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Peter Shankman is the founder of a service called Help a Reporter Out (HARO), which a daily e-newsletter that is delivered three times a day to help journalist on a deadline find sources. Yesterday, I discovered a query on HARO from a source asking other PR professionals to share successful pitch examples for a new series called "Pitches that worked". The question is, do we share the secret sauce and submit a response?
Bland, watered down and downright gross is what ends up on Richard Laermer's Bad Pitch Blog. We like to spice it up a bit at BLASTmedia--throwing in a dash of creativity and consistency mixed with plenty of time and research. We work together as a team to beef up the communication, which is only the beginning of a sometimes lengthy process. Let me break down some of the ingredients:
Creativity: New angles and new markets every week.
• How can the product, service, or even the company be shown in a different light?
• Identify the constraints of your company or product so you can be prepared to counter
• Let your colleagues take a look at the pitch and throw in a dash of their own creativity
Consistency: Be yourself and show you have an understanding of the client and product being pitched
• Offer experts and facts
• Relate the pitch appropriately
• Ensure you are pitching every week and establishing new leads
Time: Do you want to end up on the Bad Pitch Blog?
• Take the time to know and understand what and who you are pitching
• Talk to your client to ensure you are sending the right message
• Find the best niche and fit for your client before you make the pitch
We like to eat at BLASTmedia. Once the sauce (pitch) is just right, we focus on the meal (coverage). Check out what we have been eating lately:
Ryan Grieves- The New York Times (Scale Computing)
Hillary Money- TV Guide Magazine (iPopperz)
Chantal Brenton- Chicago Tribune (Eco Smart Fire)
Patrick Tarpey -- CBS's The Early Show (Sleeptracker and Good Nite Lite)
Lindsey Groepper - BusinessWeek.com (Cyberhomes)
Hungry? Contact us to get something cooking.
BLASTmedia is back in action and looking to have a winning season...not just with major media hits. After a softball season of three strikes and you're out, BLASTmedia is looking to get as many strikes as possible every Tuesday - bowling that is!
The team at BLAST has joined a local business league that meets every Tuesday night at PinHeads for three games of competitive bowling (the $1 nachos are just a perk). After competing in the first three weeks of tournament, we are proud to report that the BLAST is in 7th place! With another 4 weeks to go, we're aiming for the first place trophy.
According to a post by Rose Curtis at AllBusiness.com, socializing with co-workers outside of work is important. She suggests charity events (like the BLASTmedia Special Olympics silent auction), Sports teams (like the BLASTmedia softball and bowling teams) and company carpooling (an excuse to park in the carpool spots!). We at BLAST agree that having a good time outside of the office helps with our team work in the office.
What social activities does your company do outside of the office walls?
I speak to potential clients every day, and many are curious about our location - Indianapolis. While we also have offices in San Francisco and Salt Lake City, clients always scratch their heads at our Midwest headquarters. We're indeed the only agency in the city that works with the national media and clients from a variety of industries--enterprise tech, consumer audio, gaming, health and fitness, parenting/children's products, consumer software and applications, mobile tech, etc. - but, location simply doesn't matter. In fact, many of our clients love our Midwestern roots - we're straight to the point and always focused on creating top-tier media coverage for our clients, rather than churning out fancy reports that look nice to clients but don't do anything to impact ROI. Our results are based on the way we build our relationships, and we can manage those relationships from anywhere.
That being said, just because we're geographically landlocked doesn't mean we don't get around. Chances are, on any given week, you'll find at least a couple of us hitting the road or friendly skies. This week, we crisscrossed the US:
Ashley accompanied a new client, 360desktop, to TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. Learn more about them on VentureBeat or AppScout!
After weeks of planning, Heidi traveled to New York and Boston with Jesubi to debut their newest CRM software to media outlets and analyst firms like Inc., BusinessWeek, Network World and the 451 Group.
Mendy and Lindsey met Brandie in Salt Lake before strategizing corporate PR tactics with Skullcandy's Rick Alden in Park City. Did we mention that Rick's in the running for Entrepreneur of the Year from Entrepreneur Magazine?
And yours truly just came back from Sin City, where I learned about the latest and greatest in juvenile products at the ABC Kids Expo.
Pfew, what a week! And it's only the halfway point! Can't wait to see the results of everyone's hard work.
One of the best parts about doing PR is building relationships with editors. Since many of our BLASTmedia clients fall under the technology category, we work with a variety of tech editors on both the consumer and enterprise side of things. We have a long-standing relationship with the guys over at CrunchGear and are fortunate to get to hang out with them throughout the year at various tradeshows and events. So when we heard one of our faves, Peter Ha, was coming to Indianapolis with his brother for the MotoGP event, we quickly set up plans for a night out in Indy with the Ha brothers. (Side note: Peter will now be working for Time.com - exciting!)
Ashley, Hillary and I met Peter and John downtown and started off our adventurous evening downtown, at Chatham Tap, a popular pub on Mass Ave. After dinner, we ventured to several other Indy hotspots, like The Rathskeller biergarten and the Subterra Lounge.
We know our editor friends always have a lot of invites to parties, drinks and dinners while at various events, so we always love it when they choose to hang out with us! We think it's a combination of the great work we do (and how we make their jobs easier)...plus our good looks and killer dance moves, of course. Maybe if you're lucky, you'll score an invite to our next BLAST meetup!
