John Cook on the Naked Truth Event
posted in Business, PR |John Cook did a very good write up of the meat of the panel discussion last night.
One of the comments on his post points out that all the journalists said pretty much that the best way to get coverage was to provide one journalist a scoop. From my experience that is close, but its not the whole story.
The key isn’t a scoop, its a unique story. Journalists don’t exist to just write the same thing over and over repeating your message to the word (that’s what bloggers do.. oops). If its a truly huge story (”Microsoft announces next version of Windows”) everyone will print it, just in the off chance that their segment of the audience missed it everywhere else. But for most of us, its only going to work if the journalist feels that they have some special take on it.
So when you work with each journalist, think about what interesting thing you would like them to say. Keep in mind that in the book world, stories have conflict, and while not everything that gets printed in the press has conflict, it sure does make it more interesting. Guy Kawasaki published a list of the nine best story lines for marketing from Lois Kelly. This is a pretty good list, although it doesn’t rank them by how easy of a story they are to spin- David vs. Goliath is one of the most obvious ones and it works for almost any company and is a pretty easy one to believe. Its a good way to get coverage, but its not necessarily the best way to keep the focus on you and the wonderful thing your company does for its customers. Still, its a good one to think about since it tends to come out even if you don’t plan on it.
Of course this all varies quite a bit by the publication. TechCruch tends to favor writing straight profiles of companies. Wired tends to focus on what Kelly calls the “Avalanche About To Roll” of technological/societal change stories (although they do have a good measure of the other types thrown in too). Other publications will focus more on the business aspects.