Media pitching the way the best do it

A grand challenge you probably face frequently is pitching a product, brand, or organization that doesn’t have name recognition with your target journalists and bloggers.

After all, isn’t a large part of our job to CREATE name recognition?

Maybe you idealize what life would be like if the journalists you pitched immediately recognized who you are representing. Maybe you already live that life. In either case, this post is for you.

Yesterday I spent the day delivering my media pitching boot camp for General Motors, currently #8 on the Fortune 500. The influencers they pitch probably see their products every day. In the run-up to the event, the corp comm director and I were joking about how they measure their media coverage “by the ton.”

You might think they’d sit back and answer all the “incoming” all day. They certainly could do that and feel “busy” and “efficient.”

But that’s decidedly NOT what they do. They’re constantly, proactively pitching the stories THEY want told. And they’re humble and realistic enough to know that means they need to adapt those stories to meet the needs of their target influencers.

Frankly, I was inspired by both their dedication and openness. One of their media relations pros, who has been doing this job for 30 years, said, “I LOVE all this change – I try to learn something new every day.”

Tony Cervone, SVP of global comms, sat in the workshop with his people, taking notes and working on the exercises I gave them.

Whatever the size of the organization you represent, you deserve to land more than your share of media coverage. How do I know that? Because you not only clicked on this post, you’re actually reading it :).

The recipe for great media relations success – whatever your current level of brand recognition – is one part proactivity combined with one part humility, stirred together with a heaping spoonful of tenacity.

My next public Pitching Boot Camp – where I teach much of the same material I shared yesterday – is in NYC in September.