Understanding media relations better, and how it can help you get Exposure and #getnoticed, with Felicity Cowie

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today we're going to talk about media relations with a former Panorama and BBC journalist, Felicity Cowie, who's got a new book called Exposure. Felicity, welcome to the show.

Hi, Jim, thanks very much for having me on the show.

It's my pleasure. And Felicity, tell us, what's the difference between media relations and public relations and how can that really work to help entrepreneurs get noticed?

It's a really good question to ask because I know I stopped being a journalist around about 10 years ago and I went to then work with clients to help them get media coverage to help entrepreneurs and other big businesses get work with journalists. And I know from that side of things there's an awful lot of confusion around what's media relations, what's public relations, what's marketing, what's communications. Of course, all these things do overlap, but the really fundamental difference between media relations and all of these other activities is, is that when you do media relations, which is really a process for working with journalists to get unpaid news coverage, your key audience is the journalists themselves. And what I mean by that is obviously when people go into working with journalists, it's because they want exposure, they want media coverage, they want great headlines about their business because they want those headlines to interest and attract the public that they want to reach, whether that's more customers, talent investors, the general public, whatever, however public is defined. But unlike when you put content on your own social media channels or your own events or whatever, when you're doing media relations, your audience, you're not speaking directly to the public, you're speaking to journalists and you're hoping that they are going to relay what you say to the public that you want them to talk to. Journalists are under absolutely no obligation to do what you ask. You don't have any rights to look at their material before they publish it. They don't really have any obligations to correct any mistakes they make. And even if they have intentions to do it, it can often get lost in the mix of them now working on the next story. So it's really important to understand the whole benefit of media relations, which is really this independent third party endorsement, this sort of turbocharged testimonial that your business, out of all of these other businesses in your space, is the one that the Financial Times has chosen to feature or whatever and everything that hudos you get from that. But the risk against it is you have no control over what they do, or at least you have bits of control at the beginning of the process about what you put out there, but how the journalist uses it, how they feel the public will want to know about it, that can be very different from your business.

So, Felicity, that's really good definition. See the difference. So just tell us, though, how can a company get the journalist to be interested? Because from what I understand, they have so many pitches coming in every day that it's quite a competition. What makes a good pitch and how does a journalist decide?

Yeah, it is difficult to get things placed and just because you want something and you've got a great story and it's of interest to your immediate world, none of that's not valid, but that's just not the same for journalists. So the first thing that you really need to do is, well, I suppose, to be honest, is have a bit of a reality check with yourself. There are not agencies out there who can deliver things that are undeliverable. So putting that pressure on them and asking them to do stuff that they can't get for you is not, you know, it's just not. It's not going to work. So you need to do the legwork yourself at first, before you get involved with, you know, getting other people to help you and get really realistic about which media outlets are likely to be interested in you in the first place and what you have to say. There's no harm in taking a punt and trying it. I mean, I myself am promoting my own book at the moment and I'm sort of tried various sort of things to see. Well, I, you know, I don't know. I've never been the subject of my own pr, of media relations before. So it's interesting, the journalists saying, not for us, or somebody saying, oh, yeah, we like this, you know, that's going to happen a bit. And you have to respect the fact that they know their own audiences, they know their public and who that they are writing for. So you can prepare yourself so far in. In that way. But the other thing to do is to make yourself a very. To be very clear about who you are as a business. So when I worked for the BBC, I worked on their planning desk and it was my job to find stories. And I also then worked at Panorama. It was my job to find investigation. So I was actively looking for material, but I would tend to kind of scroll down the press release or the email and I'd look at the sort of information that the person had sent about what their business was, who they were and how they describe themselves as a source of information. These things are sometimes called boilerplates. In journalist land or marketing land. And they're usually a sort of a description. This would be about us, the description of your business. It's really important to get that right. And it's very overlooked. And in large organizations, because of the sort of politics of deciding what you are in a few words is quite complicated. You can end up having these things being sort of hundreds of words long. But for journalists, you have to think about. They want to see a source that knows itself, knows exactly what it does, that knows how to talk about it. Those 50 I advise doing in about 50 ways, they really communicate a lot about your business. So you want to put some effort into that and thinking about the outlets you want to approach before you think about what the story is that you want to tell. To be really honest, although stories get a lot of publicity as being the kind of the tool, they are really important. But it isn't difficult to think of great stories and to get quite carried away with them. It is hard to do legwork to get agreement from key people in your business about this is who we want to be portrayed as in the media. If we get massive coverage, if they describe in these 50 words, is that okay? Because it's terrible to get media coverage for something you don't do. Especially if you're an entrepreneur and you're starting out and you want to get your differentiator out there. So that and having a good think about what outlets will. Media outlets. So what I mean by that is it could be print or online or broadcast or whatever. What will impress the people that you are trying to communicate with via this medium, if you see what I mean. So if you know that you want to get some top talent, think about what kind of press or, you know, outlets that top talent will be really impressed by and try and aim for them because it's likely that they will be relevant to what you're trying to do as well.

