This is a guest post from Paul Krupin, of Direct Contact PR.
To me, getting publicity is like making candy – it’s a tasty recipe backed by art and science, psychology, and specific tactics that come into play. It’s a persuasive communications process that one has to go through. It has a very narrow set of requirements that many people simply do not understand.
The blood sweat and tears of getting publicity is always in the writing of the news release. It contains your pitch. The news release is the crucial document that you create and transmit to media. Then you watch and wait to see what happens. It’s a very important document. Your pitch is basically a proposal. A publishing proposal.
When it’s successful, it can be real magic, like lightning in a bottle. Phenomenal things can really happen. Careers and fortunes can be created. Millions of people can potentially see your message and be influenced by your writing and thinking.
But if it’s not, very little will happen, in fact, it can be a painful economic and pride-felt loss.
The hardest part that I find is that people don’t realize that getting publicity is not like marketing. When you market, you try to persuade to sell product or services.
When you seek publicity you are talking to a publisher or a producer and asking them to publish what you wrote, or write about what you say or do.
When you write a news release you are in effect you are communicating a very specific message:
‘esteemed and honored fellow publisher (or producer or host), please give me space in your publication (or on your show).’
This distinctive purpose of this message is one of the most difficult things I have to teach and get people to understand when I work with clients. Many an otherwise brilliant and successful author, marketer and promoter has great difficulty with this concept. Basically they write an ad and expect media to publish it. They are terribly surprised and hurt when it gets rejected. In fact, their failure at this point often times results in them ceasing the whole writing and creative or business development process. How
tragic to come so far and then stop over the failure to be successful at this point.
So heed the words of this publicist, and I truly believe if you grok this deeply, you’ll reduce the pain you go through as you learn what it takes to get publicity. It will make both our lives a lot easier. You’ll give me better more newsworthy information, it will take us less time to write a good news release, you’ll get more publicity when we do send it out, and I’ll get to spend more time fishing.
So here goes. I’ll share with you what I know.
First, understand that media are generally averse to giving anyone free advertising. They charge for advertising. That’s how they make their money. So if when you write a news release and are perceived as asking for free advertising, for a commercial enterprise, the likely outcome is a call or email from the sales advertising manager at the media. So please do not be surprised if and when this happens.
Second, media only publish three basic things:
News
Entertainment
Education
That’s it. There is no more, except for the paid advertising that is.
Don’t believe me? Look at any media publication. Look at a newspaper, look at a magazine. Identify what you see. Do this article by article. Analyze the media. Learn and try to grasp what they do. Pick up any publication and classify every inch of space into one of these four classifications: news, entertainment, education, or paid advertising. Prove it to yourself.
Do you get this yet?
And realize that if you want to be published, this is what you need to give the media people you are pitching to and be quick about it.
Now there’s a special psychology you need to really get down about what you are doing when you pitch to a media person.
The real key is to give media what they want. The hard part is in figuring out what that is. It’s crucial to remember we are writing to a publisher and asking for them to publish something about our topic, featuring us. BTW, if you do a good job on the news release, you’ll get some media responses even if you use the free services. But you’ll get greater penetration and quantity and quality response with services that send to custom targeted media lists matched to the message.
There are lots of issues that enter into a media decision to respond to a news release favorably: content, timeliness, quality of thinking, how many people in the audience will be interested, what’s in it for the audience, cost and effort needed to use it, prior and competing coverage of the topic, downstream issues, and the likely audience response.
These are among the many factors that go through an editor’s or a producer’s mind. You find this out when you speak to them, and also when you watch what they select, and of course, by what they publish every day. In fact, this is the greatest source of guidance you can find, and it’s available to you everyday.
What I find is that very simply, if they see what they like, they use it. They may not use all of it, and they may change it, but it gets some coverage if it fits their readership and editorial needs. Media people make decisions based on how it will likely affect their bottom line, which is revenue based on subscriptions, advertising, and market share.
To you and me, it’s a gauntlet of sorts, and we try our best to learn, create appropriate material, present it as best we can, and act
persuasively.
Once you understand this psychology and positioning, then you can get to work, and it’s really not that hard.
So how do you decide what do you put into a news release so that you maximize your publishing success?
Here’s a link to an article I wrote that explains this in more detail:
The Hot Button Theory: Maximizing Media Response to Your News Releases
Here are the basics.
Do you want to see your media response improve dramatically? Send a news release that pushes the media’s hot buttons. I’ve developed a little set of criteria from having sent out thousands of news releases for clients over the past two decades, and the common set of factors that produce the maximum success.
