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Four Easy Ways To Engage Media (Without Being Annoying)

July 4, 2016

Whether you’re an individual or company with a product or message, maintaining a relationship with media – either through yourself or through a public relations agency – is vital in shaping your message and sharing your story. There are endless ways to engage with earned media owners. It’s crucial to harness knowledge, professionalism, and to never be that pushy, 10-times-a-day-follow-up caller. Equally, it’s important to effectively craft your company communication in a way that’s valuable and meaningful for both your audience and the journalist. Below we share four (of many!) ways you can deliver information and connect with media. 1. The Opinion Piece Media outlets are increasingly happy to publish your content in its entirety if it contains content that’s valuable to an audience. Put aside all self-serving and advertising-esque writing, though, because that’s a sure fire way to land your pitch in the ‘junk’ folder.A value-packed, educational opinion piece can be a great way to get your name or product out there, particularly if it offers a differing or alternative perspective. 2. The Tip Off Just as Daily Planet’s mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent *always* seems to land breaking news on Superman, tipping off your best stories to the media provides them with an exclusive and gives you plenty of space to prepare your information in advance. Perry White would be proud! 3. The Backgrounder Making a journalist’s job easy with a simple backgrounder about who you are and what you do makes their job a million times easier. Who wouldn’t love that?Journalists are busy people. And just like Gordon Ramsay, they prefer everything handed to them on a plate, deconstructed, so they can serve it all out.. …Stay with me. The backgrounder serves the purpose of parsing out information for media. You don’t want to leave writers digging around for your story; you want to hand them all your information, complete, with the proverbial cocktail umbrella on the side, right? The backgrounder exists as a separate, discrete piece of information that you can distribute alongside other PR collateral. 4. The Media Release aka The Elder Wand of PR If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you’ll know I’m kidding… There’s no way anything can be as powerful as the most powerful thing in the history of Wizardkind! GOSH.But seriously, the media release is definitely up there.This tool still remains by far the number one way for brands to communicate with media. It allows you to cleverly construct your key messages and deliver them in journalistic format. A smashing, well-timed, value-packed, efficient media release truly is half the job done.  Whether it’s media releases, media engagement or simply content you’re after… Please get in touch with us! Header image: 123rf.com/profile_alexpokusay’>alexpokusay