How you can plan a virtual press briefing for international journalists and the digital assets need

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. It's the 25th of January, which means it's my birthday. So happy birthday to me. And I have in the past taken my birthday off, but it's been just too busy today. And we have a busy week this week. And I want to share with you one of the activities that you may want to hold for your company and that we're working on at the moment. And it is a virtual press briefing. Now the virtual press briefing is where we have the media coming to a Zoom room, and we're doing that for the DEWA, which is the Dubai Energy and Water Authority. And they have a global awards to find companies that are innovating in water technologies. And we are hosting for them tomorrow an event with some 15 media from around Asia. And the spokespeople will be in Dubai.

Now, once upon a time, in fact, even just last April, I would fly to Dubai to manage a press briefing for a client.

Now we don't need to do that. Now we can just go there via the internet, which frankly is in many ways much better. But it does create some challenges, and I want to share with you some of the pointers that we've been giving to our client in order to make sure that the press briefing goes ahead in the kind of way that we would when it was an offline event. Now, a press briefing is where you bring a number of media together and you introduce them to a client, to a product, to a service. And really what you're trying to do is to get engagement from the media that this particular clients' services are of interest to their readers. And we do that by, first of all, trying to get the media to have a personal relationship, a personal introduction with our client. The reason that companies like Diwa would use a company like East West PR is because they don't know those media already. And we do, and we build those relationships just in readiness for this kind of an event. Now, this particular event is appealing to media in CSR, in corporate social responsibility, in water technology, in technology, in venture capital, and environmental sectors. So what my team in Singapore have been doing is reaching out to the regional media.

And inviting them to come and listen to the people from Diwa to talk about the power of these awards.

Now, in the past, what we do is rent a room and invite the media and invite the client, and there would be a stand-up and there would be a presentation, there'd be Q&A, questions and answers, but there would also be time for people to meet each other, to give each other business cards, and to give even door gifts, for example, and brochures and flyers and so on to make it all feel very personal and tangible. That, of course, doesn't exist now. So how we share information has to be different. And I'm sharing this today because if you're thinking about holding a media briefing, a virtual briefing is very cost-effective, very time-effective, but does require some thinking about. First of all, then, what we needed to do was to pitch to the media.

And what we have done this time is to create a video invitation.

I've used this software called Descript, and we've taken some of the client assets, i.e., some video and some text, some PowerPoint, and I've blended those together in Descript and made a 2-minute invitation, which we then sent as a video file to the media. Now, we think this is going to be a bit more sort of inventive, really, than the large number of text emails that they get every day. The problem is getting them to open that video, of course. Now, I had thought about using a platform called Bonjuro, which you can use for sending videos to recipients as part of a campaign, and it really is very powerful. I've used it before. The issue is that I'm using the Prowly software to send out the invitations, and I don't want to have a second platform. So I've recorded the video using Descript, and with that I could add subtitles and quotes and also a call to action at the end. And this Descript software is really very powerful and very simple to use. I was able to create this in just half an hour. Embedding some other video captions and some text and doing a screen share at the same time using the Descript screen share software. So we've been able to send that 2-minute video introduction, an invitation to the media. We've got now some 14 media confirmed for this 1-hour press briefing. The next part, of course, is looking at the format of the press briefing. In the past, because you had people there, they had to listen and you could watch them and they were out of social obligation paying attention. But now people can drop on to mute, they can go on to just the picture instead of the video camera, for example. So we must make the press briefing more engaging. So it needs to be shorter and snappier for a start, and also have more mixed media. So we shall have a 15-minute invitation in advance to the media to get online so that they could be in their seats, as it were, in advance of the spokesperson arriving.

And this mirrors what one would have done in a hotel, for example. Then what we've got is a short introduction from me, but then we're going to show a one-minute video to start the conversation, and then we shall have a twenty-minute presentation, and then another video, another two-minute video, which binds in the content from the presentation.

We've reviewed the client's presentation in advance. Now that's something that often didn't happen when it was a a physical presentation. Often the client wouldn't want to send something in advance. They would wait until they've arrived and then show you on the day what they're doing. Now, this is fraught with problems because often clients give a sales presentation instead of a media-facing presentation. The difference being, in a sales presentation, they put in details about why someone should buy the product or service. Whereas in media relations, we need to educate the journalists who are going to tell other people about the goods or service.

They're not customers in themselves.

