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14 Jan 2010
This is a continuation of the post on 11/1/2010 on how to take your thought leadership position to market.
I spoke about six critical actions I believe need to be engaged in order to achieve this. I have covered the first three (1. Make it a strategic business imperative; 2. Know your audience; 3. Share openly) and today I will cover the fourth:
- Cultivate the media
The two remaining will be covered in subsequent posts, they are:
- Write and speak about your campaign
- Pump up your content online
Action 4: Cultivate the media
While in many cases the media will be an important conduit for your thought leadership ideas, there are some campaigns that do not necessarily need media support.
For those that do, it is important you cultivate your relationships with key media players who cover the topic or sector that your thought leadership campaign addresses. By following the tracking advice in the START IP methodology you should have already done your homework, scanning the newspapers, magazines, ezines and the web for what has been written about a particular topic. In so doing, you would have identified the journalists and bloggers who are covering this or related issues.
Most in-house PR practitioners, marketing departments, PR consultancies and advertising agencies have access to online media search tools. Some of the search engines also have some useful search tools and once you have plugged in your search terms you will automatically receive any online articles mentioning those terms.
Thought leadership benefits most from exclusive rather than shotgun approach
Thought leadership requires an exclusive media approach rather than a shotgun approach. Your media campaign should take into account the audience/s you are trying to reach and which media is most appropriate for that audience. As a result of this focus and your previous searches on this issue, you may find that you need to work with only a handful of journalists.
Ideally these journalists will be looking for exclusives. If you are using research to drive your thought leadership content you may want to break it into a number of different angles and take those angles individually to the targeted media. Let them know up front they are getting the exclusive angle on this story.
Importantly, the work you do with the media, the articles they write or interviews they broadcast, the information you supply them, the backgrounders and fact sheets you draft for them should not be all that you do to reach your audiences. This same information needs to be made web friendly and placed on your website so that interested audiences using the search terms covered by your thought leadership topic can easily find the information.
The media room of a company website is often the most visited landing page.
Why?
Because the media section is where people go for the most up-to-date company information. In his great book ‘The new rules of marketing and PR’, David Meerman Scott points out that your media room should not be designed only for the media. It should be designed with each of your ‘buyers’ in mind.
Once you start achieving success with your media campaign, you can start using the coverage internally through other media, such as your intranet, notice boards and meetings. This will help champion your thought leadership campaign internally – an area often overlooked but one which can generate enormous goodwill, help drive value programs and generate a wave of pride and support from within the company.
11 Responses to “Media tips on taking your thought leadership campaign to market”
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Nice looking blog you have here. The theme is awesome, great color combination.
Max I take all forms of compliment – even on the look of my blog. Cheers
Thank you very much, I did really like the response to my thread, and post replies have been really awesome. It could have never been better. Even hiring someone for this could have never met the experience all posters here have, thanks for saving dollars and adding really good information to this post to make things really easy and workable for us. Thanks again and great work.
Glad it helped Dane – I love the fact that you were able to apply some of this and it made a real difference to the bottom line.
I have recently been an avid admirer of your web site for some time but not actually provided a single thing back, I really hope to alter that later on with an increase of talk.Thanks for another new addition to the site.
Whilst I understand your position I can not actually accept what you have said here.
Gilberto, you’re not alone – not everybody will agree with what I say and that’s the beauty of blogging, being able to discuss different views with people like yourself. I’d be interested in why you don’t accept what I have said and whether it relates to what you have witnessed or experienced. Keep those comments rolling.
Cheers
Craig
Jack, great to hear from you and I would really appreciate you sharing your comments with me. Don’t be shy, give it a go.
Cheers
Craig
[...] it’s helping to share a company vision, deliver a thought leadership viewpoint or disclose the benefits of a new product, storytelling is an important skill in public [...]
How you find ideas for articles, I am always lack of new ideas for articles. Some tips would be great
Most of the ideas come from experience and from reading. I read lots of articles and books and very often these give me inspiration to pick up on an issue and write about it. Good luck.