The 7 daily rules of PR
Checking news feeds, reading top stories of the day, monitoring the Web for client mentions, and responding to clients and media.
There are specific things you can do to sharpen your strategic focus, though, so we surveyed our staff at Gregory FCA and came up with seven daily to-dos that help them get breakthrough results for clients:
1. Run your job like a newsroom.
(From Mike Lizun, senior vice president)
Start each day reviewing breaking and trending news stories. Look for opportunities to inject clients into the conversation. Would American intervention in Syria spell more opportunity for a client who relies on government contracts? Does a website outage provide an opportunity for a software client to provide commentary? What do the latest consumer confidence numbers mean for a financial services client? New stories break every moment of the day. Convert your office to echo a newsroom, constantly identifying the breaking news that provides PR opportunities.
2. Closely align media outreach with your client’s schedule.
(From Bradd Delmuto, vice president, and Alicia Buonanno, associate vice president)
Access and availability alone can often trigger media interest. Synchronize media targeting with your client’s travel schedule, using availability as a reason for making introductions and securing briefing and on-air appearances.
3. Refine your story according to past media coverage.
(From Greg Matusky, president, and Jimmy Moock, vice president )
The media often tells stories and finds angles better than clients and PR agencies. Closely track how the media is covering your client and adopt future pitches accordingly. Reuse compelling turns of phrases and convert past headlines into subject lines as a way to build on past media success.
4. Stop using Cision and Vocus as crutches.
(From Greg Matusky, president )
Media databases all too often promote lazy, shotgun pitches that alienate the media. Instead, do your own research to target reporters by their beat and better understand their interests. The era of mass pitching is over, and so, too, might be canned media databases, now that everything is online.
[RELATED: Find out about our November event that has instruction for your entire communications team.]
5. Coordinate Twitter searches with trending hashtags.
(From Jessica Attanasio, associate vice president, and Matt McLoughlin, associate vice president)
Adjust Twitter search criteria throughout the day in order to identify trends and breaking news. Use Twitter to stay on top of breaking and trending stories and inject clients into the conversation.
6. Have shareable content at the ready.
(From Alicia Buonanno, associate vice president, and Bradd Delmuto, vice president)
Re-work, reuse, and repurpose past content in new ways to give it fresh life on social and digital media. Now that content is king, there’s no such thing as a slow client news day. Keep bylined stories, commentary, infographics, and infotoons nearby, and use them as a way to constantly share insights with the media or directly to the masses via social media.
7. Build a fire under your clients.
(Katie Kennedy, associate vice president)
Hit them daily with new ideas, trending stories, and opportunities to comment on any moving story that impacts their viewpoint, business, product, or profitability. By doing so, you train clients to realize that news flows by the minute, and that there’s always an opportunity to gain coverage, provide comment, or add to the conversation.
Sara Nugent is an associate editor for Gregory FCA. A version of this story originally appeared on the agency’s blog, Gregarious.