OoO this week. Batch of links replaced by a recent PR win
I’m flying home from Paris at the moment, after two weeks away. It’s the first time in my memory that I took off this much time at once. A combination of factors led up to it, but the most prevailing one is simply that I could. So I did. In my absence this week, I have elected to offer you a glimpse into some of my work from last month. Here’s a story about how PR works, modern-day.
The key strength of being in-house at a company rather than a consultant to be a hired gun is that you work for the business. Too often, PR people neglect to realize that this is the superpower available to them. Pay attention and take notes while in meeting with others, outside of PR or even marketing, and use the access you have to develop more and better ideas. You become a stronger thinker through immersion. Take it what’s happening elsewhere and bring those insights and impressions back to your function.
I stopped pitching reporters in a formal sense last summer. Yet, I’m still tracking to my goals measured on PR coverage for our portfolio. That’s only possible because I am weaponizing what I have uniquely, which is volume of companies I’ve been speaking with, and turning the relationship around with reporters. I don’t tell them what they need to know about my assignments, rather I ask reporters what they’re working on or looking into, and then I try to match sources to their needs.
Not every reporter takes the calls, or enjoys speaking with me. But enough of them send me their active needs that I have inbound what I used to look for outbound. It makes everyone’s jobs easier once they self-identify what they’re after. I’m the only PR person in the game who is willing to hustle on their behalf for sources that match who live outside of my immediate assignments. Because even if those press hits don’t land in my bucket, those reporters will be more inclined to send me more of their requests later on that could indeed meet what I am hearing directly from founders and builders.
On a call with a reporter who’d recently taken over at Inc. on a beat at the intersection of startups and venture, I asked point-blank what he was starting to look into. He said he wanted to hear people talk about money. I took the liberty of repeating to him in conversation what I had heard so many times before in team meetings about how the real underlying lesson of the past decade of consumer businesses is that they raised too much money. And how we had deluded ourselves into thinking the companies with the most in the bank had a greater chance of thriving longer-term, when in reality it might have been the opposite.
The reporter emailed me two hours later asking to speak to our managing director on that topic. Then he asked for a portfolio company to share in first-person their experience past and present in raising less money than they set out for. The story ran at the close of July. It wouldn’t have come up if not for my suggestion on that call. Half of the published piece is about us and them. I get to count this press hit twice in my materials. You can read it here (with an Incognito window to bypass the paywall).
We will likely hit this same message in other publications later on this year, since it’s a strong one and very much caters to what we do. It’s a counter-intuitive take, yet still a very sensible one. And it’s something that others in our portfolio, too, can and will speak to, whether on our behalf or toward their own narrative arcs.
This is how it’s done.