Notwithstanding Inside Edge PR‘s journalistic style of developing content for dissemination to the media, it’s been more than five years since I regularly committed acts of journalism.
Yet I still remain on a bevy of publicists’ media lists. Almost daily, I get multiple news releases that encompass theater, health and fitness, Indiana tourism, healthcare and more–oh, so much more.
This underscores a PR fundamental that is sorely lacking in the marketplace: picking up the phone and actually calling members of the media. Radical, I know.
But if any of the above-mentioned releases had been accompanied by a phone call, then they’d realize that I’m no longer a viable media target. Instead, I’m just a piece of the wall where they are flinging mud.
For those in the business of trying to get your stories told to a broader audience, that’s no way to get the job done. By contrast, one surefire way to separate yourself from the competitive PR pack is to go beyond the comfort (and relative futility) of relying on mass e-mails.
After all, while one of the easiest things to do is send an e-mail, deleting that same e-mail is equally simple. And the deleter increasingly views your e-mails as white noise or spam–hardly the stuff of building a constructive relationship or well-regarded professional reputation.
Meantime, check out some related Inside Edge PR posts, such as The Real Purpose of Calling a Journalist and The Art of Contacting Reporters By Phone.
