Comunicar Valor

Cuando nos graduamos, memorizamos y repetimos algunos de los consejos académicos que en clase se enlistaban como “un top ten de las cosas que hay que evitar cuando se habla con un periodista”.
De esta forma, nosotros –perfectos recitadores- repetíamos una y otra vez esta suerte de mandamiento con la esperanza de no cometer ningún paso en falso y así garantizar nuestro “instantáneo” éxito.
No obstante lo anterior, en el día a día de nuestro ejercicio hay momentos en los que podríamos llegar a correr el riesgo de olvidarnos de estas directrices básicas. Es por eso que Ben Silverman (*) nos lo recuerda:

• Keep de Email headline simple.
• Get straight to the point. A simple greeting and then tell me the news. You've got to capture the journalist's attention within the first two sentences or else the pitchis going into the trash. The key to nailing it is putting the news up-front.
• Don't include quotes. This isn't a press release; it's a pitch and it's not for publication.
• Don´t attach any files. People do not want unsolicited attachments in their inbox.
• Target your pitch appropriately. I still get fashion-related pitches but I'm no longer a journalist and Inever covered fashion.
• Don't leave a voicemail message. You won't get a return call. Call in the morning or just after lunch. If it's a TV producer or newspaper journalist, he or she has a daily deadline in the afternoon/evening.
• If you don't know the journalist, say, "Hi, David, my name is Jane Doe from JD PR." I don't like when someone calls and says, "Hey, Ben, it's Jane Done from JD PR." I don't know Jane Doe and I don't appreciate her acting as if we're familiar with each other. Semantics, I know, but it's the little things that matter.
• Be brief and to the point. Tell the journalist that you're calling to pitch a story and why you feel he or she would be interested in it. Don't just launch into the pitch. A phone conservation is a two-way street, whereas an email pitch begins as a one-way street.
• Have an email ready to send the pitch recipient. If I call a journalist with a pitch, I've got the follow-up email ready to go before I make the call. I do this so that if the journalist asks me for additional info, I can get it into his or her inbox while we're still on the phone or just after our conversation has ended. If you wait an hour to send the "more information" email, the journalist has most likely moved onto something else and forgotten about you already.
• If the journalist listens to the pitch and sounds interested, but does not request any additional information at the time, wait until the next morning (if the story isn't time-sensitive) to send a follow-up email. This puts the story back on the journalist's radar. I like to send these emails around 11:00 AM because I feel by that time the journalist has gotten into the office, looked at his othere mails and is figuring out what to write that day or work on.
• Speak in a cool, calm and confident voice. Sounding excitable or rushed doesn't help you get your point across.
• Keep pitching. Don't put all your eggs in one basket thinking a certain journalist or media outlet is going to cover your story. If you get someone on the phone and he or she turns down the pitch, ask the journalist if he or she thinks it would be appropriate to pitch another journalistat the same media outlet.
• Make sure you understand lead times for magazines. Most magazines have lengthy lead times (weeks to months), so if you've got a feature or not-too-timely pitch that's part of a larger campaign then you'll need to plan appropriately.