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

Have you heard that a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, it’s a cheesy adage but also true.

We’ve seen a troubling trend in the news industry lately, which is that newsroom budgets are shrinking. Photojournalists are getting cut. Don’t be a victim of the disappearing newsroom: supply your own photos to accompany your great story. At Massey Media, we work with talented photojournalists who help us capture the news and share with editors. Remember, not only can photos help you garner press coverage, you can use them on your website and newsletters. Sarah Massey is a photography hobbyist and her client photos have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Dupont Current. Need a great photo? Call us and we’ll help you find the right pro to tell your story.

Write Your Sales Leadership Story

Join us for a two-session workshop from PR Expert Sarah Massey and Executive Coach Carolyn Butcher. Bringing a combined experience of over 30 years in sales, marketing, and public relations for corporations and non-profits, the workshop leaders offer you a creative learning environment. You will build your capacity and be empowered to use storytelling techniques for persuasive communications.

Storytelling is the language of leadership. Crafting a business story of value, relevance, differentiation, and as a strategic resource is a sales leadership story. In these master classes, you will learn the elements of sales storytelling and sharpen your leadership ability to tell your business story to your client. You will engage your clients from the first interaction to final business results. You will receive tips, tools, and time to identify strategies and steps to increase efficiency in sales and business operations and practice telling your story in ways that will delight your clients and enhance the overall client experience.

May 10: Part 1 – What’s Your Sales Story?
May 24: Part 2 – What’s Your Sales Process?
Time: 7 PM – 9:30 PM
Investment: One Session: $75, Both Sessions: $125
To enroll: info@massey-media.com

What past participants have to say…
“Carolyn and Sarah are world class storytellers and trainers,” - Chris Bradshaw, Executive Director, Dreaming Out Loud

“Sarah and Carolyn’s storytelling for sales is an invaluable workshop. I have been using their presentation for hours and hours over the past few days to help me build my vision for a new client services package!”- Mike Doyle

Do you want to make headlines in DC? Call on Massey Media.

Recent press results for our clients:

• 4/28/10, The New York Times, Labor Protests Test Egypt’s Government
• 4/23/10, ReadySetDC, Open Up! Preview of the 52 O Street Open Studios
• 4/21/10, BBC News, Murals Changing the Face of Washington DC
• 4/10/10, Washington Post, Going Out Gurus

The NY Times front page today reads like a playbook of failure:

The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay. … The Supreme Court decision (campaign finance) will increase the power of lobbyists and interest groups at the expense of candidates and political parties. … Lawmakers are weighing a pared-back approach on healthcare …

I mean a failure for justice, health care as a human right, and democracy. There was a sad headline for progressive voices when the left’s response to right-wing talk radio, Air America, went off the air with a fizzle. These issues are interrelated: poor reporting of the news, ill-informed constituents, less than half of eligible Americans choosing to participate in voting, and corporations winning the power to run elections from the Supreme Court.  It’s about dominance and greed; and, when the powers that be don’t hear from regular folks, they ignore us.

It almost makes you want to bury your head in the blankets, but you can make change. I challenge you to do one thing today, which is learn how to be a media activist, meaning learn how to call your local newspaper newsroom with an alternative to the bad news your are seeing on the front page.

Pick a positive story. Do you know a local business that is going green? Do you know an arts group that is reaching kids in new ways?  What is good news for your community?  I specifically want you to find good news, because it is uplifting to audiences and works diametrically to the usual “if it bleeds, it leads” press mentality. This is a viewpoint that is used to scare people and make them afraid to act. Are you participating in a volunteer effort for Haiti or New Orleans?  Call the press and tell them.

Find the general number for your favorite news outlet, call, and ask for the newsroom. When the reporter picks up say, “My name is such and such, and I have a story idea for you.” Explain your story and then say, “Thank you for listening to my pitch. I read your paper everyday, but I am tired of bad news. We need something different.”

Remember, it’s the media that persuades people that the problems we face are too hard to fix or that one group of people is dangerous. The media tells us that wars and consumerism are OK. Fox network has a larger viewership than all the other popular cable news outlets combined. And that’s not OK. You can do something about it.

Imagine if 10 people in your community called the paper today with a good news story. They’d have to print it. It would show them a demand.

Demand change.

Some helpful resources for media activism:

FAIR: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

SPIN Project

- Sarah

Affinity Lab Spotlight: December 2009 Newsletter

Massey Media
Washington DC Public Relations Firm
(Affinity Lab member)

Why did you start your own business?

Sarah Massey: “I launched Massey Media as a public relations consulting business exactly four years ago. A colleague from AFGE (American Federation of Government Employees) needed public relations assistance while opposing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s attacks on workers rights to choose a union at the workplace. Rumsfeld said that the unions were a threat to national security. This is illustrative of Bush Administration doublespeak, meaning the government didn’t want to pay employees living wages and benefits. I helped position AFGE in the media, showing the strength and determination of the union for its members and its cause.

