media has made P.R. even more important.  However, it has changed from shouting through a megaphone to building a relationship with those that can help you disseminate your story.

A few other great points from Scott:

• P.R. is the real-time ability to be awesome.
• Unless you are giving birth, don’t use ALL CAPS.
• Your job in P.R. is to “tell people off” and have them say “thank you.”

What are you doing to improve your P.R. pitches?

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