Increasing Your Media Quotient (MQ) – Part Two
What happens when your MQ, or what I call Media Intelligence, drops?
Does this drop over time or because of your actions or behaviors?
I believe that bad decisions can lead to actions and behaviors that lower your MQ.
This in turn impacts your reputation.
Think of people with low MQ and the names of Paul Wolfowitz of the World Bank, Ben Cousins of the West Coast Eagles and Paris Hilton come to mind because of their recent actions that have eroded goodwill with their stakeholders or fans.
Understanding how the media works is vital to getting successful coverage for your organization and raising your MQ.
What do the media want and how can you increase your chances of getting coverage?
Here is the second part of the three part series on how to increase your MQ.
To interview: Does sending images with press releases help get publicity?
Thomas Murrell: Yes, you can add them and they’re useful for web and print releases, but a waste of time for TV and radio. Don’t show your ignorance of how electronic media works by making this blunder.
My general rule of thumb is to add a line to the end of the press release for print and web that says “images can be provided upon request.”
There are exceptions, of course. Take, for example, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which has a television and radio network and now a large online news portal where they post images because a visual image both in print and online can enhance the impact of a story.
Of course, you can also send a video news release (VNR) to a television station.
While expensive compared to the cost of a traditional press release, they allow you to provide information that the television station may not have the resources to collect on its own.
An example would be a remote mine or even computer generated graphics for a new stadium, transportation development, or oil and gas project.
Any element that is graphically attractive and can add value to the story.
Clever packages made to look like news with a reporter are commonly used raw by small regional television stations that have limited budgets for news production or are understaffed.
While some stations have a policy of not using VNR, it is good public relations practice to provide professionally shot video clips designed for use as stock footage.
Some critics of VNRs have called the practice misleading or technical propaganda, particularly in cases where the segment is not explicitly identified to viewers as a VNR.
So it is a gray area and you have to be careful. At the end of the day, you have to weigh the costs of doing so against the potential return on investment.
If you only have a small budget, I would avoid a VNR and just use a standard press release.
To interview: What other aspects are important in writing a press release to help get it published or on the air?
Thomas Murrell: Accuracy, timeliness, and quality of your mailing list. And, of course, you will be more successful if you have a personal relationship with the journalists or editors in question.
Sometimes having coffee or lunch with select media can be just as successful in getting media coverage as simply jumping on a list you are unrelated to.
The media are bombarded with hundreds of releases a day. If you can target specific sections – health, business, education with specific angles – you will be more successful.
To interview: I’ve heard that lunch works well!
Thomas Murrell: Lunch is good, but the media is often short on time. You must pay and never have any expectation that something will come out of lunch.
To interview: Can you give us any advice to take advantage of your ideas?
Thomas Murrell: If one person has questions about your area of expertise, there will be many others with the same questions.
To interview: Can you expand a bit more?
Thomas Murrell: Turn all of these questions into headlines for articles and press releases you’re going to write.
For example, with your permission, I will take all the questions you asked in this global online forum and my answers and turn them into at least three articles.
These articles will be featured in health professional trade magazines, websites wanting articles, and of course my own eZine, media motivators read by 8,000 professionals in 35 different countries.
You could then take seven of these articles and then turn them into a free white paper or eBook.
This can be given away as a downloadable PDF on a website or other online forum.
You’ll find that providing personalized content that provides answers to your prospects’ most frequently asked questions is the new currency for marketing yourself as a recognized authority.
I call this the gravity effect of a strong personal brand and position yourself as the ‘go to’ person.
By attracting prospects to your business through this powerful and invisible force, you will not only have more qualified leads that will increase your conversion rate to sales, but you will also have less waste.
Traditional marketing reaches people through the push approach, but the gravity approach uses information to draw people into your business.
In addition to being interviewed on an online forum, here are five other ways I take advantage of my experience:
- Writing articles for eZines, websites and specialized magazines.
- Converting these articles into an eBook, white paper or traditional book.
- Interview other experts for an article, book, or podcast.
- Read other books and do a book review with key points. You learn and then you take advantage of others.
- Record presentations and turn them into a product or split them up and stream them as a podcast or video on YouTube.
So you can see I’ve spent an hour on this forum and written three articles at the same time! So thank you for inviting me to participate.