Media Relations

Media Relations

"Media relations are those activities that involve working directly with persons responsible for the editorial (news and features), public service and sponsored programming products of mass media.”

The News Media

The news media are omnipresent and powerful in our society. Media relations department is one of the most critical areas within any corporate communication function. With the advent of television and the tremendous growth in Internet, what had once been the domain of the print medium in newspapers increasingly has become part of the visual realm through television sets and computers. Media is the only one which keeps politicians under constant scrutiny. On the other hand business leaders who enjoyed their privacy in the past have gone public these days. So business sector today clearly realize the importance of good publicity.


The Growth of Business Coverage in the Media

As the public attitudes changed, however, the business news sections in newspapers gained recognition and began to expand. Today so many magazines and websites are devoted to the business new that it is nearly impossible to find a topic not thoroughly covered by one media outlet or another. With the increase in public demand for more information on business channels like CNN, CNBC etc started their 24 hours business channels. Forbes magazine was found in doctors’ offices earlier. But Forbes gained attention from a broad readership by publishing salaries of top entertainers, World’s richest people, World’s largest public companies etc. Business Week attracts by publishing information about business schools and corporate boards.

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/88/biz_07platinum_The-400-Best-Big-Companies_land.html
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/07/undergrad/index.html

Building Better Relations with the Media

To build better press relationships with the members of the media, organizations must take time to cultivate relationships with the right people in the media. In general response rates of 2 percent are considered a success in the direct-mail business, and public relation executives get excited if their release gets picked up by a handful of publications. The measure of success in the media relations business has been the amount of “ink” coverage that a company gets. It is important for the companies need to find out who the right journalists are for a given story and understand the news organization that the company is dealing with.

Conducting Research for Targeting Media

A typical media research operation includes the following steps:
• The senior management needs to determine the objectives for a certain story. After realizing the goals, the company should begin to search for the right place to pitch the story.
•The corporate communication professionals look in their files to find out who covers their industry and the company specifically.
•The corporate communication department needs to determine what angle the reporter takes each time he covers a firm in the industry.
• The firm’s corporate communication team needs to determine what kind of a reporter they are dealing with.

Responding to Media Calls

Many companies willingly spend millions of dollars on advertising but are unwilling to staff a media relations department with enough personnel to handle incoming calls from the media. This can be a costly mistake, as responding to such requests carefully can make a powerful difference in how the company appears in the story. So the following steps should be considered to meet the needs:

•Calls should come into a central office that deals with all the requests for information from important national media.
• The person who takes the phone should try to find out what angle the reporter is taking on the story.
• The person responsible should try to get as much information as possible while being careful not to give in return any information that is not already public knowledge
• The tone of the conversation should be as friendly as possible
• The media relation professional should communicate honestly about the possibilities of arranging an interview or meeting other requests.

Preparing for Media Interviews

The executive who will be interviewed needs to be prepared for the actual meeting with the reporter. The following approach works best.
• The executive should be given a short briefing on the reporter or producer’s prior work so that he or she develops a clear understanding of the reporter’s point of view.
• Next, the executive should be given a set of questions that the reporter is likely to ask.
• In preparing for a television interview, a full-dressed rehearsal is essential.
• In addition to thinking what to say, the executive need to think about the most interesting approach to expressing these messages.
• Finally, the executive needs to be prepared to state the key ideas as clearly as possible at the beginning of the interview.

Gauging Success

To sort media monitoring and analysis, the approach to measurement of media relations referenced earlier has the power to
•Identify which communications activities create the most value in terms of a specific business outcome.
•Evaluate how well an organization’s various communications functions perform against an industry average.
•Demonstrate the total value created by a CorpComm department in terms of one or more business outcomes.
•Drive strategic and tactical decision making in the communications function, hedging reputational risk, and managing major events such as mergers and top management changes.
•Highlight actual corporate value created by communications activities.

Building a Successful Media Relations Program

To build a successful media relations program the organizations must be willing to devote resources to the effort as an executive’s time can be just as valuable.
• Involve Media Relations personnel in Strategy: Companies should involve the most senior corporate communication executive in the decision-making process.
• Develop In-House Capabilities: Companies do not consider media relations important enough to hire professional staff in this area but for long-term approach, it is beneficiary to develop an in-house media relations staff.
• Use outside Counsel Sparingly – Companies should hire outside counsel for advice or information, to help with a major story or when a crisis hits.

Developing an Online Media Strategy

Internet has become a valuable tool that enables companies to get press releases out quickly and broadly. Companies’ media strategies need to be augmented with tactics for dealing with the new dimension of coverage. Because of the widespread reach of the internet, large number of companies are paying more attention to the web realizing that bad publicity online can threaten their bottom line.

Extend Your Media Relations Strategy to the Blogosphere

Public is often far more trusting of other consumers than it is of traditional institutions, including corporations. This helps explain the phenomenal rise of blog from 1990s to the present. Blogs are publicly accessible Web sites that serve as sources of commentary, opinion, and information on a variety of topics. The following steps are some guidelines on blogs:
•Take blogs seriously
•Act fast
•Don’t dismiss requests for interviews and information from bloggers.

"For a company or product that sells into a niche, you'll never get noticed by editors at major publications like The Wall Street Journal, but you will get niche bloggers to be interested in you," says Larry Schwartz, president of Newstex, a company that syndicates blogs for distribution to millions of people in corporations, financial institutions, and government agencies. (Disclosure: my blog is syndicated by Newstex and I do some marketing work for the company).
"For example, if you are in the consumer technology business, getting your product mentioned in Gizmodo and getting a link back to your site from Gizmodo are probably more important than even a mention in The Wall Street Journal," Schwartz says. "Increasingly, the way for people to find out about products is through blogs, and you often get a link to your Web site too. It used to be that the moment of truth was when somebody went to the store to find your product. Now the moment of truth is a link to your site from a blog."
Pitching influential bloggers as you would pitch mainstream media is an important way to get noticed in the crowded marketplace of ideas. But even more effective is having your own blog so that bloggers and reporters find you.

Handle Negative News Effectively

When a company does stumble upon bad news about itself the communications department should quickly access the potential damage that the news might cause.
Company lawyers should be consulted to discuss what legal stance the company might need to take.

Experience

The effective use of communication has helped Dell to regain its market share when many of the Dell laptops faced major problems with its batteries. Dell has promised its customers to resolve the issues with the batteries through effective usage of media. Dell widely publicized by calling this as the “Battery Recall Program”
https://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/Default.aspx?LN=en-US