Social Media Archives | G2 Communications Inc.-Medical Practice Marketing

May 25 2016

Finding Joy in Work that Resonates: Q&A with book publicist Helena Brantley

Helena Brantley is a book publicist who founded Red Pencil Publicity + Marketing in Oakland. Helena left the PR agency, marketing and advertising world and tripped into book publicity, first working as a publicity director for HarperCollins and Nolo Press before hanging out her own shingle. She has had the opportunity to work with world-renowned spiritual leaders like Deepak Chopra, as well as academics like Bart Ehrman and Stephen Prothero.

Helena finds special joy in promoting the compelling stories of memoirists. She has pitched guests who have appeared on Fresh Air, The Oprah Winfrey Show, CBS Sunday Morning, and the Daily Show. She has also managed the book campaigns for a string of New York Times best sellers.

It seems like everyone is writing a book these days, so I sat down with Helena to talk about what that means as a book publicist in the ever changing world of public relations.

What gets you up in the morning?

I don’t sleep well so usually it’s a mix of things I worry about related to being a wife, parent, daughter, sister and running a business. More enjoyably, I often awake to pithy one-liners, ideas for an email subject line, a pitch, or most recently, I awake to Twitter and Instagram post ideas! I love what I do, and I’m excited to get up in the morning on most days. I help people who have spent years researching and crafting something important to say. I take seriously the responsibility of helping to carry out their work into the world and trying to engage people—media and readers directly. Even if I won the lottery I’d still promote books and book festivals.

How do you select projects?

I have to in some way be interested in the promise of a book. Even if I don’t agree with the premise or thesis, it still has to resonate. Otherwise I could work in-house somewhere. I can do it. I have done it. But I find it very hard to get excited about something that doesn’t interest me. I also only work on nonfiction titles and most enjoy working with academics who write accessibly.

What does a successful publicity project look like?

It starts with a written plan: book publicity is to me like running a campaign with a beginning, middle, and end. Without a plan the people perish; book publicists too! Success to me is when even if the campaign didn’t sell the number of books desired, or result in all of the desired media coverage, the publisher and author feels like their time and money was used well. Like many publicists across industry, I acknowledge that it’s harder to secure national print, which is in my opinion what drives all else. What is also true is that there are a lot of new tools and tactics to apply the fundamentals of publicity. That’s exciting. It also takes time to learn these new tools.

I’m working on a campaign for BIPOLAR FAITH by Dr. Monica A Coleman, publishing in July. I’m setting up a 5-7 city book tour, promoting the tour in each regional market where we’ll contact local media and schedule readings at book venues and churches. I’m also pitching national media across mediums and helping to secure the endorsements. And we’re working on social media: I will tweet excerpts from the book, and engage with the author and others relevant to this topic. The author is also live blogging using Periscope, a Twitter app.

What are your views on self-publishing? What advice do you have for lesser known authors looking for a book publicist?

There are a lot of people who see value in self-publishing a book, and it’s great for people who find readers for their books. In my experience it is very hard to get a book deal with publishers.

In my experience, people who self-publish their books with very few exceptions need marketers, not book publicists. Unless you’re someone who is well known and has a platform, the majority of news outlets are less likely to run stories. I also think self-publishers see more value creating well-produced events and working with relevant associations and organizations on speaking engagements. If you don’t have a plan on paper for how you will market and promote the book, the project probably won’t succeed in the ways desired.

What’s your perspective on social media?

It’s a kiss and a curse. The challenge for me is understanding what is worth the investment of time and what is not. For me, Twitter is. Facebook ads are worth it – I also selectively promote my projects on my Facebook page. My personal feeling is that with few exceptions it is a waste of time and money for an author to pay someone to manage their social media presence. I think it’s a missed opportunity to learn how to stumble and fail at first, as we all do in learning social media.