Ashley, Peter and Chantal
John and Hillary - not exactly sure what's going on in this one.
Peter, Ashley and John
Whew! It's been a busy week as I've been preparing with new client, 360desktop, for next week's third annual TechCrunch50 event in San Francisco. If you're not familiar, TechCrunch50 is a major global competition conference for start-ups where they have the opportunity to pitch themselves to nearly 2,000 attendees, including corporate buyers, VCs and angels and some very prestigious members of the press.
Ryan was lucky enough to attend the event last year with client 3Tera and this year it's my turn!
360desktop is a consumer media platform that brings the Web and the desktop together as a 360° Web-enabled desktop. The free Windows download literally transforms a user's desktop into a 360° workspace, giving them an almost unlimited amount of desktop space. The program has some incredible new features and we can't think of a better opportunity than TechCrunch50 to start spreading the news!
While there, I'm also hoping to meet up with the crew at BLASToutdoors, our sister office in San Francisco. There are some new faces there I need to meet, and I can't wait!
If you're a start-up and are looking for some great media exposure like this, be sure to get a hold of us!
Working in the PR space, underneath the giant communications umbrella, we definitely know the value of good, open communication on all fronts. Communicating with the media and with the public via traditional and social media are the main things we are known for as PR professionals, but what about the behind-the-scenes communication? So many companies come to BLASTmedia to get national media coverage, a bigger social media presence, or to rock it out for them at their industry tradeshows, but many times they come missing something vital to any company's success - internal communication.
Let me illustrate. Company A wants to make a major announcement. So the CMO begins sending info to the PR agency to draft up the release. The release gets drafted and sent back over to the CMO, who approves. The PR agency begins pre-pitching the announcement, puts it over the newswire (if requested by the client) and makes outreach to the target outlets and editors, bloggers and thought leaders that would be interested in the announcement. Articles run. Potential users/customers are Tweeting about it. Everyone is happy right? Wrong. The CEO of Company A reads an article written in The New York Times that has completely different messaging than what he was thinking the announcement should have had. Or, he might even see the release picked up from the newswire on an industry trade outlet and say, "who wrote this? This isn't at all what this product release should have been about." Immediately, the CEO gives the PR agency / account rep a call or shoots them an email blasting them for wrong messaging, not illustrating the product's/service's key points, etc.
Is the PR agency really at fault? Possibly. But as I've seen many times, it is a total lack (or at least an extremely dysfunctional channel) of communication within Company A's management team. The CEO, President, CMO, Head of Global Sales, and even the company mascot all are saying different things, wanting their agency to talk to different target audiences, with sometimes COMPLETELY different messaging. A PR agency can only do so much with the direction we receive. We can learn about your product or service, your industry and competitors and give you our feedback on what your positioning, messaging and audiences should be, and then execute on that plan. But what we can't do is make sure that plan (positioning, messaging, timeline, audiences, etc.) is clearly articulated, or even mentioned, by the CMO to the other executives. We try to pull everyone that is involved into our world for a bit to let them know exactly what we do (and don't do), how we do it, and what their expectations should be of us. We can't however, tell a CEO how to run his/her company or what he/she should expect from his/her team - nor can we demand access to him or her to approve messaging. Sometimes that's the biggest problem with companies: if a company can't get their communication, message, goals etc. defined within their executive team (even with our guidance from the outside), how is a PR agency supposed to execute on that plan? More importantly, how are your customers supposed to understand what your messaging is?
Internal communications is often overlooked, but if a company can't figure it out themselves and how to work together within, how are you supposed to move forward? It's your base. If you build a house (or company) on sand (faulty products, lack of business plan, poor leadership or poor communication), your house will crumble. If you build it on rock (quality products, quality business plan, visionary leadership, and a tight executive team), your house (or company) will stand, and will be able to be built upon, for years. On what are you building your company? Are you communicating that to your team? We love helping companies either way, but it is a heck of a lot easier to do our jobs (get media coverage, which hopefully improves sales, Web traffic, etc.) when Company A is on the same page with each other...or at least in the same book!
Yesterday marked my first day in the BLAST office after a long stint of bedrest and maternity leave. While I miss spending time with the twins, it is awesome to be back in the saddle (and having adult conversations!). Now that I'm back, I'm hearing about all of the amazing stuff that has happened while I was away.
Both our Indy and San Fran office have swelled with new clients and new people, a clear sign of the invaluable service we provide to our clients. The new clients are as diverse as our team members -- sports tech, storage, Web apps, audio accessories -- and our killer account teams have scored some amazing national media coverage for them. Seriously, I was floored by the recent top-tier press. Our clients have been featured this summer on The Today Show, Good Morning America, a full review by David Pogue of the New York Times, Washington Post, InStyle, WIRED, SELF and Good Housekeeping (to name a few). In addition, we have clients in the running for Forbes magazine's "America's Most Promising Companies" and Entrepreneur magazine's "Entrepreneur of the Year Award" (vote for Skullcandy's Rick Alden!)
If you can't tell, I think our firm is the shiznit and love that we continue to kill it for our clients. I'm looking forward to re-engaging with my clients and scoring some national media coverage of my own. Way to go, BLAST!
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