If you win an award for your business, product, or contribution to your industry or to society, that’s PR gold, for two reasons:  First, you have a perfect reason for contacting a reporter with real news, and second, you can add the award as a credibility enhancing footnote or addition to your boilerplate in future pitches. So we could almost hear you ask: great advice, but how the heck do I go out and get...

Just like everything else in this world, competition for publicity gets stronger every day – and avenues of communication multiply and broaden. Whereas a reporter in the old days used to put out a few phone calls to find sources, now he posts his search on private services that PR firms scan multiple times a day, plus public online services, and perhaps industry-specific websites or e-list services as well....

This is another of our tips that we’ll contradict next week.  But read on. First, yes, absolutely honor the reporter’s stated deadline when he or she sends out a query.  Maybe you set aside the query and planned to get to it, and then it got buried, and then before you knew it, the deadline passed and – Oh no! – you see you should have sent your pitch in by 2 pm pacific yesterday! Well, you’re running...

Do you have a tendency to draft an email, hit “send,” and then slap yourself in the forehead and say “Oh no! I forgot to say something!?” Or, “I can’t believe I forgot to insert the hyperlink for my website!?” If you do, you’re caught between a rock and a hard place if you’ve just sent a pitch to a reporter, because sending a second “Oh, also, let me add to or fix my first...

SYCOPHANT: A fawning flatterer. A servile or obsequious person who flatters somebody powerful for personal gain. Oh, how reporters, those powerful purveyors of positive publicity, love to be flattered! So if you can do it, go for it. Flattery, done in the right way, can get you far. But don’t be a sycophant. Flattery done right is not a simple thing. There’s an art, and a level of integrity required....

Sometimes the best way to pitch a reporter on your business or expertise is to tell a real, human story about one person. This is classic storytelling and it can be appealing and compelling. Your business or service is secondary to the story, but it gets mentioned. Here’s an example: She strode into his office, extracted a document from the files on her arm, and wafted it onto his desk, her elegantly manicured...

Last week we promised that we’d totally contradict our PR Tip with a new one today. Well, here it is: Don’t mess around trying to be funny – make your subject line businesslike. OK, so last week we said “Make your subject line attention-grabbing” and we recommended using a funny or clever line to grab a reporter’s attention. The truth is, sometimes you just don’t have anything funny to say, nor...

Here’s a PR Tip that we’re going to totally contradict next week. There, you’ve been warned! This week’s Tip is this: Have a little fun in your subject line, and you can catch a reporter’s attention and get some press. That may seem obvious, but the secret is to make your funny or clever line about the potential story that can be written, not specifically and directly about you or your product. So,...

Just like your mother and the Girl Scouts have always said, you must Be Prepared! When you send off a pitch to a reporter, you should already have on hand the basic materials and files that a reporter might ask for. These are: • A company one-sheet. This is the overall information about you and/or your company that would typically fit on a single sheet of paper. Include images, general service, product,...

In journalistic circles, emails containing atrocious examples of off-topic pitches sometimes make the rounds of bitterly amused reporters. Um, don’t let yours be among them. It sounds a little obvious, but sometimes we need to consciously resist the urge to contort a reporter’s request into a real stretch of logic, trying to include our product or service or expertise into their current story. Or we do in...