So, Felicity, let's say you understand who the audience is you want to go for. So you've chosen the media outlet. What should be included in the pitch? You've talked about the boilerplate. Agreed. But how do you get the journalist to buy into your story for you to be the trusted source versus other people that are approaching them?

I think it's having that sort of 50 words very clear about yourself. So the first thing that they think is it sort of calms them down a bit and they think, yep, okay, I can trust this source. Also, journalists don't work on their own. They have to re Pitch all the time. So you want to think about. When you pitch to a journalist, it's almost like handing them a baton. You need to make it as easy for them as possible to sort of pass this baton around. So when I went to the BBC, of course it's a massive organization, but I would have to go to at least two news meetings in a shift. I would need to justify why I thought a story was a good story and why I thought the source of the story should be included in the story. And it's a shame, but people pitch a great story and the journalists go, yeah, we know exactly who is a great commentator on that. And use somebody that they've already, you know, they've already knows works well for them. So you need to think about that a lot. That pitching. It's not about wowing one person with a sort of an amazing headline and a story, it's about what's going to travel well. And this is why people focus on, you know, what's the key thing you want to get across, if it's helpful. I have, in this book that I've just written, I have this analogy which I use with clients, which is if you're from the UK or if you visited London, you might be familiar with something called Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. And it's a place that goes back to. I got, I don't know, olden times before.

Before you and me. Before you and me, Felicia.

Yeah, it's really a really long time, but it's been around for just. It's basically a sort of a piece of land in Hyde Park. And on a Sunday you can take a soapbox. This is where the say came from, I think, a box, stand on it and just shout out your kind of version of things. And in the middle of. There'd be lots of people doing this, and there's a crowd in the middle gravitating towards the speakers that they're most interested in. And I use this analogy quite a lot when I. To help people understand about pitching to journalists, because you need to think that the journalist is almost the person on the box who's got to kind of stand in a news meeting and, you know, get attention for your story. So if I was about to get up on a box and hide corner and speak about your business, what would you say to me before I got on that box? You're not going to give me some really convoluted and complicated thing because I won't remember it. You're going to be quite snappy about what you want me to say. And also if you think about that kind of melee of people and noise and voices and everything, you know, like, what's going to cut. What do you want to actually say more than anything else? It's that noisy even inside news organizations. And unless things have radically changed, which I very much doubt in the last 10 to 12 years, news meetings are quite. They're not like meetings in the corporate world are very different. News meetings are extremely short, they're extremely to the point. You're very challenged on a story idea. You've got to really bring it to that meeting. You've got to be quite succinct yourself. So you have to think about arming up the journalist as your sort of champion to go make this happen for you.

So very interesting, Love that analogy. So the journalist is the person on the soapbox, as opposed to the entrepreneur on the soapbox, with all the people in the melee being the journalist looking for stories. The dynamic is that there are fewer journalists than there are entrepreneurs or people pitching.

I suppose it sort of follows on from what I was saying about the difference between media relations and public relations. In public relations, the entrepreneur would be standing on the box and just shouting about their stuff to the crowd and would be doing it all themselves and probably absolutely amazingly, because it's their business and they know what they want to say about it. And that's fine, you can do that. You cannot bother with media relations at all. And just do everything on your own box, on your own channels, if you really want to. And I absolutely give people, when they ask me, I say, just take my permission, just do that. Just stop worrying about this. You've got masses of followers. Go for it yourself. But there obviously are, as we've talked about a bit, there are huge benefits to getting media coverage because no matter how brilliant your content, how passionate you are, it's all self promotional, it's all viewed as self promotional. Whereas if you get a journalist to get them to stand up on the soapbox and speak on your behalf, and in this loud, noisy crowd of drawing public around, it's a different. They've chosen you to go and talk about on this box, they've chosen to put your messages up there. So I think that's a kind of a useful way of seeing the difference between the two things. And I think hopefully people grasp, you know, journalists are not conduits. So they will not just take something, stand up, they're not a member of your staff. They won't just stand up on a box and say what you want. They will look at the crowd, they'll listen to everybody else speaking and they'll start to do their own thing with the information you give them. So that is a way of thinking about these differences and what you're getting into.

