Building out a media list isn’t about adding names and emails to a spreadsheet – or pulling a list of reporters from a database – it’s about understanding the people you want to influence
There’s an old military expression that goes like this:
“Amateurs talk strategy, experts talk logistics.”
It’s an acknowledgement that the best laid military plans easily fall apart in execution if the troops don’t have an ample supply of ammunition, water and sustenance.
While it’s not a perfect analogy, something similar is at work in media relations. Once PR people reach a certain level of experience, they stop building and managing media lists. Many believe this is grunt work and they want to focus on strategy now – because that’s the fun stuff and where the margins are made.
So, at the very moment that senior PR people obtained a level of proficiency, experience, and, dare I say, wisdom in their careers, they abdicate the responsibility of media lists.
Yet in media relations, knowing who would be receptive to what pitch is a significant part of the job; you can’t be successful without it. I’d further posit that when PR people say they ‘have the relationships to get top-tier coverage’ what they really mean is they know who might cover a story idea.
Need a media list of technology reporters? Just delegate the task to an intern and arm them with a subscription to a media database. In just a few clicks, they can pull a media list with hundreds, if not thousands, of names and emails on it.
All that’s left is to blast out your announcement and watch the coverage roll in. Only it doesn’t roll in. Why? There are a lot of nuances to covering “tech” that cannot be ascertained from a media list.
At a high level, for example, the difference between consumer and business tech is easy to see. People who cover business tech don’t typically cover consumer tech and vice versa. Blasting a media list from a database is bound to have more people who aren’t interested in your topic than those who are.
You can see the effects in your low open rates for pitches, lower click-throughs and media coverage reports that count press release distribution as placements (the latter is simply dishonest in my opinion). It’s a disservice to the client or employer – and also to those junior staff who are being taught terrible habits.
All good marketing, public relations and communications efforts start with audience identification. Audience identification is the process of understanding an audience – their hopes, fears, motivations, influences, questions, problems, aspirations and the language they use to express all of those things.
It is a prerequisite and is non-negotiable. To that end, you can’t effectively identify an audience through a database (that’s been compiled on the cheap by a tech company that uses underpaid offshore help and who does not understand the lingo, slang, issues, or the culture of a local market).
This is where we get back to the strategy part I mentioned in the beginning: building a media list is one of the most strategic processes someone working in media relations can do. It’s not supposed to be quick or outsourced or delegated. Influence requires understanding and understanding takes due diligence.
Moreover, building a media list isn’t about merely adding names, beats and emails to a spreadsheet so you can email a bunch of people later. Instead, it’s about understanding the people you want to influence:
- Researching what they’ve covered, what they are covering and developing a systematic and efficient means to review it again when it comes time to pitch;
- Being disciplined about writing down pitch ideas, and categorizing them neatly based on what you learned as you perform this important research step;
- Reviewing the social media channels of the people you’ve identified – understanding who they associate with, who they influence and who influences them;
- Adding the publications to readers (i.e. NetVibes or Innoreader) or subscribing to their newsletters by email so you understand the issues they cover and the way that they are covered; and
- Keeping up with all of these aspects over time, you stay abreast of changes and emerging issues; a media list is a continuous work in progress.
The benefit of an efficient, but methodical media list building process comes from internalizing what you’ve learned through the process. This makes you 10x more capable of drawing connections, correlations and coming up with new angles (or counterfactuals as the case might require).
Spreadsheets aren’t this mythical source of efficiency drain some vendors like to espouse. The source of inefficiency comes from skipping these important steps of audience identification because we’re in a hurry to get an announcement out the door.
All this can be summed up in a very simple idea in human communication: if you want someone to listen to you – you’ll have a lot more success if you spend some time listening to them first.
Doing this any other way is akin to sending troops into battle with a brilliant strategy – and no feasible way to resupply them once they cross the line of departure.
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