If only to learn that it doesn’t work, it’s worth the pain of learning something new and especially if you are someone trying to engage people in new thoughts and ideas. In my experience the principles of publicity haven’t change: we just have more tools and tactics.

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Helena is the publicist for the Bay Area Book Festival, June 4-5 in downtown Berkeley. If you’re a reader, this is a personal invitation from Helena to attend the festival featuring nearly 300 authors from around the region and the world. Details at baybookfest.org or follow #baybookfest.

Feb 19 2014

Unshakable Marketing Principles for the Digital Age: Q&A With Marketing Consultant Kathryn Gorges

Kathryn Gorges (pronounced gorgeous!) knows how to spell out the core principles of marketing for companies overwhelmed by the present demands of content strategy: “The most important thing is who you’re targeting and how you’re solving the customer’s problem. You can’t create content for the masses; you need to speak directly to your target segments.”

Gorges is a marketing consultant and Social Marketing Diva with over 17 years experience. She works with brands to increase visibility and nurture customer relationships through web content, social media, email, and event marketing.

I spoke with Gorges to glean insights into how marketers and PR professionals can generate quality customer conversations and relationships in the digital age.

In the midst of constant changes in digital marketing, what are the core, unshakable marketing principles?

KG: We’re still in the middle of a transition where we have these bright shiny objects and we’re not sure how to use them. People are throwing thousands of dollars away on marketing automation and blogging and images, and not knowing what they’re doing.

The truth is, at the heart of everything is still the story. People doing marketing strategy the right way are the ones that lead with the story of how the product or service is really making a difference for people. Out of that, all content is created. The story is the core, the touchstone.

Companies need to figure out, what is the central narrative? People are developing all kinds of content and wasting money because the content doesn’t match up to that central story. It’s the story and behind that is the customer.

There’s a problem of focus these days. The focus is on lead generation and brand awareness and putting all that into these tools. But where you make money is with repeat business. Otherwise it’s a transaction. If you don’t have real customers and repeat customers then you’re not building relationships with those customers.

It’s not about one-way messaging. What is the reality like when someone calls your company for service? If you know your job is to give them an excellent experience but the customer gets put on hold for 20 minutes then it doesn’t matter what your message is. Companies can’t rely on the artifice of messaging and phone scripts.”

What value does social media provide in all this? Lead gen? something else?

KG: Customers talk to other customers. They can do a search and find out what others are saying about you. It’s all out there. Millennials have come through the recession and are really skeptical about vendors’ promises and one-way marketing. They want real relationships. They are going to build that relationship on top of the trust that gets passed on by knowing how other customers feel about your product or service, especially from people they know. That’s first, then the relationship with the company follows.

That means the real experience people are having is more important than the messaging. Customers won’t form a relationship with a brand because of the brand’s messaging. They want to know, ‘does this make a difference for me?’

Today there are so many places to find out about a product or service before customers even talk to a company. They want other people’s experiences first. Once they’ve seen that then they are ready to see what the company says about itself.”

Why does content strategy matter?

A content strategist figures out how to create a bigger view (and greater visibility) on the web. This person develops a cohesive strategy that in every way carries forward the narrative, with different pieces of content for different platforms. Companies need a content strategy where derivatives of the content are published on the companies’ social platforms as well as 3^rd party media platforms.

Derivative content includes: press releases, infographics, blog entries, bylined articles/op eds, social channel entries, etc. You can get your content in front of people directly but it delivers real value when you have a direct relationship with the customer. Now you have this whole other mechanism of getting content out there.

Knowing how to develop and produce the most compelling content; knowing what resonates is now vital to marketing success. Marketing people haven’t had to produce this content before. There wasn’t this big content machine.

So there is an ever demanding content generation machine and your potential customers are consuming that content. But there’s also Google – companies need to get decent search results to have social authority. There’s this crushing need for generating content and putting it out on company websites. But the company needs to be a subject matter expert, not a media company.

Don’t lose sight of the 2-way relationship with the customer. That isn’t going away any time soon.

Images:

Kathryn Gorges: Kathryn Gorges

Feb 06 2014

How to Bond with Today’s Freelance Journalist: a Q&A with Healthcare and Business Writer James Ritchie

With hybrid expertise on the business and healthcare beats, James Ritchie has earned himself job security at a time when journalism keeps changing. “Business journalism is never going away,” he explains. “People need business information to make decisions.” What’s more, Ritchie says, “I have a broad background in covering healthcare; that’s my competitive advantage.”

Ritchie has more than eight years of experience covering healthcare, including medical practices, health IT, insurance companies and hospitals. After working as a staff reporter for the Cincinnati Business Courier, Ritchie became a full-time freelance writer for a variety of media and corporate clients. He continues to write for American City Business Journals in several capacities.

I asked Ritchie about the role of PR in his day to day work as a journalist.

How has journalism changed for you in the last 3 to 5 years?

“The pace has changed. Throughout the media world, you see a lot more short pieces on the web to break or update news. Headlines need to scream, ‘Read me!’ Quite a few stories can be told with infographics and bullet points. It’s harder to get and hold people’s attention, and if you’re planning to write a long narrative piece at many publications the bar is very high. It had better be a remarkably interesting story.

“Of course, it depends on your audience too. In the traditional daily newspaper you have sports, business, news, comics, etc. But now a lot of people are reading about what they’re interested in and tuning out nearly everything else. If I own a restaurant, I’ll read a trade publication on restaurants. And if you’re writing on business and particularly in specialized areas – in my case, usually healthcare – you’re more likely to publish the stories of 700 words or more, because the audience is hooked by virtue of the topic.

“But there’s still no room to be boring.”

What makes a great story?

“What I’m going for is something inherently useful to the reader. They’ll take the information and do something with it; it’s not a passing interest.

“There are a lot of ways to tell good stories. News today is often recursive, where one outlet is quoting – and linking to – another. If you can show your readers something interesting or useful in that way then you’ve done them a service. For investigative stories, you often see data journalism, where you’re trying to pick out trends from a big data set. If you can analyze the databases, you can tell stories that you couldn’t have gotten to in the past.

“But there’s still a place for going out and looking people in the eye and getting stories. We have to be careful not to move too far away from that. You need humans to tell the stories.”

How often do you deal with PR professionals?

“Quite a lot. There are many cases where PR people help me to get in touch with executives, physicians or other sources in their organizations. And I listen to their pitches as long as they’re relevant to something I might write.

“Of course, you can’t respond to everything. A healthcare reporter shows up on all kinds of lists. When I was in a staff reporter job, I would probably get 200 emails a day. But most of them wouldn’t be relevant to me. They may have personalized the email with my name, but it was going to a whole lot of people. One time I got a pitch about a health screening van in a parking lot in Montana. I would delete that.

“Things that are pitched to me specifically, I read.

“I like Help A Reporter Out (HARO); I put queries out. If it’s a hot topic you get a lot of response both from PR contacts and directly from sources.”

What can PR people do to improve their relationship with you?

“Probably the main thing is to focus on the person-to-person relationship. Build a social bond. You might not be best friends, but you can position yourself so your email gets read. Send a sentence or two. Say, ‘I have a story I think you might like.’

“If you can provide an exclusive story that’s in line with what the publication does, that helps. Journalists work hard for exclusives. If a PR person says, ‘I’m going to give this to you first,’ that’s of interest. Barring that, at least bring a new angle.”

Do you value the PR-Journalism relationship?

I value the relationship. If you call an executive at a hospital or large company, in many cases they’ll refer you back to a PR person. The PR person can often get you the access you need. The second thing: They’re there, and people internally are feeding them stories that you might not hear about otherwise.”

