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1/12/17

How to engage and manage press

Andy Vargas joined us in class today to speak on social media and press. It was inspiring in that he helped to simplify the often times daunting task of posting daily to social media and the upkeep on that. The first point he made was to make sure you find where your specific audience lives online. From there be sure to create relevant, helpful and informative content that is important to the audience’s life & makes their life better. Always as key, make sure the content is quality. Andy’s introduction to Hootsuite was huge for us in saving time and being strategic about the content we are creating. Other good tools Andy gave us are Medium (where content can be published to relevant audiences in a clean and easy to read platform) & Canva (a place to create designs with free graphics and templates).

Talking on press, Andy had us ask ourselves ‘where do our customers live and what are they reading?’. Think about your angles when reaching out to the press/your community. For example, human interest, business/issue growth & impact/growth focus. When it comes to a press release make sure to always talk in the third person, the subject line should read as a headline, give them some quotes, use metrics when applicable, and be concise.

He reminded us to always remember where we came from and to reach out to those who have helped in our journey and let them know where we are today. Those folks could be from universities, internships, jobs, etc. It’s likely that those connections will share or post about where we are now (our wins!) to their online community, only further extending our reach as a company.

In order to validate our business and place trust within our company we need to be active on our social media, website and in the press.

And at the end of the day always FOLLOW UP! Persistence is key.