How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Podcast posted by Lindsay Mecca at Wednesday, March 11, 2009

In PR, you never stop worrying about results. You're always looking for the fresh angle, the cool insight, the clever pitch that converts to clips or sucks in huge new Web traffic.

But we all face that moment when the client is too slammed to get back with what you need right away. The content well is running dry. All of your pitches seem to miss the strike zone. What's a pro to do?

What a client never wants to hear from you is: "Well, I tried to reach you but you were unresponsive," to excuse poor results. No one likes blame shifting, and clients are not paying you to "try to reach them." They are paying you to get results. When you are on the hook for results, and you always are, you have to get creative.

I took a ride on the "Get Creative Express" a few weeks ago with a brand new client when I was looking for angles for pitches. I wasn't yet well versed enough in their industry to create my own content from scratch, and I had a very busy client (who, in case they are reading this, I ADORE) who was slow to respond to my slew of (nagging and urgent) requests for information that day.

The solution? Maybe there was something that their former agency did recently that might spark an idea? I poked around the client's media coverage in the previous months before we started to get an idea of the CEO's voice and his views of a few key issues. I found a PR goldmine in a podcast with the CEO. Put my headphones in, cranked up the volume. Twenty minutes later, I had a page of notes about the dilemma developers face in the cloud.

Next step, I drafted a post for my client's corporate blog based on the CEO's comments in the podcast. When it went live, I pitched it to reporters who had recently covered the cloud and/or application development.

The result? In two weeks, I closed on five briefings and five clips (and one pending feature story) with online coverage that reached an audience of more than a million people. Yes, and a very happy client. Not bad for the first two weeks on a new account.

It's too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you simply don't know enough to generate good content (I get it - I'm a Human Biology major working in high-tech PR). Just remember that being independent and proactive when it comes to finding and evaluating pitch angles will pay big dividends. Don't make the mistake of waiting for your clients' responses to your questions -- the content you need is out there already. Find it and start pitching.