How can you find exactly the right journalist in Asia for your story? One solution is Telum like it

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James and I'm really delighted to have Tim Williamson joining me today. He's the Asia Pacific Managing Director of Telomedia and Tim's originally from the UK but now living in Singapore. Welcome, Tim.

It's great to be here, thank you for having me, Jim.

Now tell us about telemedia. How does telemedia help businesses to get noticed?

So, um, let's go back to first principles of PR and marketing for a second. And when you're a business of whatever size and you've decided that you want to talk about something exciting that you've been doing and to publicize it, there's nothing worse than putting together a press release and spending hours and lots of effort and blasting it out into the outside world, fully expecting to get the phone ringing off the hook with lots of journalistic interest, and there's just crickets. Nothing really happens. And the reason is because there's lots of other businesses doing the same thing, and there's journalists who can be receiving press releases that aren't really within their interest areas or their beats. And what Telimedia is all about is essentially connecting people, organizations, companies, business owners, PR people who've got something that they'd like to say and get out there with the right journalists and content creators and earned media who are producing content on those particular areas, those topics, those products. So it's about— it's a platform to find the right people, discover the right people, fundamentally to talk to, and a community really, where we try and encourage great interaction between PR people and between the content creators, the journalists. And we do that with a bunch of different ways, but fundamentally it's sort of an internet system where you can look up the journalists that you need to engage with and find out through lots of rich content whether or not that journalist might be the person that you want to talk to.

And Tim, you know, Asia Pacific is a huge area and also diverse in terms of languages and publication types. How many media contacts do you have and what sort of reach does Telemedia offer to its clients?

Well, the numbers change a lot, but we're in the very high tens of thousands of journalists and it moves around. At the moment during COVID we've seen some quite significant changes in in media and the structure of the media, but it's thousands and thousands of journalists. And really, that's part of the beauty of a business like ours in Asia, because in the Asia-Pacific region, you've got extremely diverse media, you've got different languages, you've got geographies from Australia and New Zealand, which we cover all the way through to China and Taiwan. And it's really hard. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. It's hard to know who to engage with. And I joined TELUM, I was actually one of the very first clients of TELUM many, many years ago when I moved to Singapore about 7 years ago or so to set up a PR agency. And for me, it was a godsend, even in the early days when there were not so many, we just didn't have as much data as we have now. It was a window on the Asia-Pacific media that otherwise would have been extremely hard for me to find.

And having been a client, you know, ourselves as ESOS PR, as you say, Talem Media has been this amazing sort of resource, this fountain of content. And also, if I remember rightly, from a language point of view, Talem is covering English and Mandarin and Thai. Just tell us, in terms of if you're working across the regions, can you— can I search and talk to media in different languages actually on the platform, or is it all in one language?

Yeah, so we have a platform. We have a number of different services we provide, if you like, but the core of it is a platform. And we provide newsletters for the journalist community and the PR community about journalist moves and PR moves, and we provide job newsletters and all of those kinds of things. But on the platform, you're right, we've got multiple languages. We have Bahasa, we have traditional Chinese, we have simplified Chinese so that we can cover Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. We have Thai, and we have— and I think this is probably one of the things that makes us distinct— is that we have country teams, we have local language teams for each of our markets. So if you imagine how you might have done this in the old— more traditionally, in the days of the little black book and then on the Excel spreadsheet, you would literally have to have teams of people constantly updating information about journalists. And that would be just simply contact information. It wouldn't be what their preferences were, what they were looking to write about next, when to contact them. But we've got teams for all of our main countries that are talking to the journalists every day. And they've actually got KPIs, believe it or not, to network with journalists and to network with PR people and to make sure that everything's not just up to date, but really actionable and really useful. always sort of keeping an eye out like good PR people do for, you know, what's that bit of information that somebody else might be interested in and might help them to get a piece of coverage or, you know, to engage better with that journalist.

So Tim, that sounds, you know, really a rich, rich sort of resource then for people. Which companies are, or which kind of companies, is it big companies, small companies, only agencies using Telum?

There isn't a typical Telum client. It's the full gamut. And we cover all sectors as well. So when we look at things, we've got sort of small freelance operators, we've got startups, we've got huge MNCs, we've got most of the— I'd say PR agencies, large, small, and government organizations. Literally anybody who wants to engage with the media, I think, will be a Telum client. a Telum customer.

And what about workflow? So from a practical point of view, you know, on some of these sites I can find a media contact, but I've got to download it and send it from my Outlook. Some I go on and it's a full ecosystem of replies. Could you share with it from a workflow point of view, is it like a complete environment, a complete workflow system, or is it just parts of the problem that PR people are solving?

