How to get media to cover your event an interview with Heidi Hanna

Hey there, Paula Rizzo here, and you're about to listen to a really great interview that I did with Heidi Hanna. And Heidi Hanna is an author of several books about stress and stress management. She has a really interesting take on it because she says, you know what, we actually need stress. And she and I first met years ago when I was a senior health producer at Fox News Channel in New York City, and I interviewed her about one of her books.. And, you know, we became friends. We hit it off. And then when my book Listful Thinking was being written, I thought, you know what, it'd be great to talk to her because she has a really unique perspective on list-making and lists and how you can use them to be less stressed. So we've been in touch for a very, very long time. And more recently, as I've become a media consultant and now have my own business helping experts and entrepreneurs get out there in the media and understand how to pitch better and what kind of content to put out in the Heidi came back to me and said, hey, I'm trying to get some media for a conference that I'm doing. And it's about stress management and humor and how that can really help you to lift your mood and I guess get rid of stress. And I said to her, cool, let's work on it. So we worked together on a couple of pitch ideas because I said to her, hey, the media does not care about your event. They just don't. I'm sorry to say it, but it's the truth. And so We chit-chatted about it, I gave her a couple of ideas, and here's what ended up happening from there. So listen in and hear how she was able to implement some of that stuff and have a really successful event that actually media did attend. And I mean, they sent live trucks. I can't believe it. It's awesome. The local news station sent live trucks to her event. So listen in here, and I think you'll enjoy hearing some of the tactics that she used. So you just had a very successful event, and you and I had spoken about it previous because you wanted to get some media for it. And, you know, we talked a little bit about how media doesn't really care about your event. And so—

not at all.

No, not at all. So tell me, what were you able to accomplish to get people to know about it and to cover it?

What was really interesting is I think I had been thinking about this, as you know, a year ahead of time, really thinking, how can I get this message out to people. And if we're gonna have the conference in my backyard and it's a topic I think is so important, how do I share that message with people? The benefits of humor. Not just, I want you to come to my conference and pay a bunch of money or sponsor a conference that you don't know anything about, but how do I get people to appreciate the benefits of humor for our conference theme, which happened to be resilience? So leading up to it, I was very strategic about reaching out to some of the local media to say, I'm an expert in this area, I would love to send you some pictures pitches and you can let me know. And before I did that, I talked to you. I sent you my ideas. And it was fascinating, just, you know, something that was probably so common sense to you of like, that's interesting, or that's been done. Like the example that comes to mind for me is a lot of people are fascinated with techno stress or like addiction to technology. And I don't really love talking about it, but I feel like everybody else wants to. And your response was, "Eh, not really that interested." And I thought, "Okay, this is the kind of stuff we need to hear," because sometimes I think I know what people want, and then on the other hand, you were really interested in what I had to say about stress and gender, which is actually one of my favorite subjects.

Yeah.

But not something that everybody wants to talk about. So I pitched this around the holiday season, and she immediately said, "Can you come in and talk about the stress of the holidays?" So I did the morning show, Good Morning San Diego, and then the next day they called me and said, "Can you come on the evening news? We want you to do it again." And I was like, "Oh, great." So really wasn't pitching anything in particular, but wanted to establish the relationship.

So you had reached out though, saying, "Hey, I'm available to talk about this kind of stuff," and then they came up with a theme of the holidays. I mean, that's awesome.

No, actually no. But this is what I learned from you, honestly, was I always feel like I don't want to put anything on someone I'm gonna let them tell me what they want. And I always have people saying, "No, you prescribe. You tell me. I'm too busy. You tell me." So I actually gave her a list of 3 to 5 things. You know I love lists too. I love the number 3. I love the number 5. I think I did 5, and just the top ones that I had felt excited to talk about that you had also said, "I think these resonate." And then even— just a couple based on your feedback. And she quickly, because it was the holidays, said, we want holiday straws, we want it next week, can you come in at this time? And we made it happen. And it was a great segment, and like I said, they asked me to come back, they posted it on their website, I now had that footage that I could share, which was great. They showed my book, even though it was, I don't know, 2 or 3 years old at this time, so it wasn't new to me, but it was new to them, new to the audience. And so then, as the conference got closer, it was getting—

So no mention of the conference then?

No mention of the conference.

Yes, exactly. Yep.

No mention of the conference. And at this point, it's the beginning of the year. I honestly probably could have pitched something on New Year's resolutions, but I was super busy. I was getting married.

So, right. I was kind of busy. Yeah. And then remind me, the conference was when? What month?

The conference was the first week in April.

First week. Okay. So now here we are in January. So you've already laid the groundwork, right? You were already there. Hey, I can be, help you about stress, help you about stress, right? So you're in their ear a little bit already.

Yes. And you call and I will answer. And yes, I will come back in the studio when you need me to come back again quickly without a lot of—

Yeah.