A really nice way of thinking about it. Also, that the journalist has got its own community, hasn't it's got its own audiences. And that's the other thing that you tap into when you work through a publication. You get access to their audience as well that you may not have already. Felicity, what about using an agency? Because many entrepreneurs may not have the time or the skill set or even the patience to work directly with the journalists and certainly not to be consistent. Do agencies work? Are they a waste of money? What's the view on the inside of all those agencies that are calling?

So I've worked obviously as a journalist, then I've also worked within PR agencies and I've worked within in house communications teams. So I've kind of done the whole mixture of things you can do in this space. And I think that there is a real value in using people who are experts and who are focused in that part of your business, which is, well, let's, it's media relations or it can be some of the other activities to do with communications. But the huge warning to all of that, and again I would say is why I wrote this book, is that there is no point in going to an agency if you don't grasp the fundamentals yourself about what you want to do. Because what tends to happen, and what I've witnessed quite a lot, is the agency is very, very keen to get and keep the contract. And so when the client, whatever the client says, the agency will say, yeah, great, we can work with this, let's work with you at a strategic level. They'll come up with, or we'll get you some quick wins or whatever. They'll do whatever they can to offer value. Now that's absolutely, completely fair enough because, you know, they want to serve you. But the difficulty is with a lot of businesses is that they don't create really a brief for the PR agency. So, you know, if you think about something a bit more familiar to a lot of companies and that's to do with the money, say you're not going to go and like hand over like the reins of your business to an accountant without really understanding some of the basics about what an account is going to do for you, what times of the year they're going to deliver stuff for you and, you know, who's the right accountant for you or the, you know, the finance team. And somehow this logic doesn't often or doesn't always get applied to support with media relations. And I find that astonishing. When you're handing over your reputation in a way, okay, it's not your budget, but it's reputation and asking, you know, an outsider to kind of figure out your business for you and then tell the world's media about it. So you need to get very clear about what you want to say in the first place. With the book that I've created, it is a low cost option for entrepreneurs who just want to explore this without committing themselves to anything. But also you can use the book to learn how to create that brief, how to find the right skills, how to just be aware of what you want so that when you get somebody involved to help you, as you would with, you know, other people, that you get into your business, you have some idea of what you want to get from them. And if you can do that, it's a delight. As a media relations, I mean, I work with clients I absolutely love because their briefs are so clear and know exactly who they are and what they want and why they want it. And it means I can bring my own creativity and thinking to what I do and then we get the results that, that they want. But it is, media relations is, it is a very specific skill and it does require an understanding of how journalists work. And that is not always inside PR companies or in house communications teams.

Yeah, I think you've raised a number of great issues there. And something that one journalist said to me is that journalists actually compete with each other internally to get the space right. There are more journal journalists are more content than there is space to be published. Is that right, Felicity? The journalists are actually competing with each other as well. That's another dynamic that people don't think about.

Oh, definitely. And it could be really, I mean, like a really extreme example that I give to people to kind of reassure them that it's not just you, is that when I went to the BBC, for example, I would set up guests all the time to come in and talk about specific things. And some of these guests would be a really big deal and quite complicated to kind of even just manage their diaries so they could come out to the studio. I mean, any entrepreneur or CEO, you know, it's very busy and like clearing their diary for a media interview. But there's always delays and stuff like that. It's quite a tall order. I Remember once getting Tony Ben, sort of former like labor statesman to come and comment on a story. Arch, I can't remember now. And we did all this stuff and he came in and he was waiting in the green room and all this stuff and I was really pleased with myself. It was a real sort of coup to get him and everything. And then some other news story broke. I can't remember what it was. This is when I was working for the BBC News Channel. So it's a rolling news channel. But all news poses this risk. Some other story broke and I actually have to turn around to Tony Ben and send him home. Like, I couldn't even get him to comment. The story was so at odds with what he knew about. I couldn't even get him on. We could even crowbar him in to comment on that. I mean, he was so nice about it. Obviously he was very seasoned and he was very used to this sort of roller coaster that is trying to get media coverage. But clients find this quite reassuring sometimes, even though it does show the time wasting aspect of this for, you know, a CEO. So clear their door to immediate interview and then if it doesn't happen, that's just like incredibly frustrating. But you kind of have to be in it to win it, I'm afraid. And news is, it's not even the journalist being. It's the nature of news and other stories and other things happening. As a journalist, you're really not in control of a lot of things and a decision about what is it.

