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Make the Most of Your Release: Reach Out

If you’ve read any of my articles, you know that I’m fond of lists. On the heels of my last article about how to follow up on your release (See “Trevor’s 7 Rules of PR Pitching”), here’s the fifth of 6 tips to help you get the most out of your follow-up (read the first here).

Reach Out: Send out good tips about items in your field that don’t relate to you to influential media.

Image Credit: Tippie Toes by Exquisitur licensed through Creative Commons

Sound counter-intuitive? Maybe a little. But it pays off, even if it does mean that the press runs a story that talks about a competitor or mentions a burgeoning trend without discussing you. How’s it pay off? In two ways:

1. Journalists are human, too: Make their job a little easier and they’ll remember you fondly. This means that you’ll have an easier time reaching them the next time that you want to get your own story covered, that they’ll be prone to call you for quotes when they need someone to weigh in on something they’re writing, and that they’ll feel (ever so slightly) like they owe you a good turn for the favor that you did them.
2. You’re keeping up with the trends: As I’ve covered earlier, there’s a number of ways that knowing what’s happening in your business pays off well for your ability to write news releases (and it’s a no-brainer from a general business perspective). It’s also something that you can legitimately budget a little time to each week as part of your media outreach and not feel like you’re a slacker for tooling around reading blogs or your RSS feed reader for two hours.

The best way–the very best way–to get a reporter or blogger to talk about you when you have news is to have already fed them news that they wanted to use before. So if you hear something that would interest one of those media contacts who you’ve been following around the Internet, send it on to them. Even if it’s not about your company. Especially if it’s not about your company.  Once a reporter or blogger knows who you are and that you care about getting good information out about your field, they’ll be more prone to open your pitches just to see what you’re talking about.

As always, a certain amount of restraint is necessary here. No, you don’t need to forward on to your blogger network the latest rumor about MacWorld’s next Developer’s Conference, or who’s going to win American Idol. But if you find a real tidbit of news that’s under-reported by a journalist that you read who might be interested in it? Go right ahead and pass it along.

90% of all press release story queries are form letters blasted to every reporter on the planet willy-nilly. It should not surprise you that this jades the media outlets quickly. It also means that they treasure the people who don’t randomly bombard them, but rather show some consideration for what it is that they write about and what interests them.