Interesting

AHA Image - TV CameraWe work with our clients on media training. It doesn’t mean that we put words in their mouths or that we help them to “spin” a story. It means that we help our clients understand how the media works, what a journalist needs to get from an interview and how to be effective and relevant during the interview process.  At AHA, we take pride in working with clients that are ethical, that have integrity, and that care about their stakeholders and the work that they do. In our opinion, media training is about making the most of an interview opportunity – to share facts, to inform, to open a conversation. If the questions are tough or difficult, it is crucial to answer them with transparency and authenticity, and to provide valuable information that shows what is being done about the situation.

I have seen tough interviews from both sides – media and client – and it is one of the areas that we talk a great deal about at our Vancouver PR agency. An interview with a journalist can be of huge value in sharing information, in talking about your organization and – if an issue or crisis has happened – in providing background, the reason why it happened, and explaining what is happening now to your stakeholders and the public at large. (Just a note of caution here. If you are dealing with an issue or a crisis, as important as the media is, it isn’t the only avenue you should be taking to communicate with stakeholders and the public.)

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Yesterday morning I found myself sitting in the Vancouver Airport, getting ready to fly to Cabo San Lucas. Paul and I are working here this week (and, hopefully, getting some sun and fun in too!). I realized that I didn’t have a “work” related book to read on the plane. I quickly opened my iPad and did a quick search for books I have been meaning to read, but haven’t got around to yet. Brian Solis’ book Engage has been at the top of my list for a while, so I downloaded that to my iPad and read it on the plane.

I am a big fan of Brian’s. If you are a communicator that wants to take your social media to that next level, I strongly suggest following Brian’s blog and connecting with him on Twitter and Facebook. 

I also highly recommend Engage. It shows you how to move forward in social media for your organization without overwhelming you or making you feel like you are so far behind that it’s too late. It’s a great book.

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Years ago I was working at Maclean’s magazine and writing primarily for The People Page. The items on the page were short – about a paragraph in length and each short piece needed a strong headline.

I loved writing for The People Page. First off, it was the most-read page in the magazine and I liked the challenge of putting interesting, entertaining and informative stories into 100 words or less. And I love writing headlines. It’s not as easy as you think to be smart and witty in five words and describe the article.

Fast forward to now. Social media demands short, snappy and interesting pieces. All those late nights of struggling to turn a two-hour interview into a 100 words is paying off for our clients. I understand not only how to keep it short; I know why it’s important. As communicators, we only have seconds to capture someone’s attention and we’re competing with a lot of “stuff” for that attention. Knowing your audience is key, understanding what your objectives are is important and seeing the world in one-sentence connections is valuable.

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Nothing gets our juices flowing in the AHA PR office more than the opportunity to pitch media and bloggers. Coming up with the right idea that will get a journalist or blogger to learn more about a client’s organization or their product or service takes more effort than most people outside of PR realize. It is part art, part science and part magic – I think.

While we still believe that there is value in a news release, more and more these days, we find ourselves developing pitches for a specific journalist or blogger. We write the pitch as if we were writing it for an editor – with stats, facts and why this story idea is relevant to the readership or audience of that journalist. It is an interesting process and one that takes the effort of several of the AHA crew. We put the pitch through its paces, reviewing it through the eyes of a busy journalist who receives a lot of pitches in a day. We look at it with the “who cares” lens – and ask why anyone would care about this information?  If we can’t confidently explain who would care and why – the pitch needs to be reworked. And if we keep hitting the who cares phase and we can’t get past it – sometimes, we need to go back and speak with our client about taking a different angle or, perhaps, coming to terms with the fact that while this information is of value to a specific audience relevant to their organization, that it may not be of value to a larger, more public audience.

Ragan.com has a great piece written by tech journalist David Pogue of the New York Times. We’re big fans of Pogue’s work – not only does he know his stuff, he is a genuinely nice guy and he’s really funny. (Several years ago, he was a speaker at the Ragan Social Media Conference and there was a technical glitch with his presentation. Pogue sat down at the grand piano on the stage and performed a fun, lively little number taking a poke at communicators and reporters for us while the challenges were being fixed.)

In this piece Pogue shows two pitches that got his attention. Getting the attention of the New York Times tech journalist is a pretty great thing – this is worth a read.

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