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Two ways to gain publicity

By Wal Baker

You know there are two ways to try to gain free publicity: the right way and the wrong way. The right way is more likely to work; the wrong way is not.

If you want publicity, you need to know the difference between the right way and the wrong. The right way is the professional way; the wrong is amateurish.

This is because in gaining publicity you deal with professionals working in the mass media. They are journalists, that is reporters, writers, editors, presenters and the like, working for media outlets of press, radio, television and the internet.

Give these journalists news that is relevant to them and they may have it published; free publicity for you. Give them information they do not want and they will not use it; no coverage for you.

If you give too much of the wrong information to them too often, wasting the time of these busy professionals, they may think poorly of you. They may treat your news releases like spam email and remember you as a kind of spammer. This may spoil your chances of gaining publicity in future.

So the right way to gain publicity is to give journalists news that is relevant to them without information they do not want. That news needs to be based on evidence, facts, statistics, quotes from witnesses, professional opinions, scientific findings and the like. They do not want scientific, technical or bureaucratic jargon, advertising copy, unfounded opinions, misleading information, praise, hype, spin, spiel, superlatives, lies, stunts, gimmicks and so on.

The best way to gain publicity is to give your information to the right journalists in a professionally written news release. Such a news release may best be written by a publicist who has been a journalist.

A qualified and experienced public relations consultant who is a specialist in media relations and publicity and who is also well qualified and experienced as a former journalist working for the mass media, may be your ideal publicist. Such an expert understands which information about you, your business and your products and services is newsworthy. This publicist can write a news release for you and distribute it to those journalists who will find it relevant to their publications. Then the journalists may quickly recognize the newsworthiness of your release and prepare it with little rewriting or editing for publication.

Some small-business executives and professionals write news releases themselves to try to save money. Often they waste their own time and that of the busy journalists who receive the news releases. Doing it yourself can be the most costly and least effective way of gaining publicity.

Unless you run a very small business serving only a local market and you need only publicity in your local newspaper or on community radio once a year or less, it is probably best not to try to do it yourself.

When publicity work is worth doing, it is usually worth doing professionally. Otherwise it may cause you more harm than good, even damaging your credibility and reputation. That is why you may need a good public relations expert to help you form strategies for publicity and to implement suitable tactics to achieve it, with the objective of enhancing your credibility, reputation, brand name and corporate or professional image.

Just as you may be wrong to represent yourself in court instead of hiring a lawyer to represent you, you may be wrong to try to gain publicity yourself instead of hiring a publicist. The mass media can be at least as complex as the law. So you probably need a publicist, and a good one.

A news release written and distributed by a good publicist will usually be published to at least some extent in the press or online. Yet most copies of a news release which has been widely distributed are discarded by many of the journalists who receive them and not edited or published. Many of these discarded releases are written not by amateurs but by corporate publicity officers, public relations consultants or former journalists working as publicists. A news release may be ignored by the media because too much news is competing for too little publishing space or broadcasting time, or because it has been poorly written and so fails to win the attention of a journalist.

Only a good publicist is likely to achieve ongoing publicity for you which is worth more than it costs, which is profitable for you. So to increase your chances of gaining publicity cost effectively, you may need to find and hire the most professional and experienced publicist you can afford - somebody who knows the right way to gain publicity.
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Wal Baker is principal consultant at Wallace Baker Public Relations and has been since he set up this firm in 1984. He is a media expert and publicist who has been accredited by the public relations institute. Before he became a public relations consultant, he was employed as a journalist by News Limited, John Fairfax Group and other media organisations for many years and was a member of the media alliance for journalists.