Lacy and Sarah

What I learned on that first job was how to lend the expert extra set of hands that campaigns needed, do the great work of making headlines, advance the issue for the client, and build capacity for the client. We then researched and identified a demand for creative media consulting in the progressive political arena and stuck with our niche market until we had mastered it. Most of Massey Media’s clients have been progressive nonprofit organizations, but lately we’ve been expanding our mission. Throughout 2009, we expanded Massey Media’s target markets to include socially responsible businesses and the arts.”

What makes Massey Media different from other PR companies?

One of the reasons our clients select Massey Media is because we are passionate and deeply connected to the issues of our day. Everyone at Massey Media comes from the progressive movement, and we care as much as our clients about advancing their causes. From workers rights to environmentalism, from global justice to public art, Massey Media has a vision of a more just planet where everyone enjoys freedom and has a roof over their head, safe and healthy food and water, literacy, and so forth. We are deeply connected to the media that covers these issues and know how to craft stories that producers and journalists want to use. Our clients know us from the community we serve and see how we work to make stories happen in the press on a daily basis.

Our team has years of experience in the top national and international campaigns: raise the minimum wage, campaigns for global justice, promotion of a climate treaty, protection of voting rights, and so forth. Massey Media identifies the successful campaign tactics and applies them to local projects and small business public relations, and it’s working. For example, we worked with Albus Cavus this summer to publicize their work on DC’s largest public mural in Edgewood. Massey Media operated the media work as a campaign to win more walls for public murals in DC. We announced the artwork project with a press release (campaign launch), we wrote a press release a week telling the story of the artists and the community (developing the campaign platform), taught a workshop on spokesperson skills to the artists and the 45 young people working with the group (empowered campaign supporters), brought the press to the mural wall to see the work in progress, and culminated with a huge community event with live painting (victory rally). The DC art and event press loved it, ultimately awarding us the front page of the Washington Post weekend section and the center spread of the Style section. This coverage has led to more projects for Albus Cavus and renewed interest in public art in DC.

Another reason we stand out is that we take our ethic of empowerment to our clients. When we partner with a client to promote their issue, we hand over all of our intelligence and information tools and help them to use it. Each client gets a Massey Media kit that includes the press results we create, the press list we use and notes with full contact information, all the materials we write, and also a debrief memo on how to be your most effective in story-telling. We believe that using the power of the press is a powerful tool for communications and that the ability to make headlines should be more democratic.

Tell us about one of your newer clients and what you are doing for them?

Massey Media recently started work with the Zinn Education Project to promote their creative teaching tools to high school and middle school teachers. The project brings Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States, to life for teenagers. Our public relations work is to place stories about bringing history alive in the traditional press that reaches teachers, as well as social media and popular websites. It’s an honor to be assisting Howard Zinn and the Zinn Education Project, and we feel this partnership a special acknowledgment of our vision. Zinn has helped shape our perspective as active participants for social change. We are proud to be serving our communities by helping people to learn their own history and tell their own stories.

What advice do you have for small businesses and arts organizations who are considering PR?

The most important first step to consider is whether you have the capacity to take on a sustained public relations partnership, both in terms of time and financial resources. The press is demanding. They want stories, photos, and interviews and they want them on a 24/7 news deadline. Do you have time to help supply this or a budget that allows your PR firm to take care of it for you? The best avenue for earned press is to position your business or yourself as an expert in the field. Do you have time to invest in creating this profile? When you get press attention, do you have the capacity to fulfill the increased demand for your services?

The next piece of advice we have is to get ready to get creative. We all think we’re newsworthy; however, the press has a certain approach to storytelling, and there is a lot of competition for their attention and airtime. Your PR pro will help shape your project, product, service, or cause into a story the press wants to cover. This will include chiming in on holidays, (like “Eat Well to Feel Well in 2010” for New Year’s Day) creating fun visuals (fake health care lobby greenbacks with pictures of Joe Lieberman), and having you practice slogans (“hard work deserves fair pay, so raise the minimum wage”) so you get quoted in the press. Get creative and have fun with it!

Sarah Massey, Principal
Lacy MacAuley, Project Director

The American city newspaper holds the space for its “metropolitan consciousness.” What happens to the city when the newspaper goes away? September’s Next American City reports on the demise of the newspaper industry and what happens to cities when their papers fold. (http://americancity.org/magazine/article/out-of-print/ — you have to buy the magazine to get the whole story.)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Digital_Divide1.png)

This is a constant conversation at Massey Media. Does social media and new media replace the paper? Isn’t more information a good thing?  One of our biggest fears is that the digital divide will create an information divide. While the democratization of the media means more and differing voices, it may also inadvertently exclude the voices of those without Internet access. If lower income families are not on the Internet, will online news sources include them or cover the issues related to social justice?