That's a really good message for all those clients that the agency is doing their best. And on the agency side, we've all been to places where the, the media says that's no longer topical. So Felicity, what would be the number one tip that you would give to an entrepreneur? You've got this new book, Exposure. Is there a tip in that book that above all else, you'd say to entrepreneurs, if there's one Takeaway from a talk with Felicity Cowie about PR and media relations.

Yeah, and I suppose if there's, if I'm allowed to. I think one is the kind of the bigger picture thing, which is like only goal for media coverage if you can't get what you want. Any other way would be my. It's really hard work. As hopefully as I've sort of conveyed in this interview. It's bumpy, it's risky, it's unpredictable, but the benefits are huge. You know, just one piece of coverage from like a decent outlet that you know the people you're trying to Reach really value. Like, you know, one hit by the Economist or the Financial Times or Forbes or, I don't know, whatever. You can recycle that for years and certainly for our year. And there's no cost financially to getting that because it's not advertising. But there is a time cost, there is a risk cost of things I've said. And the book does actually give kind of at least eight reasons why it's worth putting yourself through this. But if you can't justify what you're doing with any of those eight reasons, don't bother put your effort into other things that you know what you're going to get from. But if you do decide it's worth it, then my other tip is, really, is a quick one, is like, absolutely, do not go near a journalist until you've created a press release about your story. Now, that might sound really obvious, but all this stuff about chats and pitches and emails and phone calls and messenger things and all this, what you want is to have an actual press release which really clearly sets out your story. Has this about us, this boilerplate about who you are as a source really embedded at the bottom. Because as we've explained in this conversation, there's a lot of pitching and repitching goes on. I mean, I know it used to be infuriating. I find both sides of the fence, like you'll pitch a story and then the shift changes and everything. And it's almost like you have to pitch about seven times, like just to get the story to move. As an outsider, you want to have this press release. You want to have this map of what your story is. It's the only part of the process where you really have any control at all, which is what you've decided to put out to the journalists. Very, very busy journalists and very small publications. If you write this thing well enough, they will quite often cut and paste it, or at least cut and paste the section where you describe your business. And effectively you've now got exactly your own words. But out in this, you know, bigger, amplified and with this endorsement from journalists. So the investment, if you're going to do this, think about it, whether it's worth it. And if you do, then make sure you write press release simply being a document, maybe one side of a four, the length isn't strict, which sets out what your story is with a headline, has this boilerplate thing. And yet in the book it does have a template of how to do all of that. Journalists are taught what to look for in press releases. And so it sort of incorporates what journalists are actually looking for and it gives you a kind of way of putting this together. But yes, don't attempt to do media relations without a press release because I suppose the last is it helps you test the whole story itself.

Felicity Cow, if people want to find out about you and your new book, where can they go?

Well, the book is available everywhere. Thrillingly. It's called Exposure Insider Secrets to make your business a go to authority for journalists. That's it. This is behind me, but it's down for those who could see a sort of screen. I know some of you are listening instead. So, yeah, it's available through Amazon, any bookshops globally. But I also have a website which is ww.themediarelationscoach.com and that has stuff about the book on it. It also has a blog and some free information. And if you want to hear me talk or come to, you know, workshops, things like that, I try to put everything on there. So it's a sort of a site for resources as well. So it's www.themediarelationscoach.com.

Felicity Cow, joining me actually, from just down the road in Bristol. Thank you so much for joining me. And it's a huge subject to manage to cram it longer than the normal show, but I know it's going to be worth it. Thank you for joining me on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur show today.

Yeah, thank you so much.

It's been my pleasure. You've been listening to Felicity Cowie. This is Jim James with the Unnoticed Entrepreneur show. Thank you again for listening to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur.