Rostrum Communications - A London PR Company

With all the buzz around social media and digital channels, some of the PR tactics that have been around for a while might seem a bit old-fashioned. But they’re still relevant. Let’s look at meeting journalists for a coffee or a lunch.

Why should you meet journalists?
1. to build relationships
2. to find out what they cover, and how they work
3. to get quoted in their articles
4. to see if you can contribute to their publication

What are the rules for success?
1. Know who you’re meeting & why
2. Read up on them - find out what they cover and try to understand their style
3. Have something interesting to say - about big picture issues as well as just what’s happening at your organisation
4. Be nice to them - but remember they are a journalist and you should assume you’re ‘on the record’. A simple rule is - if you don’t want to see it appear in print/online tomorrow morning - don’t say it!
5. follow-up. If they ask you to send a photo - send it! Availability and reliability are key to good relations with the media…

Next time we’ll cover writing contributed articles for trade magazines.

- Mark

This is great from a Director magazine piece on monetising Twitter…

Is Twitter starting to cannibalise its own ecosystem? Some in the industry seem to think so. Responding to Twitter’s decision to limit third-party advertising apps, US angel investor Chris Dixon tweeted: “Twitter is like a drunk guy with an uzi killing partners left and right”. He later added: “Expect investment in ecosystem to drop significantly.”

If you want to get quoted in the media, speak like Chris Dixon does. That’s seriously good quote. Or just hire us and we’ll come up with lines as good as that or better.

Whichever channels you deploy, it’s important to think about social media in the context of your wider online strategy.  It helps to think about social media in terms of a 3-stage process. 

1.       Analysis.  Where are we now?  Who’s saying what about us?  Can we seed into their conversations?  Web listening and seeding software can help with this.  We like Freedata Labs because they’ve got the data specialists to help you make sense of the information the software throws up, but there are other applications out there;

2.       Strategy.  Based on the analysis (1) – what do we do?  What’s the plan, how quickly do we need to make it happen and what resources do we need to make it work (and how do we measure it?);

3.       Delivery.  As a PR firm, a natural product of our efforts is to generate lots and lots of positive, compelling content for our clients.  This can form the basis of your social strategy, and you can add more stuff in as time goes by.  The flow of content must be regular though, or your online reputation will start to suffer.  Measurement also  needs to be realistic, effective and bear some relation to other metrics you trust for other marketing/comms activities.

Daily Mail
Karl West is now City News Editor at the Daily Mail, replacing Ian Lyall who is becoming Editor of Proactive Investors on 12 July.

Daily Mail / The Times
Sam Fleming has left the Daily Mail to join The Times. Sam will be starting as Economics Editor at The Times on Monday 12 July. Hugo Duncan, currently City Reporter at the London Evening Standard, will be replacing Sam at the Daily Mail in September.

Money Observer
Rebecca Rutt has joined Money Observer as Editorial Assistant.

Source: Gorkana

Great coverage went up online yesterday at Reputation Online as our MD, Mark Houlding, blogged about social media for b2b marketers and whether or not it actually matters.