Here’s what you need to do:
Tell me story (a short, bed time story), give me a local news angle (of interest to my particular audience), hit me in the pocket book (make me or save me money), teach me something I didn’t know before (educate me), amaze me or astound me (like in WOW!), make my stomach churn (in horror or fear), or turn me on (yes, sex sizzles).
Your news release needs to do this in 30 seconds or less.
Let’s look at it again from a slightly different perspective.
I’ve studied what the media actually publish for decades now and I believe you can boil it all down to one simple formula. Look at almost every article in USA Today or any other newspaper or magazine or any TV show and try to identify the common key elements that pop out at you. You’ll see it immediately once I tell it to you.
Here it is:
DPAA+H
These letters stand for "Dramatic Personal Achievement in the Face of Adversity plus a little Humor."
If you look at almost every media around you, from the front page of USA Today to the Olympics to the evening news to the sitcoms on TV, you’ll see this is what the American public wants, desires, and craves.
DPAA+H
As a culture, we crave to see the human spirit triumph in matters of the heart, and in trials of hardship and tragedy. We ask to be uplifted right out of the humdrum of our everyday reality into the exhilaration and extreme emotional states of those who are living life on the edge.
It galvanizes our attention. It rivets us to our seats. It captures our attention and our hearts.
It drives us to pay for newspaper subscriptions, to movie theatres for entertainment, to rent videos for fun or education, to bookstores for a good read. This is what energizes and drives the very core of numerous key economic systems and is what creates and maintains the very infrastructure of the publishing, news, and entertainment industries.
And this is what the media seeks to provide. This is what works. Human interest stories with
DPAA+H
You will see these elements everywhere you look in varying degrees. It is a rare media feature that doesn’t contain most of these items. The media uses technology to increase the assault on our senses, enhance the effect, and make our experience ever more compelling and memorable.
And if you are writing a news release to get publicity for yourself or for a client, what you have to do to maximize your chances is recognize this desire and need, and then cater to it as best you can.
If you want to put your best foot forward and take a crack at writing a news release that does this, here is what I suggest:
For any particular publicity project you have in mind, study your target publications (the ones you really want to be in), identify articles that you want to achieve similar success, review prior and existing media coverage of your subject, and then make a list of the top ten things (ideas and actions) that you can write or talk about.
You can use News Search Engines (e.g., Google News) to evaluate media coverage of your topic and to identify articles that you can use as models. Then you can actually put pen to paper.
My 3-I technique is really useful at this point. Identify your success story, Imitate What You See, Innovate with your own information. Learn more about this technique here: http://www.directcontactpr.com/free-articles/article.src?ID=52
Just remember – you need to hit people’s hot buttons and galvanize attention. To do this you need to focus on developing some very special ideas.
One of the most successful types of news releases to use is the problem solving tips article or advice article or entertainment article.
Pretend that you are going to speak to 20 people and you wanted to inspire, motivate and impress the hell out of them, but only had exactly three minutes.
What are the very best eight to ten pieces of advice would you give them? You must identify the topic that will interest the maximum number of people. You must also then present the very best advice or analysis and recommendations, best stories, best insights, or best humor you are capable of to address the problem or the subject you identified. These must be ideas or actions they can take or implement that will produce highly desirable benefits in their life right now.
The reason is that these ideas are just like candy. Candy produces such pleasurable sensations that it results in chemical memory. People always remember where they got good candy. And that’s what you need to make. Good intellectual property candy.
The goal here is to galvanize them into action, so that when you are done, they jump up and open their wallets, and hand you their business card, and say "call me, I need your services".
It is not just to sell your book. It is to sell people on YOU. You are the candy. It is professional branding at it’s best that we seek here, so that people are so enamored with you that they buy everything you have available for sale.
So if you’ve done your homework, and studied what your target media are publishing, you’ll see that this is what is being published day in day out in media of all types.
It is also a pathway that you can probably follow pretty easily if you set your mind to it.
So think about this relatively easy assignment and then start writing. If you do this, I’d like to see what you create. You can send it to me anytime and I’ll be happy to give you comments and recommendations on what to do with it to help you get to where you want to be.
Just remember this: If you give the media what they really want, they’ll give you what you want – free publicity.
Paul J. Krupin, Direct Contact PR
Reach the Right Media in the Right Market with the Right Message
http://www.DirectContactPR.com Paul@DirectContactPR.com
Blog.DirectContactPR.com
Free eBook download: http://www.directcontactpr.com/files/files/TrashProof2010.pdf
I have now been selling my fiction for over a year and I’ve experimented with a lot of different strategies and tactics. I have also changed my mind on a lot of things and believe that selling fiction is quite different to selling non-fiction.