That's a really interesting question. So we believe in sort of meaningful engagement between you and the journalists. So we don't really want, or we don't exist to spam email thousands of journalists with sort of irrelevant content. We want to make sure it's the right content. So from a workflow perspective, we're there, We have very rich search information right from the start of when you're planning a campaign to make sure that you're targeting the right journalists and putting together the list of the right journalists. And within that, we've got recommendation engines, we've got keyword searches, multiple different kinds of keyword searches. We also have, then we've got live list updaters so that next time you log in, it will say, well, this journalist has moved, or you might want to think about these journalists, so that you don't need to go through and manually check your list time and time again. And then you can, through the system, you can set up your press release to go out as a BCC or whatever, however you want to do it, but it comes from you. And then the final component to it, which I think is incredibly powerful, is it's the whole ethos of our company is about networking and relationships, and you can track your relationships with the journalists that you're engaging with. And you might want to do that from a compliance perspective. So you might want to keep interactions if you're in financial services because you want there to be a record, or there might be a sort of a crisis or an issue. You might want to do that because you've got a temporary person working on your PR, and you want to keep a record of what the interactions were with journalists. When that person's moved on. And you might just simply want to do it so that you can have multiple people looking at the latest RSVP lists for the great party, or virtual party, of course, during COVID So you might want to do that as well. But so the essence, we have that sort of ecosystem within Telem, but we also, you know, it's a very active thing. So when you log into Telem, you'll see the latest media requests, and these will be live opportunities that journalists have said to us, look, I'm looking for this story and I need some, you know, I need some something within the next week. You'll get that when you log in, and you'll get it in our newsletters as well. So we try and take care of that component. What we don't do is some of the other areas like media monitoring, for example. We leave that to others. We're quite focused on doing what we do and trying to do it really well.

So what would be sort of a typical time that companies are using Using television? Because often, you know, the agencies are using it kind of full-time, but do you see any peaks or troughs around COVID, for example, any particular back-to-work messaging or any fluctuations now?

It's interesting. So I think if anybody's thinking about engaging with the media, I would say that's the time to get tell them, and perhaps to get a PR agency as well if you have the money to do it, because of course PR agencies bring a huge amount of value to their clients, value and insights, and we can't replicate, and we wouldn't want to replicate that. We're complementary to that. So when you start those programs off, that's, I think, it should be a foundation stone. It's kind of, you figure out really what you want to say and what you want to achieve and what the business objective are, and then a key pillar of that is, well, who should we be talking to? And then how do we build up relationships? Because as you know, and I know, having worked in PR agencies, you need to build those relationships with journalists over time. That's often where some of the best coverage comes from, is when they know you, and it doesn't always happen overnight. It's a relationship and a long-term game.

Now here's one question for you about compliance. You mentioned compliance. What about, you know, if I'm dealing with a journalist for a client, all the work I'm doing with them, does that mean like a competitor, like either another agency or like my client's competitor, is going to see what that journalist is doing? I mean, are there some sort of walls around— I have a conversation with this journalist, Does it kind of get updated so that—

No, only you can see it. So only you can see it, although in some cases we would have obviously PR agencies that would want to see what each other are working on within the agency. And in some instances, we may find that a client, a PR agency and their clients want to work together and see who's working on what. But beyond that, I mean, we can't see, nobody can see. It has to be secure. I mean, all of All of our business is based on trust at the end of the day. We try and provide a lot of benefits to our 2 sets of customers. That's the PR people who are trying to market themselves, the business owners, the PR, in-house PRs, the agencies. And our second set of customers, which are the journalists and the content creators and the bloggers and the podcasters. And so what we're trying to do is to create a very a lot of value for them, and in return they place quite a lot of trust in us. And we make sure that everybody hopefully gets a better interaction out of it, so the journalist doesn't get inundated with irrelevant pitches and requests that they're not interested in, and the companies that are engaging with them are able to do so with a degree of insight and forethought and information that really helps.

So here's a question for you. I'm not sure whether you're allowed to say this. Can you give us an idea of how many press releases are being sent out through Telum, say, per month? We talk about that volume.