So we had a good look at the presentation today, and it's a very nicely presented, very professional presentation by the team at Diwa. But it is also some 26 slides, and they have 20 minutes. We all know that Speaking to a slide for 15 seconds or less is quite, quite short, and especially if there's text on it. So we raised the point of how quickly they would need to go through the slides, but also that the current slides are very factual and functional. But actually, when people are listening through Zoom, their attention isn't going to be as focused as it is when they are in the room. Because there's no power of personality. They're also not, if you like, in a collective experience. So in the same way that when people watch a music concert or a movie, the collective experience creates an energy in the room and a sort of a level of understanding which is absent in a digital meeting.

So we then talked to the client about what's a theme for the press briefing. They want to share information about this $1 million award. In fact, there are a number of different payments under these 4 different awards, anything up to $100,000 for one award. And the functional aspects are perfect, but what I had shared with the client is that what we really need to do is to create an emotional attachment between the journalist and the spokesperson and the message they're giving Because we can always share the facts and the figures later. What we really need to do is to get them to understand that the awards are a catalyst for change within the organizations that enter and win. So we need to get the Speak PR program where we talk about storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and to know. We need to get the presentation to really talk to the personalization aspect.

And we need to make the hero of the awards not the award giver, but the awards recipient.

What do they do with the money? How does it impact them when they've got the award? And most importantly, how will they bring fresh water technologies to those people that are thirsty around the world? So we have to then think with the client about making this into a story about the winners and a story about the people that will benefit from the winner's technologies.

So we've moved on then from the idea of the theme, and we look at the assets we need to offer the media. Now, the client wants to give a PDF file to the journalists of the presentation, but for the journalists, that's useless because they can't open them and edit them. So what I've done is I've exported that to a Word document because they can use that file, cut and paste the images and the text directly into their articles. What we're also doing in the press kit is we're including videos, which are the short-form and the longer-form videos of the announcement about the awards, but also interviews with previous winners.

Now we've also interviewed a winner from a company called Liquinex, and we are including the case study into the press kit in case someone is interested enough to then create a link to a case study of a winner. And we're also of course going to be including details of the prize money and the details of how a company can enter.

Journalists are very short of time, and they're asked to file 2, 3, maybe 4 stories per day. Our job is to give them all of the building blocks so they can assemble a story rather than necessarily originate a story.

Many journalists are covering stories with domains that they're not familiar with, and so we also need to recognize that we must give them content that they can understand quickly and easily. That's another part of our Speak PR program, is that content will be engaging if it is both simple and new, but also that it is relevant. And so by setting context for the journalists and giving them the content so that it's easy for them to understand but also easy for them to share, we will help them do their jobs. Now, this all takes place in the background. The client As far as they're concerned, and in fact, as far as any client is concerned, their news is the most important news in the world, and rightly so. Our job as the agency is to bridge the expectations of the client with the needs of the journalist, and using a video-based virtual media conference creates some slightly new challenges for all parties concerned.

So if you are thinking about holding a press briefing, I would encourage you to do so, but don't approach it in the way that you might have done a previous event in a fixed venue with people turning up.

The video and the Zoom interview process means that the media may or may not ask as many questions depending on how shy they are. So we can use the back channel of the chat room to ask some of the journalists if they've got questions, and sometimes some of the more shy journalists will ask the moderator, for example me, to ask questions.

Now that would never happen in a normal press briefing because they couldn't whisper in my ear a question. So actually the virtual press conference is really good for those people that are shy, and we've talked about that before about trade shows and virtual trade shows being really good for those people that are shy. Press briefings are still a key part of anybody's media relations program.

Really, really encourage you to think about hosting one if you have got something to share. How you make it interesting, how you theme it, how you create the assets, how you facilitate the conversation around that is a skill set in itself. Now, what I also was talking to the client about was the need for them to all be in situations where it's well lit, where they have microphones available and headsets, because what you also want is an, an event which has good production values. We're going to record the event, of course, and the opportunity then is to create digital assets content from the content. This is the repurposing of content. We'll have sound bites, we'll have recordings, and we will have both moving assets and still assets. What I mean by an asset is a piece of content we can use which could then be used on social media by the client as well as by the media. So in that sense, it's a really efficient and effective use of time. So if you're looking at creating a press briefing, I can really encourage you to do so.

Feel free to give me a call and email me at jim@e-swestpr.com if you've got any questions at all about how that might happen.

If you need any help, then of course we'd be more than happy to do so.

So thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR.

My name is Jim James, and you've been listening to the program that explains how you can do PR yourself without a big team, without necessarily even outsourcing it, but by using some technologies. We all know Zoom, but one, for example, like Descript.com for creating your content. If you like this, please do sign up to our newsletter at eastwestpr.com or come to the website at speakpr.co where we have the information about our 5-stage methodology and the 6-week mastermind.

My name is Jim James.

Until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a sustainable business, and that if you've got something to share, think about hosting a virtual press briefing.