360DigitalInfluence

A couple weeks back, a colleague of mine on the account side came to me with a question:

“We just scored this amazing media placement for one of our clients in [Tier-One Publication]. Do you have any ideas for how we can get some additional traction for the article?”

Harkening back to my days as a lowly Assistant Account Executive, presenting my SVP with a similar piece of media coverage that I no doubt, spent countless hours pursuing and securing, I remembered his response: “That’s great. But did you get the Journal yet?!!”

Subduing my urge to respond in a similar fashion and saving my colleague the dejection that I had felt, I provided a more constructive response.

The fact is, media column inches have been shrinking at an exponential rate. Newspapers are shutting their doors with a few viable ones moving their operations online. To compound the issue, marketing budgets are decreasing as companies look for efficiencies in generating awareness for their brands. What does this all mean? It means that that piece of coverage you secured in Wired or in Crain’s New York Business is ten times more valuable today than it was, say, five years ago.

So then how can we extend the life of that press coverage? Here are some tried-and-true methods, as well as some new thinking:

• Company Web site Newsroom: While this method has been used for years, its importance and value cannot be denied. Posting your article placement on your Web site’s newsroom will not only aid in search engine optimization (SEO), but customers, investors, and prospects like to know that their vendor/partner is getting quoted-positively-in the news. Additionally, other reporters who are doing research for a related story, may stumble upon the article, your insightful quote, and could follow up with another interview request.

• Social Media Newsroom: Many companies are starting to develop social media newsrooms as part of their content marketing strategies. But aside from posting links and PDFs of your media coverage and press releases, the social media newsroom should have images, video and other social links to really drive value. Some of the most successful social newsrooms link back to the company’s social media channels (Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) as well as RSS feeds, links to subscribe by e-mail, eNewsletters, and event calendars.

• Share it!: I used to represent a number of law firms and I always loved walking into a partner’s office to find the walls COVERED with framed news clippings. Although I never had the gall to crop and frame the few media clippings I’ve been quoted in over the years, I would immediately rush out and buy up every copy of the newspaper or magazine to share with my family and friends-my mom has all the copies. The idea here is that we should be sharing this coverage with our networks, both offline and online. Brands should be sharing the coverage in monthly/quarterly corporate newsletters, tweeting out links to the coverage, including marketing collateral for your salesforce, posting content in the discussion section of your LinkedIn group, and sharing a link to the article with your Facebook fans. While the channels and methods have changed, the underlying idea is the same.

• Write About it: A lesson that I learned early on in my career in public relations is that an hour-long interview with a reporter MIGHT turn into a one sentence quote in an article. And a lot of times, that quote may not match what you actually said. For companies or individuals that have blogs, an excellent way to extend the life of the coverage would be to write about the article. And I don’t mean simply regurgitating the content of the article, but expanding on the main points of the piece, providing additional insights that the reporter may have missed and inviting readers to provide their thoughts and extend the conversation.

• Post it: Aside from the usual social suspects (Facebook and Twitter), there are a number of content aggregators where you can posts links to news, byline articles, white papers, etc… Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange, is a personal favorite of mine. The site hosts hundreds of topic categories from Social Media Marketing to Leadership to Global Business. There are hundreds of people active in each of the topic “communities,” regularly sharing content. Additionally, BusinessWeek is consistently one of the highest ranked domains in search, bringing your quote in Poultry Times into the first three pages of Google results. Posting on other content aggregator sites such as Digg and Reddit is also a must.

• Create a Video: No, I don’t mean getting your CEO to sit in front of a camera and having them read the full article-unless they are reading a particularly compelling op-ed they wrote. Similar to the idea of drafting a blog post, have the subject matter expert quoted in the article discuss the topic of the piece in a short video that can be posted in your social media newsroom and on your company’s YouTube channel. We are all aware of the explosion of online video and its benefits for search. Creating a short video related to the article, developing a Q&A, or even having a sales rep. provide a demo of your product can be much more engaging than handing a prospect a product data sheet.

• Monitor: A critical step that we often forget as we are busy making clips decks and getting poster-size reprints of our placements is to monitor the article after it has run. There may be comments posted by readers on the media outlet’s site that can be responded to. Readers may have tweeted a link to the coverage or shared a link to the article on their Facebook page. In a number of instances, there may be misinformation in the comments that need to be addressed, or quite simply, readers to thank for sharing your positive coverage with their networks.

So how have you extended the life of a media placement you’ve secured? Let me know your thoughts while I go post a link to this blog post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Business Exchange….oh, and e-mail it to my mom…