Passion, Persistence & Expertise

As you embark on your PR journey, there are a few essentials you must have to ensure success. One of the most important tools you must have is a smart press list. To compile an excellent and practical press list, there are a few things you must think about.

Why Do You Need a Press List?
The answer to this question might seem obvious, but it’s actually more multifaceted than you might imagine. In today’s world, everyone is so connected and informed about a variety of different issues and events. Despite everyone being so interconnected, establishing a link with these individuals can be quite difficult. Without going through the right channels, it can be next to impossible to reach a large audience. The press, however, is that direct link between you and your audience. By placing yourself in the press, you will again access to the ever-growing network that exists in the world outside of your immediate social network. If placed properly in the press, you’re audience can grow exponentially.

Who and What Is Your Target Audience?
Who is the audience for your message is an important and significant part of your press list. Without understanding who and what your target audience is, it can be very difficult to build a following and establish yourself in your particular field. The reason this particular piece is so important is because it will help you figure out where to direct your focus. For instance, if you were DC’s youngest (and most talented!), electronic rock band, you’re target audience might be teenagers and young adults who listen to electronic rock and similar genres. With that in mind, you’ll want to seek out outlets that have that following. You’ll want to seek out press placements in teen or music magazines and other similar outlets. Granted, being on Fox News in the middle of the day might be a great feat, but if your target audience isn’t watching, what’s the point? Being able to hone in on your audience, capture and maintain their attention are the goals of public relations and, more specifically, a press list.

Last, But Certainly Not Least…
There are always a few logistical aspects to these processes. You must think about the geographic area when building press lists. If you’re touring in and around Baltimore, find news outlets that cover that area. As mentioned before, it’s great if you’re in the press in California, but when promoting for an event, you want to make sure that you’re target audience (in this case, the audience in a particular area) sees your message.

Also, remember the world of press and media is much larger than you think. Today, people are accessing their news from more than big television networks. Blogs, independent news outlets, and radio are also big sources of information for the masses of today. Seek out media sources in places that you might not normally. The bigger and broader your network, the more potential you have to gain a larger audience.

And always remember, the team at Massey Media will build your press list, if needed. Massey Media puts together the perfect package for your public relations needs. We have the passion, persistence and expertise to make your dream into a reality!

- Hilary

Making headlines can unlock the doors to recognition and sales for artists. But how do you start? Artists who want to get press and attention focus on populating our openings and garnering reviews.

Submissive Heartthrob by Brad Ulreich

The press list for a DC artist with a local event should include the Washington Post Going Out Guide, Washington City Paper calendar, Art Beat at WAMU, and popular blogs like FreeinDCBlog and websites like BrightestYoungThings. These are key to getting the word out and getting seen here in DC. A coveted review in the Washington Post will bring you new fans, but that slot is highly competitive.

read it all here in Sarah Massey’s column for the Pink Line Project.

September 12 on the National Mall was a reminder to celebrate the basic right we have in the United States, the right of free speech and protest. While a lot of attention was given over to the poorly-named Teabaggers and their anti-health care reform agenda, there was also an important rally for immigrants rights in the shade of the Washington Monument. Organized by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), with the support of United Tenants and Workers, CASA de Maryland, Legal AID Justice Center, SHARE Foundation, CARECEN, DC Jobs With Justice, Comunidad Unida de Uluazapa (El Salvador), and CPR Radio 97.5 FM, immigrants rights supporters held a rally, vigil and a music concert to protest the 287g Program and to demand president Barack Obama to use his executive power and end or suspend this program until is fixed.

President Obama extended the 287g Program that turns local police into surrogate immigration officers. One of the most significant problems with this law is that it creates a fear of the police, the very people charged with protecting the population. If you are robbed at the worksite but you are an undocumented worker, you are not going to call the police. This means criminals get away. Further, civil rights groups have stated, “Racial profiling and other civil rights abuses by the local law enforcement agencies that have sought out 287(g) powers, have compromised public safety, while doing nothing to solve the immigration crisis.”

