Comments on: 5 Steps to Effectively Leverage Your Media Coverage

By: Social Media Advocacy: Stepping Out of Our Silo

Social Media Advocacy: Stepping Out of Our Silo — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:20:10 +0000

[...] reprints made of the story for the sales team. Instead, shouldn’t the coverage be leveraged and packaged for all of your departments to effectively communicate with each of your targeted audiences? [...]

By: Lauren Fernandez

Lauren Fernandez — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:59:35 +0000

Matt- I really like this post. Some great points.

What about customer success stories – and for big media hits, getting media re-prints? You can use these with the sales team, and they can hand them off to potential customers, etc. This is really effective in the healthcare sphere, where it is highly competitive. If a potential sees the headline of a top healthcare mag, or can relate to what another customer experienced, it’s only beneficial to your client.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:19:47 +0000

These are all great comments and feedback!

Amy – I particularly like your idea about social bookmarking these clips on a platform like Delicious. Since I don’t actively use it, do others need to be signed-up to view articles?

David – How much “training” did you have to do when arming the sales teams with these reprints? So many times I just see them throw them in with the other collateral without really having any speaking points behind the piece.

Anna – I’m glad you agree about the company-wide buy-in…I think this is so key since we tend to live in our marketing silo with such coverage.

Joe – The way I view it is “hedging your bet”:). If you’re already paying a certain amount to get the coverage (via your PR firm or in-house) you need to leverage such validation to ensure your targeted audiences are seeing it!

Jenn – Great point about “identifying trends” this is so important and is something we typically do every week for clients when searching for pitch angles. But I think you are saying we can assess trends out of the actual coverage?

Katrina – I’d be interested to learn more about what your firm is doing around this topic.

Thanks everyone!

By: amymengel

amymengel — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:30:20 +0000

Another channel that might be really useful is social bookmarking. You could save all of your clips on Delicious with specific tags for each department or customer. Delicious also allows you to add commentary to the articles you save, so if there’s a part of the article where you’re misrepresented you can note that. If clients or employees have their own Delicious profiles, you can send the link directly to them by tagging it with their name.

By: David Mullen

David Mullen — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:23:24 +0000

Great points. We worked with a former technology client to help its sales force leverage all compelling media stories with their customers. We’d create pdfs and sales would use these as a way to reinforce with current customers that the client was the right partner and to continue to build confidence in the client among prospects. To the client, the biggest ROI of media relations was to keep its sales people in front of clients and prospects.

By: Anna Barcelos

Anna Barcelos — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 04:33:33 +0000

Love how you emphasize the importance of a company-wide strategy and not just limited to management and/or marketing silos, which is very common. Being from an integrated marcom background with PR being part of that, I always ran into challenges with other departments (IT, Production)seeing the value of PR efforts and had to do some educating. The key as you mentioned is spot on! Get a point person in all areas of the company and make sure they are equipped with information and materials in relevant formats that they need to support the PR strategy. Good stuff!!

By: Joe Webb

Joe Webb — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:27:18 +0000

Solid process, Matt. I especially like the idea of having a dedicated channel for the dispersion of relevant media information and news. If every department in an organization was provided this pertinent, timely information and they were all given the access to broadcast it through their own multiple communication channels and networks, company reputation and brand awareness would increase dramatically.

By: Jennifer Wilbur

Jennifer Wilbur — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:56:51 +0000

All great points, Matt. I would also add “identify trends.” Often, you’ll find messages or other thoughts highlighted in your media coverage that you didn’t intend to push, but were picked up anyway. Identifying these early, and then examining the impact (good or bad), will help determine future strategy.

By: Katrina

Katrina — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:05:34 +0000

Matt,

I think this is a great approach. Our firm has a similar system – in addition to our general clip report we send a newsletter-type report to the sales teams – and it seems to work.

This is helpful advice.