Seat at the Table

If you have been in corporate or b2b public relations long enough (about a day), you’ll hear the call from senior management for more business media.  What’s most suprising is that the same people who read the business papers as a daily religion to get real information about companies making substantial strides, quickly forget about what information is needed for an article worth reading.

To oversimplify the matter, I would break business media stories into two basic categories: hard news and soft news.  Chances are if management is asking about business media, they don’t qualify for the first category.  The tough part is that only a small percentage of space gets used for soft news oriented companies. 

The first category of business news is hard news about companies that move markets either through market share (e.g., IBM, GM), actively moving/high valuation stocks (Google) or news that affects the first two companies (winning a major contract over IBM).

The second category of business news is soft news about companies, developments or trends that are currently or are highly likely to affect companies covered in the first category.   For example, stories about YouTube and other video sharing community sites is significant as they affect major media companies and the entire marketing industry.

Keeping this in mind, even if your company has a good soft news story, it still needs to deliver

1. Tie into a major trend but preferably one that is being recognized but is only starting to be covered.  If you break the trend to a reporter, you’ll get more space.  If you join in after the trend chorus has started singing, you’ll be one of too many voices.  A while back I recommended to a client that they do a marketing campaign within Second Life, arguing that it was starting to get a lot of attention as a virtual world platform.   After providing my recommendations they decided not to pursue it at the time.  If they were to ask again today after seeing all the Second Life coverage, I would suggest they not bother.  Too many voices.  Instead, I might have them look at SMS communities such as those by Upoc as it’s a growing trend with strong revenue implications that is only starting to be covered. 

2. Have a colorful anecdote.  A Business Week story about computer dashboards starts with a anecdote about Oracle’s Larry Ellison honeymooning on his yacht.  There’s little doubt that a company well featured in the story, Netsuite, provided that nugget of info (Ellison is an investor).  That certainly helped capture the reporters attention and, in turn, have them focus more on the company that provided that and other information.

3. Have big numbers.  No one cares about a company being a leader.  They care by how much.  How much money will your company make on a hot product?  Prove it.  How much money will you make for major companies?  Show how.  Working with Musiwave, my team put together numbers that showed the billions of dollars the music and wireless industries could potentially make through mobile music.  We did this by getting research on the number of mobile phone users with music players, the number of people using portable music players, listening and purchase habits.  This allowed reporters to take our potential revenue figures and see the logic behind them. 

4.  Know the downside and show it.  The best articles provide a 360 degree view and that means showing the downside.  Explore what the potential downsides are and present them to the reporter along with how the company is addressing the.  Certainly, reporters were often skeptical of Musiwave’s mobile music strategy.  So not only did we quickly show how we were addressing roadblocks such as making it easy to purchase music on a mobile basis, we had demos so reporters were able to try for themselves.

5. Have history and context for the reporter.  In the Business Week dashboard story, the reporter showed were the ideas for dashboards first came from and how they were developed.  This is the kind of background information that rounds out a good story and is appreciated when presented by PR folks.

Now certainly the above rules aren’t a gaurantee of a business story.  But they are critical components.  When brought together, they most certainly raise the likelihood of a story being serious considered. 

One thing to notice, very little of this post focused on information about the company itself.  That’s becuase unless you are a hard news type company, the best way to be a part of a business story is…to be a part of it.  Don’t focus on your own company and let the media figure the rest out.  Instead, show the media the whole story and where your company fits in.   Do this and you’ll get a fair hearing.