I attended the rally and music concert to show my support and celebrate the values of free speech and protest. Artist, Activist Cesar Maxit made powerful signs, “BROWN is not a crime. Stop 287g Racial Profiling.” We need creative, hopeful, and loud responses to oppression, even when it comes from the White House, I mean especially when it comes from the White House. Today, Maureen Dowd wrote about America’s racism in her column. She added an important quote, “… always remember that silence gives consent.” Don’t sit idly by. Raise your voice to support justice.

- Sarah Massey

If someone told you two weeks ago that you would be “tweeting,” you may have raised an eyebrow in confusion and wondered if the bird flu was making a come-back. Blame it on laziness or a general apathy to technology, but new applications and gadgets held no interest for me. Give me my PC and a phone without a brain, any day. Lately, though, I’ve crawled out of my burrow to research social media, and, as it turns out, I don’t need a beak to tweet.

“Tweeting” is the commonly used term for interacting on Twitter, the fastest growing social networking site on the Internet. Twitter asks members to answer one simple question, “What are you doing?” and broadcast that to those who are “following” them. Knowing this, though, still didn’t help me understand the purpose or benefits of Twitter, besides allowing a member to tell 100 of their closest friends that they love peanut butter and now are going ice fishing with their grandfather. Couldn’t they just do that on Facebook or on their own blog? Aren’t all of these sites just the same?

The answer is no. Although these sites are often used for more trivial purposes, the number of businesses and organizations with presences on these sites is growing quickly. Social media sites enable groups to stay in contact with current clients and colleagues, but they also provide a cost-effective strategy to reach new audiences. Twitter, blogs, and even Facebook, to an extent, breed success through the ripple effect. One follower finds what you have to say interesting and passes it on to another friend who passes it on to another friend who passes it on to another.

However, you have to have “friends” or “followers” to attract more. How do you do this? To gain hits and attention, you have to engage. The more you interact with others, commenting and responding to their efforts, the more people will see your name and grow curious. The most important thing is to get your organization or business’s name seen by as many people as possible. This requires constant interaction. Posting once a month or even once a week is not enough; daily posts and updates are necessary to keep your name floating among the cyber community.

Take Massey Media as an example. Recently, Massey Media has made an effort to reach out to clients and groups of interest by expanding our blogroll to include them and becoming their “followers” on Twitter.  We showed our support and interest; and in response, we have gained additional Twitter followers.  Own the Press blog posts have been picked up by other groups.

Name recognition is an elementary principle of media relations. Yet, it has been transformed profoundly by the new social media. Massey Media understands that applications like Twitter and Facebook give groups, whose reach would be traditionally only local, a chance to reach out nationally and even internationally. With today’s technology, individuals and groups can connect globally, and Massey Media can help to foster that change.

-Kimi Killen

I’ll admit, I’m a bit behind the times, but I just finished reading “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell for the first time. If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading this book, Gladwell details the process of social epidemics and the people behind them. He uses examples of everything from Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride to suicide rates in Micronesia during the 1960’s to explain that at a certain point, things go from being an isolated incident to being a full blown “epidemic”.

By taking these occurences out of their context and analyzing them like the spread of a virus, Gladwell is able to determine the precise “tipping point” of the epidemic, and he challenges readers to apply the concept to their own line of work.

Cue me sipping coffee in front of my laptop on a rainy Friday morning.

While taking in my typical morning media fix I began thinking about social networking sites like Digg. When someone has Dugg a website, the site is given one “point”, basically. Once the link has gotten a great enough amount of points in a short enough time, it will graduate to the Digg homepage. This is where the epidemic takes off.

Typical users of Digg aren’t people that are meticulously picking through specialty websites to find one cool tid bit to share with friends. But there are those people. They are your friend who is obsessed with car websites or the office weirdo who is a little too into Transformers or whatever. Gladwell calls these people Mavens.

