Press an “urgency button”

Have you ever had the chance to look at the email back-and-forths between savvy PR pros and top-tier journalists?

This week I reviewed five such conversations. Some were REALLY long – like, six months long. All five resulted in placements: two in the Washington Post, one in the WSJ, one on NPR’s MarketPlace, and one in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

It was fascinating to watch as each pitching pro kept the conversation alive with just the right amount of initiative. Persistent, but not overbearing.

And then, at a key point in the dialogue, each pro pressed a different “urgency button” that spurred the journalist to action.

That’s because most journalists don’t have the luxury of working sequentially. They have to keep their eyes squarely on their most pressing project. Whatever is most timely has almost all of their attention.

It’s YOUR job to help them out by determining what makes your idea pressing, and communicate that to them in a way that’s easy to understand. That’s what it means to figuratively press an “urgency button.”

I shared these conversations and the urgency buttons they contained with my Inner Circle members on Tuesday. Yesterday I got this email from member Chris Orris in San Francisco:

I pressed an urgency button with a reporter literally an hour after the webinar yesterday – been working on getting a CNN journalist to interview a client . . . Woke up this morning to her asking if 3:30 would work. 🙂

This is the type of work that Media Relations Masters do. They don’t stop with the common complaint: “This reporter will never get back to me!” They figure out a way to be valuable and timely enough that the reporter WANTS to respond.

These are the kinds of things we talk about in the Inner Circle. I put resources in front of them that aren’t otherwise available. But the members are the ones who have developed the mindset to see the open door at the end of the hallway when the rest of the PR pros see only closed doors. THEY are the ones who seek access to the best practices our fascinating field has to offer.

You can adopt the same mindset. Whether you choose to get access to my premium training or not, you CAN earn more than your share of media coverage. And with it, more than your share of compensation and independence.

It starts with knowing there’s an open door there somewhere. Then you put in the work to find it.