How to get tech PR results without making reporters mad

I like to tell people that being best friends with an editor might buy you an extra five seconds — the time it takes to give the subject line and intro of your PR pitch an extra read-through. That assumes they check who sent it. So, your pitch better be dynamite on its own. That said, relationship don’t hurt (usually).

I interviewed BetaKit’s Editor-in-Chief Douglas Soltys to chat about the topic of how to build a relationship with a reporter. (You can see the whole interview on YouTube.) I was cheating, a bit, since I actually had a relationship with Douglas prior to going out on my own as a Vancouver tech PR agency founder. Here are some selected transcripts.

JONATHON. We have a relationship going back years. People think…
that if you are friends with a reporter, your pitch will land 100 percent of the time.

DOUGLAS. Yeah so that’s not true… Recognizing your name
and then having a familiar association with that name goes far in terms of anyone prioritizing their inboxes. It also might make us give it a little bit more time. I’m not sure if it’s more time reading your content, or it’s a commitment to read that in in priority, versus other random people where maybe the sentence or the subject line doesn’t catch.

But I even think just stepping back to this idea of the assumption of the value of the relationship versus all the other things that you need to do to make sure that you’re forming the right relationships with reporters… because,
just because you have a relationship with a journalist, doesn’t mean it’s the
right journalist for your outcome.

…

JONATHON. It’s about targeting someone in a sales-oriented manner, which is not to say like a used car salesman, but more like trying to get that win-win.

DOUGLAS. Journalists might say what you’ve been articulating in a different way. Not in terms of win-win wins. They’re more like “Hey man, I don’t write about this stuff. This is what I care about, or this is what my readers care about. So why are you pitching me when someone else in the publication writes about this? Don’t waste my time. Don’t email all of us. Don’t spam us.

I want to kind of like ladder out from the journalists’ perspective and communicate in a way that people these companies might be a little bit more familiar with and that is like, this is inbound marketing.

Like getting coverage for to a certain extent, like if you’re a publicly traded company or if you’re an Uber, if words come out of the CEO’s mouth, that’s news. If you’re not at that level you need to work for coverage until you get to the point where your company is justifying its own coverage because it’s big enough successful enough and so on. And the way that you get earned media is by earning it. And you’ve got to do work to make that happen, because you are relying upon others to tell your story for you to a certain extent.

Now, one component about marketing is telling your own story and creating a bunch of momentum to create inbound leads and things like that and you shouldn’t see the communications or PR processes very much outside that. There are different particulars but it should kind of fit into that that funnel approach.

If you’re writing blog posts every week and doing stuff on social media and really doing work with like influencers to make sure you’re targeting the right individuals, you can apply the same or similar methodologies to contacting journalists’ publications and the like.

JONATHON. Let’s talk a little bit about cultivating the relationship. How is that done?

DOUGLAS. I was reading a funny LinkedIn complaint from a… it was some tech reporter in Silicon Valley and and he was like, look if i said yes to every single PR person who invited me to come out for coffee to just to discuss what kind of stories they want to put out, I would be spending all my time just drinking coffee in cafes and I wouldn’t get any work done… Relationships should not be, you know just some BS, you know, sort of scheming way of getting into the headspace of a reporter.

JONATHON. I want to know and work with people in a collaborative way. In a human way. These are people. They have needs. And also journalists are often some of the most interesting and quirky people, doing all kinds of neat things uh in their off-time. They’re just interesting people to talk to. They want to talk about big ideas. So, I love listening to reporters.

DOUGLAS. Yeah, while your background preparation process can be as heavily researched and technical as you want it to be or the time that you want to put in, if it’s missing that human element, you’re going to fall short.
If I receive a a forum email that I know you’ve sent to 20 other journalists —
which i can obviously recognize, because, who can’t —
then you’ve kind of dropped the ball at the one yard line… Be a good person and human in your interactions.

But i want to go back to something you were saying about building the relationship and why would that be a component. Generally it’s a given that
as we said at the top if you have a relationship with a journalist you’re going to get more time and space with them. But you’re also going to have a better
understanding of what it is they want to write about. What their focus is. What they’re interested in. All those quirky ideas that if you have something you can’s talk about, maybe it’s not news in the specific sense of an announcement. But like “Hey, we have a really great expert who could speak to you about x y and z because we know you’ve been reporting on that a lot. Or you’ve been you’ve been publicly stating that you’re looking for people to talk about this. If you have a relationship, that goes a long way as opposed to, you know, a cold email being like “my CEO is available for comments on the global news that everyone else wants to comment on.”

Check out the full interview or more PR tips that get results from the Mind Meld PR blog.