Outside major announcements like profit results or product launches, many companies find it hard to keep the media interested in what they are doing, especially with the attention span of the traditional media narrowing as journalist numbers fall and publication sizes shrink.
It’s true that most companies don’t have significant announcements to make week-to-week or even month to month.
However, there are almost always interesting stories waiting to be told that are relevant to or illuminate the bigger story a company is trying to tell about itself. Company executives may not recognise the news value of these stories because they work in the business every day and they are not “news” to them. It can take a fresh perspective, together with an appreciation of what journalists and their readers are interested in, to identify and exploit this kind of “news”.
“There are almost always interesting stories waiting to be told that are relevant to or illuminate the bigger story a company is trying to tell about itself”
It might be a new technology story that shows the company’s competitive advantage in a particular field, a profile of an experienced manager who has charge of a new business strategy, or a case study of a project that highlights the company’s environmental credentials.
It could also be a story that might struggle to generate media interest one week but is suddenly relevant the week after because it relates to a bigger news event, like a change in government policy or a major initiative by a larger company in the same sector.
Such stories are especially important for companies that have a large and valuable audience on social media or publish their own content, both forms of media which have an unquenchable thirst for news updates. One of the great advantages of social media platforms is that they allow a company to drip feed information that keeps them on the media’s radar.
This is where a proactive external media relations adviser can really prove their worth.
The proactive adviser meets with their client frequently and sees it as fundamental to their role to find news and understand where to insert it in the news cycle, just as a journalist would. They are a reliable source of ideas, proposing topics for press releases, story pitches to journalists and interview or speaking opportunities. They are also a useful sounding board for a company wanting to know how a proposed new business strategy or reorganisation will be received externally.
Being proactive also puts the adviser in a better position to spot and manage or contain issues when they are small, rather than when they are raging out of control in the media.
Not every idea or meeting will lead to a result that can be directly measured in column inches, but as part of a broader communications strategy, proactive PR puts the company in a position to take advantage of every opportunity.