James Ritchie image: provided by James Ritchie

Jan 22 2014

Healthcare PR Advice from Editor Donald Tepper

Donald Tepper is editor of PT in Motion, a publication for members of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA). PT in Motion covers relevant legislation and association news, and “discussion of professional issues and ideas in physical therapy practice.” G2Comm works with a wide range of healthcare providers so I talked to Tepper to get his take on working with PR professionals.

Tepper provides some sage advice for PR folks who want to impress editors by delivering useful and valuable stories.

Know Your Story Inside and Out

Tepper has encountered PR pros who know virtually nothing about their own products or company beyond the press release. “If I’m interested in pursuing a story, I find it frustrating to ask basic questions and the PR person knows absolutely nothing,” says Tepper. “They can’t clarify anything in the press release or speak to anything beyond what’s in it.”

“A lot of PR people think their main function is to pitch. Trouble is they don’t know what to do next. They don’t know how to tailor a pitch to a particular news outlet.” It helps if PR reps have some honest curiosity and interest about what they’re pitching. Don’t just do a robo call.”

Know My Story Too

Tepper once worked in PR. “When I was on the PR end, reporters would call to ask questions; they knew the subject and the publication and I knew theirs. He doesn’t expect PR people to be experts on his publication but knowing Tepper’s story means knowing what’s relevant to his readers. “I may get a pitch about a chiropractor who offers a product or service but—because the focus is on the chiropractor—it’s not relevant to my physical therapy readers. But if the product helps PTs do their job, I’m interested. Tell me why it’s relevant.”

Know What Makes a Story Valuable

“Why should our readers care?” questions Tepper. “If [PR pros] can answer that, I love it. The size and exposure of your company is not important; the topic and angle you’re pitching is. Pitch me an interesting topic that readers haven’t read before; nuggets of useful advice.

Value for PTs means information that helps them operate their businesses better. For example, “we would write about what questions you should ask when evaluating EMR [electronic medical records] systems. Or concept pieces such as ‘What is Crowdsourcing?’ Both have relevance for PTs.”

If you’re pitching a product, the same value criteria apply. “One inventor developed a new cane – Swiss army knife of canes — that found its way into a larger article on inventors. We wrote about how the inventor came up with the idea, then how the product was developed and commercialized. That type of article goes over well.”

Know What Journalist’s Look For

Journalists are always looking for credible and knowledgeable sources. Make your pitch attractive by providing a source “who is willing to be quoted and talks beyond yes and no answers.”

“We prefer to talk to clinical people at smaller companies. More productive interviews have been with clinicians who’ve founded and grown their own practices. They have both a business and clinical perspective.”

Highlighting contrarian points of view is also important to journalistic integrity. Tepper uses multiple methods to identify diverse sources, including social media platforms. “We’ve had articles where we’ll do basic online research and turn up great sources that way. We also have an editorial advisory group…[and] rely on APTA staff specialists.” If your sources understand the POV you bring to a larger story, you can make it easier for journalists to integrate their voices into their articles.

Know How to Write

Don’t let weak writing stand in the way of your story. “Many of the news releases and announcements I receive are not well written,” says Tepper. “If it’s poorly written or has grammatical errors, it reflects poorly on the message of the release. I recognize that releases are written to please the client, but it would be nice if PR people attempted to inform the client that if changes were made to the release it would make it far more effective.”

Good grammar is the minimum. To really stand out, you need strong, compelling language as well. “Too many releases use ‘PR language’ with terms such as revolutionary, extraordinary, and cutting-edge.” Cliches make readers tune out. Grab editors’ attention with clear, fresh language that explains the specific value of your story.

Think Before You Pitch

Tepper’s bottom line: “PR professionals need to understand that PR is more than pitching stories.” Before blasting editors, know the details, context, value, and interest of your story.

Image provided by Donald Tepper

Nov 12 2013

How to Build Trust with a Health & Science Journalist: Insights from Ivan Oransky

Ivan Oransky is VP and global editorial director of MedPageToday, and a former executive editor of Reuters Health. He also co-founded the blog Retraction Watch, founded Embargo Watch, and served as managing editor, online, at Scientific American, and deputy editor at The Scientist.

