Global PR amidst Global Pandemic
Where do you pitch when COVID-19 keeps cancelling conferences for breakfast It's almost like we didn't know how many conferences we had until we started receiving daily bulletins announcing cancellations to the tune of half a dozen a day. Informa to postpone or scrap events worth £450m over coronavirus. The bigger the conference, the louder the reverberations from it dropping: MWC, Facebook's F8, Google I/O, Geneva Motor Show, GDS, NVIDIA's GPU -- all gone. With that, gone is travelling for work, quickly followed by going anywhere at all for work, including offices -- people WFH so much that their companies' VPNs get banned from food delivery apps.
For my small corner of the tech world, tech PR, neither working from home nor interacting with people who mostly do are anything new. However, this total curfew, driven by a panic-stricken news cycle, is a whole different ball game.
Not all PR people are boisterous extroverts though: a lot of us actually prefer reaching out via emails. However, most still find pitching their company face to face more productive. If you are one of those, you're going to have to make some changes.
In my experience, it's relatively easy to get media coverage if you're a US company aiming mostly or exclusively at the US market. Things become a bit more challenging when you are based elsewhere and looking to get in. Having a news hook usually helps, like a round of investment -- just find a reporter who covers VC funding in your market.
When you have a hardware or software product, this is where face time works a lot better. If you have confidence in your product and can be pro-active, polite but quite firm, or sometimes just a tiny bit pushy, the CES floor is your oyster.
At least it used to be. Jest all you want about the panic but a lot of people take the situation very seriously, and rightfully so. Epidemiologists opine that it's really better to err on the side of caution, so if you, a daredevil, think of still travelling and trying to secure meetings with reporters from another continent... please, don't. But it doesn't mean you can't get coverage.
Here are a few things to think about.
1. You are not the only one barricading yourself at home. Reporters still get tremendous amounts of leads and rumours in face-to-face conversations, and many sources just aren't comfortable enough sharing anything electronically. If you have a juicy market tidbit, try reminding a reporter acquaintance about yourself by sharing it, no strings attached.
2. You don't always have to travel to get in touch with a global tier-1 publication: many of them still keep a network of full-time local correspondents. Identifying and getting in touch with them should always be your priority. Even if your line of business isn't their primary topic, a good, worthy business scoop will still help them co-author a news article with a more specialized colleague from the HQ.
3. Pay attention to the newsletters, like Fortune, Reuters, Axios, or Nuzzel. They have their own editors and reporters, and if your pitch is sound, further phone calls and email exchanges will surely follow.
4. Know and use the power your company's LinkedIn account to reach out to a specific subset of reporters. Take time to prepare unique, concise posts and boost them using the powerful campaign manager.
5. Carefully comb your calendar for already scheduled meetings at major conferences. Take time to reach out in advance and suggest a phone call instead. If it's a hardware product, it could be a good idea to offer a demo over Zoom, especially if you can involve one of the leading product people. With software products, I suggest you prepare all possible stats, figures, and charts and follow this helpful set of guidelines from the TechJPR Facebook group.
Less travelling may be a blessing in disguise if it enables you to go back to email and Twitter. With more online time on your hands means more opportunities to participate in more industry-specific discussions, connecting with even more people -- safely.