Someone Needs To Fire Their Media Liaison

Posted on | August 23, 2010 | No Comments

First, some background. Before I took on business writing, journalism paid the bills. I still do the occasional magazine article from time to time in addition to my business writing gigs. It gives me the opportunity to stretch my writing muscles. And I enjoy the research part of the work, getting to interview experts so I can dig deeper on topics I’m interested in.

Well, it’s mostly enjoyable. Until I come across the sad case of media liaisons who don’t know how to do their job.

As an in-house communications director, I also worked that media liaison role, so I know how it’s supposed to work from both sides.

The job is to put out press releases and other marketing materials in the hopes of snagging a reporter’s interest. When calls come in from journalists, other skills come into play; the media liaison now has to talk to the reporter to get an idea of what the story is about to direct the call to the best in-house expert. There may also be a chance to tweak the focus of the reporter’s questions to highlight your company’s features.

It’s important to remember that even if the reporter isn’t looking for information directly related to your business offerings, just getting your name into a big magazine is advantageous.

Let me give you an example. We’ll say you run a clothing chain store named Harry’s Suits. A reporter calls and says he’s doing a story for Business News magazine that has a circulation of 1 million. The topic of the story is “in-store music that gets people to buy stuff”. Which do you think is the better response (below) from your media liaison, A or B?
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A) “I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can comment. It’s true that we do use in-store music in our stores to try to get our customers to buy things. But I can’t really say we’re in-store music experts. It’s certainly not part of my job. Anyway, our business is selling suits.

“Really, we can’t really speak as experts about in-store music because we don’t make the music. We’re not composers. In-store music isn’t really what we’re known for and it’s not what we want to be known for. But we’d be happy to give you quotes and information about our new line of suits that we have available. Otherwise, I don’t think we can help you.”

B) “Absolutely! We use music in our stores to try to get our customers to buy things. I’m afraid I don’t know much about it. But I think Joe Mavis in marketing knows the guy who selects the music for our stores. He can tell you who does that and what goes into the decision.

“I’ll get you his information. He might also have some good data on what kind of response we’ve had from in-store music as well, and which suits are our best sellers for different kinds of songs. Feel free to ask him about that.”
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For the first response, the reporter will hang up and move on. And he’ll never call them back for another story because the media liaison was being obtuse.

For answer “B”, the reporter will get forwarded along to Joe Mavis or whoever and collect some quotes. Even though the story really isn’t focused on men’s suits, the story will probably include a quote like the following:

“We’ve definitely had better sales of our blue navy suits when we play jazz in the store,” says Director of Marketing Joe Mavis, with the Harry’s Suits clothing chain based out of New York City.

You’ve now got 1 million potential readers of the fact that Harry’s Suits sells blue navy suits and you can find their store in NYC and maybe even your own city. If the article goes online, that sentence might now come up in a search for clothing stores that sell suits. And if the writer was feeling particularly Web-2.0ish, he might even have inserted a hyperlink to the store website. And of course, the marketing people at Harry’s Suits would be free to blog, tweet, email and Facebook the hell out of the story.

That’s how a single line in a news article like this brings in leads for businesses all the time.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, while researching a story for a large-circulation business magazine, I got stonewalled for no good reason by a dumb media liaison because the story I was writing was not directly dealing with their particular service offering.

No big deal on my part — I have plenty of other sources who were only too happy to provide me with quotes. And maybe no big deal on their part, either. Maybe none of their potential customers were going to read that article — even though I suspect a good number would have (either in the original magazine, or perhaps excerpted on the company’s press page).

For the vast majority of companies (and I’m guessing this one, too), reporters are not banging down their doors everyday. If this is the way that this media liaison deals with all media requests — “either write about specifically about our awesome products and service offerings, or we can’t be bothered” — then they’re not doing their job. Instead of creating promotional opportunities, they’re wasting them.

That’s why someone needs to fire their media liaison.