Oransky gave me his candid opinions on PR professionals, and allowed me to share them with you. The health journalist pulls no punches, while offering constructive advice that may help your pitches make it to a choice media outlet.

Do Your Research

“What bugs me is PR people not bothering to find me and follow me so they can figure out what I’m interested in,” says Oransky. “I have my own blogs and I tweet regularly; it’s not that hard to find me.” The surest sign you’ll be ignored by him? You email him an irrelevant press release.

“I get releases about country music!” he says. “I get about 300 emails a day; 200 are from PR people who send out press releases using the Howitzer approach. They are automatically discredited. They can’t possibly know what I cover if they’re sending me press releases via email that I haven’t asked for; 99% of the releases I get are irrelevant.”

Get Focused

Expertise in one field indicates integrity. In Oransky’s view, “The most credible PR people tend to be the ones who work at boutique firms and have taken the time to figure out what I care about. They tend to only focus on one industry. They’ve taken the time to study me – and therefore it’s worth investing my time. I have relationships with these people and with others at larger firms who’ve taken the same approach.”

“Pitch Less, Tip More”

The best way to develop a relationship with Oransky is to share “a study that really fits with what [I] do that no one seems to have yet.” “Pitch less and tip more” is another way of saying, “Help me out; create some trust there.”

This approach benefits PR pros in the long run: “If a clinical study comes out, provide me with a source who doesn’t have a dog in this fight, even if he or she isn’t a client. It may not seem that it directly helps you in the short term, but it means I’ll take your calls next time, when you have something to pitch.”

Show, Don’t Tell

Oransky hates “when PR people use nonsense words like ‘breakthrough study’.” If that’s true, show him, don’t tell him. Backing up your claims is especially important these days, when so many studies are funded by companies. Want to use hyperbole? Better back it up with evidence and credible sources.

While at Reuters Health, Oransky learned that when “the authors have significant relationships with companies, you’ll tend to see more positive results for the companies’ products.” To battle bias, he and his staff had “to put these studies in context.” They would “talk to proponents as well as skeptics of the study” and “look at similar studies from the past.” The more context you can add to your pitch, the more useful it will be to health journalists like Oransky.

Dare to Be the Skeptic

“Having my staff interview your client as a source only when they’ve published a study is missing the other bite of the apple,” he explains. “You can also be the outside expert. We want sources who are skeptical – not just the experts in your company.”

In covering studies we don’t look at journals as high priests of truth. They’re more useful than scientists shouting their alleged breakthroughs from the mountaintop, but we’ve seen how the sausage gets made. There, I mixed several metaphors!”

Think Before You Tweet

“Do not blindly pitch me on Twitter,” Oransky exhorts. ”Sometimes people don’t realize that Twitter is public, and they send me embargoed press releases.” Do, however, use Twitter to learn what Oransky cares about and connect with him via his interests.

When done right, tweeting can be more effective than email: “People who only know to contact me through my work email with the same press release they’re sending to hundreds or thousands of other reporters don’t know me,” he says. “They are self-selecting themselves out of my source gene pool.”

Put Down the Phone

Oransky is blunt: “Don’t ever call me to see if I got your press release. If you’re calling to do that, I can’t imagine we have a relationship. Not only is it a waste of time, but you’ll get a mini rant. It won’t be pleasant.” If you need more convincing, here’s a preview of just how bad a mini-rant might be.

The Relationship Comes First

Oransky’s recommendations echo the advice of most other health care and health IT journalists I’ve interviewed. Overwhelmingly, they are asking PR people to think like a journalist. Get to know Oransky–who’s made himself highly findable–and send him tips he can use. If you’re consistent, without flooding his inbox, you’ll build trust–and he just might give your next pitch a second glance.

[END]

Photo source: MedPage Today