There has been much dialog this past week about the tactical aspects of working with the media or media relations. A PR colleague, David Mullen sparked some debate with his calculated title to a post called, “Relationships Don’t Matter MOST in Media Relations.” Although David’s point was very well understood in his post, many seemed to react as if David was suggesting that relationships don’t matter.  As you can see from his post today, “Five Tips for Media Relations Success,” David clearly makes his point.

The Reverse Pitch

This also triggered me to share with each of you a tactic that falls into the category I like to talk a lot about, “Commonsense PR” called the “Reverse Pitch.”

Within the worlds of PR and media relations we get so caught up in the traditional pitch process or taking a story idea or resource to our trusted or sometimes unknown media contacts. Please don’t misunderstand me; I have generated hundreds of articles for clients and companies I’ve worked with as a result of this traditional pitch process. 

I would ask that each of you reading this post to humor me for a minute and take off your PR or marketing hat and look at the traditional media relations process:

1. Your client/company has a message they would like to communicate to a group or groups of respective targets…via the media;

2. You identify the media outlets and contacts to target with these messages;

3. You target these media contacts with a pitch and/or press release telling them why they should care about your messages;

4. You can repeat and tweak steps 2 & 3 but at this point your “pitch” is in the hands of these media contacts.

As you can see, the traditional pitching process is dependent on an uncontrolled variable (not to be too technical) – the media being convinced that the story or resources you’ve pitched are worth moving forward on as a story.

Without elaborating this “reverse pitch” approach in great detail. I would strongly suggest that steps 1 & 2 of this process consist of asking the following two questions before you get into your tradition pitch mode:

1. What types of stories or resources are you currently looking for given the beat (or beats) you are currently interested in covering?

2. How can I be of assistance in helping you accomplish those stories?

Granted, this is more of a formality than anything else as they may immediately respond with, “Why? What do you have for me?” But my point here is that we must start this process by first assessing the needs of the individuals (the media) that control the outcome of our efforts. By doing so, I can guarentee each of you will see far greater success generating coverage for your client or company.

This said I’d love to hear from you about this “reverse pitch” method or perhaps the “ask before you pitch” process. Do you agree? Do you feel differently about these initial steps? As always, I look forward to the conversation!