No, we can't. Yeah, we can't tell. We just— we made a deliberate choice that we don't send the actual press release through Telum, so it doesn't go through us. Um, it goes from you. And this goes back to that point about media engagement. We firmly believe that that personal touch is very, very important. Oh, I see. So you can set it up, and you can do it at a click of a button very quickly. It took 2 clicks of a button, you can have your distribution list set up, and you can send it, but it comes from you. So we don't see the number of press releases. And also, I mean, a lot of what we're trying to do and help people with is not so much the kind of the broad brush press release distribution, which of course they can do, as well, but also finding that one journalist and thinking, well, you know, putting the pieces together and coming up with a great pitch and an angle and just sending the note or the WeChat message or the whatever it is and getting some publicity.

So just to that point then, you've got the social media contact details then as well, you mentioned?

So we have the main sort of contact details, the main social media, anything business-related fundamentally. So of course you'll know from China that, you know, WeChat, and then for Southeast Asia it can be all sorts. It depends. In the Philippines, we have a team in the Philippines where a lot is done over Facebook, and in Singapore and in Australia, LinkedIn. Twitter in Australia is extremely important. So all of those components too.

Okay, and then presumably I can see the profile of the journalist and download it and share that with the client? Because they wanted the briefing book to see who we're setting up an appointment for them with.

Yeah, so if you're— and this can be if you're a business owner or you're a PR agency and you want to make sure that the CEO— in the case of PR agency, your CEO spokesperson is as fully briefed as they can be, then they can see the biographical and relevant biographical information and where this journalist has worked and what they've covered and all of those nice things. But also there are interviews with the journalist, there might be video interviews with the journalist, so that you can pick up some snippets from there, or they can explain what they're most recently interested in. There are, as I say, media requests, and we have a lot of surveys. What time of day do you like to be contacted? Do you like to go out for coffees or lunch? Are you able to take gifts or not? All of those kinds of things. So yeah, we try and put all of the good stuff in there so that you've got— there's plenty to work with. So you don't go into that interaction blind, you go in there well briefed.

Yeah, sounds like it. And in terms of Telum, there are some other services, as we know, around the world. What would you say is the number one reason that Telum is unique?

I think there's a couple of reasons why we're unique. One is that we're certainly in APAC, we're the only company doing what we do. I think the second part is this connecting people. We think of ourselves as connectors, and we do that not just through the system, but through the kind of rich ecosystem that we try and provide everybody with. And that means that we give journalists newsletters on a weekly basis, and several times a week sometimes. Journalists get job information. We have PR news for the PR community, so they can see who's gone and where and what. We do lots of in-person meetings for our subscribers, and now of course we do lots of virtual networking and meetings for our subscribers as well. So we like to think that if you subscribe to Telum, you join us as much for the network as you do for the information that we provide, and it might be the connections that get you your next job or get you your next great employee as well as As well as, of course, helping you to reach out to the media.

Fantastic resource. Now, Tim, obviously the million-dollar question is, what does this cost? What does the telemedia service cost, and how do you break that down for clients?

Yeah, so it entirely depends on what you want to do. It's pretty flexible. At its base, you buy regions. We've got 3 main regions. We have Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. So you can buy a region, and then you can buy seats. So that's If you've got a lot of people, like a big company or a big PR agency or multiple offices, you can buy more seats. So basically, for one region would be, I think it's around about $690 a month, and you get an annual subscription for that, and then it depends what else you want to do. And within that, you get the journalist data, the newsletters, everything that you need from that one region. And also, frankly, we try and give you the information that you need if you're in Asia and you're looking to project to the outside world, the top-tier financial journalists or the top tech publications outside of Asia, or likewise, if you're in London or if you're in New York and you're looking at Asia, we try and make sure that we provide you with sort of insights and information to help you navigate this as you said, very diverse, large, vibrant region.

Great, Tim, and you're in the heart of it, and part of my heart is still in Singapore and Asia. Tell me, how can people find you if you want to get in touch with you?

talemmedia.com. So we have a website on talemmedia.com. We're on social media. You'll see in there— on there as well, you will see some of our content, interviews with journalists and editors from around, from everywhere, from New Zealand and Australia through to China. We had a piece on this week about expat journalists in China on WeChat. We have all different kinds of information, so you'll find some of that on the website and on social channels, but telomedia.com.

Tim Williamson, Managing Director of Telomedia Asia Pacific, thank you so much for joining us on Speak PR today.

Thank you very much, Tim. Now, I'm a big fan of Speak PR, so thank you for having me on.

Great. We're a big fan of telemedia. So for those of you that haven't heard this before, you can find Tim and a number of podcasts at eastwestpr.com, and you can also find them on Spotify and on iTunes and Google Podcasts and others. So thank you for listening to this episode, and in the meantime, I wish you the best of health A profitable business, and that you keep on communicating, quite probably using the telemedia database.