According to the article:

The Pew Foundation’s Internet and American Life project (finds …) the Internet community remains divided by access, savvy and taste. For example, 65 percent of white households have a broadband connection, while only 46 percent of black households do. While 88 percent of households with an income of more than $100,000 have broadband, only 35 percent of households with an income under $20,000 do. This means that in a cosmopolitan city such as Washington, D.C., for example, just half of the city’s residents have access to broadband Internet.

Draw your own conclusion.

- Sarah Massey

You have the frame, you have your message. The project is daring, the artists are world-class. But you have no press. Shouldn’t reporters be crawling out of the woodwork to cover this story? Doesn’t the visual just shout front-page? It may, but reporters don’t swoop in like fairy godmothers. They don’t have some journalistic version of “Spidey Sense” for great stories. They need direction, too.

The perceived success of any project is in part determined by the amount of press and attention it receives. Media pushes projects into the limelight and gives them a greater future. Garnering media attention is a competition, though. There are hundreds of stories floating about, and everyone thinks theirs is the best. To get attention, you have to make the effort.

The bread and butter of catching the media’s attention are pitch calls. Pitch calls set a foundation for future relations and are the most direct way of reaching a reporter. The frame of any successful pitch call will lay out the “5 W’s” for a reporter: who, what, where, when, and why. This is the basic information any reporter needs to have to decide in about one minute if your message is a story. It needs to be formatted in a succinct manner that catches attention and communicates how your project is different from every other group they have heard from.

Pitch calls can seem daunting at first. You constantly face the possibility of a negative response. However, you must proceed with confidence. You believe in your project and are passionate about it and that is the key element when talking to the media. To receive excitement, you must project it. No one is going to listen to a robot. A monotone mumbler will never make the 7 second news-bite.

Many also proceed under the impression that they are bothering a reporter or intruding on their busy schedules. Instead, you need to consider your call as doing the media a service. They are always on the look-out for a great story, and instead of having to go out and search for it, you have brought them it to their doorstep. Pitch calling is the beginning of building positive relationships with the media. It is a reciprocal partnership from which both of you will benefit. Forming these relationships will also aid you in future projects because once a reporter knows your work and that it is newsworthy, they are much more likely to continue providing you coverage in the future.

Making a Pitch Call:
1. Place your pitch call plan in front of you. Make sure you have read it through enough times so that you will not sound as if you are reading a script.
2. Pick up the phone and dial the first person on your press
3. Smile. When you smile, your voice changes inflection. It is infused with enthusiasm and warmness. Always pleasant to hear on the other end of the phone.
4. When you call, politely, yet firmly ask for the person with whom you wish to speak. Make sure you state your name and the group you represent.
5. If you reach the reporter, follow the pitch script you practiced. If you reach a voicemail, leave a message that includes all your major talking points, along with your name and contact information.
6. At the end of a pitch, always gather the reporter’s contact information including name, phone number and email address. Make sure you jot down any pertinent notes so you can follow through in the future.

Congratulations! You can now begin forming important press relationships and grabbing the spotlight for your project!

-Kimi Killen

Photo Credit: Sarah Massey

Every chef worth their salt understands the importance of process. If you pour the cream in too soon, the sauce spoils; if you reduce it too fast, it will never thicken, and instead of serving that perfect bechamel sauce, your guests will be sipping a slightly runny, quite buttery cream soup.

Process is key in every profession. A runner always stretches before a game and artists must be careful to mix their paints properly. Process is like that great woman standing behind that powerful man; rarely seen or heard, but without her disaster would ensue.

Like most people, the media is not interested in process. Who wants to see the chef whisking the steaming sauce when you could have the final dish? Just look at sports, for example. The front cover is never of a runner stretching and doing warm up sprints; it is of him crossing the finish line. Mass media is interested in that snapshot moment. But the participants live the process. They move through numerous problems and successes before reaching the end. So how do you tell this story? How do you find and make reporters care about the process?

To target press, you need to first know your message and what the end game is. What are you trying to accomplish? With public art, there are a couple central goals. First, you need influential citizens in the arts and government to notice your project because you, along with every organization, are looking for ways to expand. Secondly, you want the community to notice; you’ve revamped a portion of their neighborhood and they should share in its benefits.

Now that the message has been developed, you begin to search. You should always be reading press and media that covers your type of work and projects. These publications will give your search a great jumping off point. Next, scour local and national newspapers, magazines and blogs to find an audience. Find the movers and shakers of your community. Ask yourself: what are they reading? How do I appeal to them? For example, if you are looking to be placed in a publication or piece dealing with urban development, focus on the beautification aspects of your story. If you are speaking to a community, show them how your program affects their lives.