So this Maven finds some obscure website that profiles literally every bad guy from Transformers the show (yes, this website does exist) and he gives the website the nod by Digging it. Communications scholar/author of Diffusion of Innovations (1962) Everett Rogers would say this guy has now taken on an important new role of being an Innovator, a concept that Rogers made popular, since he was one of the first people to check out this site. Now take 50 or so other Transformers aficionados checking out the website and the seed has been planted, it gets placed on the Digg homepage.

Next, the standard Digg user logs in and looks at the latest hot links. Here there other levels of distinction being made. 

1. Early Adopters - these are the people who are more passive fans of the Transformers enterprise. They like the show/movies/merchandise but they would never actively seek it out. They are gambling on the word and reputation of the Maven/Innovators who suggested it in the first place. If the site lives up to expectations, they will probably Digg it as well, passing our “Transformers bad guy website epidemic” on to the last group of adopters and effectively “tipping” the link.

2. The Majority - For all you hard core Everett Rogers fans out there, I apologize, but I’m going to combine three groups (Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards) under one umbrella for brevity’s sake.

These are the people who click on the link because everyone else is. These people have no major connection to Transformers but they figure, what the heck, if this many other people are into this, I should probably check it out. They are the people who tag along with their friends that are obsessed with Transformers. At this point our epidemic is raging like wildfire, people are sending the link to their not-quite-hip parents, and next thing you know, Transformers 2 will beat out The Dark Knight for “highest grossing opening day of all time”.

All of this, despite the silly example, is applicable to our work here at Massey Media. When clients ask us to raise their public profile, they are handing us a potential social “virus” and our job is to infect a select group of influential people so that they will pass along what we gave them to the majority. Think about it…

I would love to hear what you all think about this, or even how you have applied these concepts in your professions, so please comment below.

Back to the beat…

- Lyle Harrod

PS Digg this article!

In today’s new media saturated culture, if you want to keep up with friends, clients, customers and opportunities, social networking must be an intricate part of your media equation. But where do you draw the line?

One week, your friend tells you that if you aren’t on Facebook, then you might as well be living in the Stone Age. The very next week that friend might tell you that Facebook is out, and LinkedIn is the only way to go if you want to be in the know.

Another friend suggests that you Twitter from your cell phone, and another says that if you don’t blog and have a presence on forums on a daily basis then you are obsolete.

If you actually have friends that are giving you this social networking advice, you run with a hip crowd. Have fun with that. But most people hear about new social networking sites as they are thrown in casually into conversation, with the speaker assuming that you, the listener, are some sort of social networking guru.

If you are one of these people being passively thrust into this social networking frenzy, I have a couple of suggestions for you (and your business, if you are an entrepreneur)

1. Do your homework.

All social networking sites may seem the same to an outsider, but each one offers different functions and will connect you to a different group of people. Scroll through the “About Us” sections of websites to get a feel for the functions and tone of the site.

2. Know your audience

If you are over the age of 18, and if you are looking to use social networking to promote your cause or your business, you aren’t going to need sites like MySpace which are geared towards younger crowds of people. Instead, take a look at sites such as LinkedIn, or even Facebook to a certain extent, to plant your personal or organizational flag.

3. Don’t mix business with pleasure

If you create a Facebook page to promote your small business, never post personal photos, like pictures of your camping trip with your buddies the weekend before. People want to do business with you without knowing how pasty your back is.

4. Keep it under control

With all those hip friends telling you to sign up for this and try out that, it can become counter productive. If you took two minutes to Tweet about how you are about to meet with a client for the first time, and that you’re nervous, that’s two minutes you don’t have to finish preparing for your meeting. Way to go.

Use only as many sites as you can afford to. Juggling and updating six sites might be reasonable for some people, but for others, one or two might be an easier lift to start. See what works for you.

5. Choose wisely…

Carefully target your media outreach. This means being very specific. If you are selling custom made bikes in Virginia, you would need to have a presence on a forum on say, mountain biking in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Most importantly, just do what works for you, and have fun doing it!

Note: check out Sarah Massey’s interview on the Independent Business Owner Show and listen to more tips about getting your message out in the media.

- Lyle Harrod