Last week it happened again.
Every time I deliver my Pitching Boot Camp and teach PR pros how to grab the fleeting attention of today’s media influencers, somebody approaches me with the same weird observation.
Recently it was a PR rep from a huge government organization. He said, “This is all great, but I don’t have any problems getting media attention. They’re calling me every day.”
What a huge opportunity he is missing!
Whether you’re at a big brand or a small one, it’s not solely about the volume of stories that include you. It’s whether you can place the stories you want told.
A few months ago, I got an inside look how things work when you approach the “quantity and quality” issue from the proper perspective.
I was conducting training for the North American communications team at General Motors, #8 on the Fortune 500.
The media members this team pitches probably see General Motors products every day. Research shows that the automotive press corps is second only to the political beat in size.
During the run-up to the event, the corporate communications director and I were joking about how the GM team measures its media coverage “by the ton.”
You might think they’d sit back and answer the “incoming” queries, phone calls and email all day. They certainly could do that and feel “busy” and “efficient.” Sometimes that’s referred to as the “order-taker” way of doing business: sitting in the office of a very popular brand and just waiting for orders from customers to roll in.
But that’s decidedly not what they do at GM. They’re constantly pitching the stories they want told.
And they’re humble and realistic enough to know they need to adapt those stories to meet the needs of their target influencers.
Knowing Who The Audience Is
Sure, the GM communications team has an open line to the auto trades. And those relationships definitely are important in setting GM’s agenda in the trade space.
But moms shopping for a new SUV to haul the neighborhood runts to soccer practice don’t read auto trades with great regularity. They do, however, watch The Today Show.
So the GMC brand communications team collaborated with the parent company’s in-house story bureau to calibrate a pitch that pushed the right buttons for a Today producer.
Instead of relying on name recognition and the typical mistaken assumption that a refreshed product is newsworthy on its own, the team went a layer deeper. The pitch was about a new safety feature that reminds drivers when they get out of the vehicle that they have a child in a car seat in the back (potentially life-saving during hot summers).
A Factual and Emotional Pitch
The pitch struck not merely a factual tone, but also an emotional chord among Today’s target demographic. Instead of putting forward a brand manager or top executive, the PR team built the story around Tricia Morrow, a mother and GM global safety strategy engineer who worked on the remodel.
Most PR teams, especially those at big organizations with “media calling every day,” lapse into habits like sending formal studio head shots along with their pitches.
This team knew that Today is looking for people and issues its audience can relate to, and that sense of connection guided all the decisions it took. That includes the one to paste in a selfie the engineer took with her daughters.
It’s not a surprise that image made it into the Today.com article that resulted. And a few days later, the engineer was driving around a Today correspondent, touting the SUV’s new feature for millions of viewers.
What You Can Learn From GM
Here’s what that pitch evidences about the media relations culture at GM that you can copy at your organization:
- An organizational humility that, no matter how big we might be, we’re not as important and newsworthy as we tend to think. Instead, we put our target influencer’s audience first, and then everybody wins.
- An individual humility that admits, no matter how experienced we are, the dramatic changes in the media landscape require us to continually learn new approaches. One of the GM media relations pros, who has been doing the job for 30 years, said, “I LOVE all this change—I try to learn something new every day.”A structure and mandate that establishes the bandwidth to handle the need to be reactive, but not be consumed by it. GM has certainly had its share of crises, but teams and individuals are expected to protect time and space for proactive pitching.
- Tony Cervone, GM’s SVP of global comms, is open about his desire to build world-class teams in Detroit and around the world. I observed him leading by example: During my workshop, he sat in the front and stayed the whole time, taking notes and working on exercises I gave to the group.
In summary, the recipe for great media relations success—whatever your current level of brand recognition—is one part proactivity combined with one part humility, stirred together with a heaping spoonful of tenacity.
CONTACT: Michael Smart is the media pitching coach PR pros seek when they want to boost media relations success. He advises everyone from Fortune 10 brands to nonprofits and sole proprietors. Learn more at: michaelsmartpr.com. Michael also will moderate a panel of journalists from The Washington Post, Slate and Aviation Week who will evaluate pitches during PR News’ Media Relations Conference, Dec. 7, in Washington. For information visit: http://www.mediarelationsconf.com/