However, before any of this can happen, you have to convince reporters that you are newsworthy. Decide what stands out about your piece. Reporters are like teenage boys: they always want the newest thing, even better if no one else has it yet. How is your project different? If there is something controversial about the project, even better! It’s art and the age old adage “Any press is good press” is applicable here no more than anywhere else.

Making news with public art is just about making news. Exploit your visuals and don’t hide your differences. Art is about drama, full of color and life. It’s time to make it pop and sizzle for the media.

-Kimi Killen

Benington Community Center Wall painted by Albus Cavus. Photo Credit: Sarah Massey.

Famed Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco described a mural as “the most logical, the purest and strongest form of painting…it cannot be made a matter of private gain; it cannot be hidden away for the benefit of a certain privileged few. It is for the people.” When the Albus Cavus 2009 Edgewood Mural project is unveiled in mid-August, it will not only be for the people. It will be by the people.

The wall will be a collaborative effort between artist and community, individual and collective. During the nine-week program, the young DC participants have mined their own imaginations and used crowdsourcing (when “consumers” help create a product through feedback, typically on the internet) operations to take the temperature of the Edgewood community.

But in a climate where news is defined through sex, violence, and which “celebrity” is getting a divorce or which politician is dropping off the Appalachian Trail, how can public art grab a piece of the media pie? Should the media even want to cover public art?

Public art does not need media attention to exist, but attention is necessary to thrive. The very nature of “public art” is delineated by its name. To live as intended, public art requires interest: neighborhood, local, or national. Murals can represent social movements or beautification projects; and, oftentimes, the artist (or artists, in the case of the Edgewood mural) are looking to expand and continue creating. There are aseemingly infinite number of blank walls and not-so-pretty buildings calling for make-overs. America’s urban and suburban public spaces are built for functionality, not beauty. Groups like Albus Cavus seek to reverse this trend.

A new look, though, requires financial support, and this is where the media comes into play. The media’s purpose is to call attention to the newsworthy, important, new, or interesting. When public art receives a write-up, a TV interview or most importantly, a visual, it is able to reach an audience who can enable development and future projects.

Public art should be a “no-brainer” for mass media. It is the classic tale of the ugly duckling, and who doesn’t like a happy ending? It is the story of a barren, cracking parking lot wall that is transformed by passion and imagination into a veritable explosion of color and life. As mentioned previously, though, sex and scandal persist to be the big sellers.

The most important ingredient in the recipe for gaining press attention is to target and research your audience. You have to find the people who report on and write about your subject: art blogs, art critics, city writers, and development writers. Once you’ve created a targeted “press list,” the next step is to grab their attention and keep them up to date! What is the most interesting aspect of your art project? Is it the process of bringing 50 people together to create a singular work? Are public murals part of a social movement? Looking past the media, whose attention do you want to grab?

Public art is change you can see. If you can focus the public lens on the process and the qualitative results it produces, you will be more than another photo op. Make the media look closer, and they will find the experience.

-Kimi Killen

Photo Credit: Sarah Massey.

This past weekend, DC saw its first annual Sacred DC, a festival for healing, arts, and activism. Massey Media’s Lacy MacAuley was intimately involved in the planning and media outreach for the festival. The organizers wanted to provide a space for dialogue and strategizing about environmental and social injustices. Held on the summer Solstice at Malcolm X Park in downtown DC, the festival was an opportunity for local residents and youth to connect while attending workshops on yoga, meditation, mural painting, and urban gardening, to name just a few.

Lacy worked closely with the co-visionaries of the project, Graciela Lopez and Zainabu Dance, to craft a media strategy that could speak authentically about the spirit of the festival. She met weekly with organizers to make sure that everyone’s ideas and voices were heard and that everyone was familiar with the “talking points,” and she coordinated the pitch calls to press and bloggers. The press release she drafted went out to local media multiple times, creating a drumbeat, and pitch calls soon followed. Zainabu and Lacy secured a press hit with WPFW’s “From the Vault.” Soon after, the Washington Examiner called. The reporter was on a tight deadline, so Lacy gave him an interview using the media messages they’d crafted.

Lacy also aggressively pitched the Washington Post, who sent a reporter and covered the story. Even as she was emceeing on the main stage, Lacy was called upon to facilitate his interview. NBC also showed up early in the day. In addition, Lacy made sure to coordinate photographic coverage of the event to offer to the press and funders of the event.

Massey Media brings this same level of attention to detail to all our clients. If you’d like to see your progressive event or cause in media, let Massey Media show you how!

- Janaki Spickard-Keeler

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