Engage in PR

Yes, this post easily could have been titled “Press Tour 2.0″ but I hate that stuff, as you all know, so I had to find a way to avoid the cliche. The problem, however, is that it is a proper description. The press tour is a classic tactic for any company making a news announcement, launching a product, launching itself or simply introducing an executive. In most cases the company works with their PR team, internal or external to set up media interviews during a set time frame. Back in the day you would actually plan a week on the West coast and a week on the East coast to meet with press, traveling for much of the time and going to dozens of editorial offices.

Of course, that is simply not how it is done today. Most of the meetings are done virtually and unless you are a large company (or the Muppets) you often need to plan it over a longer period of time, thus minimizing the impact of a ‘tour’. The reasons are various; freelance writers working from different locations, bloggers with no set deadline reporting stories in near real-time, travel budgets, the glut of news, etc. The PR industry has adapted and created a hybrid of the press tour and in most cases, if done properly, you can get to all of the media outlets important to your audience, give them the information they need and garner coverage for a longer period of time. A win-win.

Currently I’m going through this process with our company and it will certainly help us in introducing us to media, getting our story to a larger audience and ultimately helping us to engage with this audience within our own community (not to mention driving sales leads…knock on wood). During this process I’m already thinking about how I can turn this on it’s head when we prepare for another large press engagement towards the fall.

I have two goals for next tour:

1) More Video
This is a no-brainer, right. With the face-to-face aspect of these meetings happening less and less it’s time to get virtual and actually visualize each other when talking. This could be something simple like Skype, but I’m actually leaning towards ooVoo. ooVoo would allow me to obviously have a few more people involved, be it execs traveling, our PR partner, my boss, a customer, or others.

2) Better and More Empowered Scheduling
One of the major issues with planning interviews is the scheduling. Not only with media and analysts but with the numerous amount of spokespeople that are ideal for different journalists. My thoughts again go towards ooVoo (I swear, they aren’t paying me) and specifically the way they did the scheduling for “My ooVoo Day“. I want to create a special web page for each of our journalists that we talk with where they can go, select a day/time that works best for them, tell us if they want to use ooVoo, Skype, phone, smoke signals…whatever. The page would be personalized for each, but dynamically update the schedule.

I think being on tour right now is ideal since we can follow up with all these folks with a preview of how we are going to try and communicate with them in the past during big announcements AND share with them all of the different ways they can now follow our communication (Twitter, Squidoo, YouTube, RSS, Blog). We must continue to find better ways to communicate information, whether it be everyday or significantly timed events.

–Kyle Flaherty

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 5:32 am and is filed under PR, Social Media, Twitter, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.