And by the way, got to know the news director just a little bit in passing. He came up to me and really wanted to talk about his background in meditation. So we had this like bond about that, chatted for a while, and that was cool. Kind of just made a, you know, planted a seed in my head to come back to later. But that comes up again, and that is super important. So around after my wedding, you know, I start reaching out again. And thematically, April is Humor Appreciation Month and it is Stress Awareness Month. So I was kind of planting the seed to do something on stress. I'd like to talk about humor. Still no mention of the conference, by the way. Right.

Right. So it's all about the theme.

I'm just saying there's a conference coming and it's about resilience and our, you know, we're doing some cool outreach stuff locally. So that might be of interest. And so the producer actually emailed me back and said, "There's an article out today about the fact that women experience more stress at work than men." Mm, I love it. "Would you cover that?" And it was like, that was not the plan, by the way. That was a last-minute switch. I said, "Absolutely." It was Glamour magazine, you know, so they gotta do the lead into it, make it really relevant to something that was in the news right now. Had an awesome conversation. It gives me goosebumps thinking about it 'cause we had such a great conversation about women in the workplace and stress, and then it took off tied into humor as one of my favorite strategies for building resilience. Ah, oh, by the way, aren't you hosting a conference? Why, yes we are.

So, so organic, right? It's not, oh, you didn't go in with COVID my event. Let me sell tickets for my event. No, it was really about something that was newsy that you were able to talk to as an expert. And then how brilliant to have one of the examples that you have tie into your event That's brilliant. That's awesome.

And I can honestly say I'm not even smart enough to really like make that happen. It just, it was there. I knew I wanted to pitch it and then it truly is one of my favorite resilience building strategies. So I was able to say that and also mention for the first time ever at the conference, we're gonna do an outreach event. Now I also did this for media as much as I did it for anybody else. I knew no one would be interested in talking about a conference. But we did a free event Friday night that was part of the conference. So essentially we opened up one of our sessions to anyone in the community that wanted to come for free. It gave us more exposure, gave them a free opportunity, and we had a headliner, Yakov Smirnoff, who's a well enough known name that it was interesting. And his story, Paula Rizzo, I could not have— I mean, this is going to sound horrible because it's really sad what happened, but from a news perspective, As he was planning to come down, one of his best friends passed away suddenly, and she was the owner of The Comedy Store, Mitzi Shore, who a lot of people knew. And being in San Diego, we have the La Jolla Comedy Store. So now Yakov is supposed to be here. He's supposed to go on the news at the 6:40 spot in the evening, right before he goes on stage. And my husband is now driving him down from LA in Friday afternoon traffic, hoping to get there on time, talking about something that's really current and really emotional to him. So, so Yakov actually came on. So I did— you know how hard this is— I did 4 live segments with a weatherman who was covering it, who thought he was coming for some sort of like comedy festival. The best segment— we had 17 minutes of coverage in the 5 and 6 o'clock evening news, which is amazing for a conference, right? And the very last segment was Yakov getting to talk about his history, his legacy, Mitzi Shore. And tonight— Wow. —in this event, the event went amazing. And even though it wasn't like, you know, as many people, we doubled in size the amount of the conference, and we got this great media coverage. So here's the one piece I want to go back to. When I did the pitch about women and stress, which I was flexible to cover that because that's what they wanted, we tied it in. Right. As I was walking out, I saw the door of the news director, Steve, was open. And I remembered that we had had this little bonding moment about meditation. I thought, you know, I'm just gonna go say hi, with no intention to just say, "Hey, great to be back again, nice to see you." So I did, so I walked in and he goes, oh, and he's in a conversation with someone, he goes, "Oh my gosh, come in here right now. We were watching your segment, we loved it. Tell me more about what's going on next year." Wow. With Yakov Smirnoff. And so I go and I get the flyer I brought and I'm like, well, here's what's going on, and I'm really excited about it, we're trying a new thing. And he goes, I'd love to send a live crew. And I'm thinking, are you kidding me? You know, so— Amazing. So he was so excited. He took the information. He said, we'll send somebody. I followed up with the producer, you know, a few days later, just said, what do I need to do to make this happen? She got right back to me. Here's who's going to be here, 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock news. Here's his cell phone. He'll meet you at this time. I mean, it was all of these pieces coming together. And I think my philosophy has always been serve first. And I think that that's so important. You have to— build the relationship. You have to show your value, your willingness to serve. Honestly, when I did it over the holidays, it was not what I wanted to be spending my holiday time. I'm on course, you know, it was like, this is interesting, but, and, and going back again, it was like, oh, there was traffic. It's just so easy for us sometimes to forget that. But I think if it's important and we want to build that relationship, you needed to do it. You needed to. Yeah. Now it's like the conference is done, but that doesn't mean I can't still bring value. So, you know, kind of having not a set schedule, but reaching out every now and then and just saying, how can I help you guys out?

Yep. Be of service. That's what I always say. I always think of TV as a public service. And so you did it right. You did it right. I want to ask about two things there. So one, you had, you know, um, like a celebrity type, right, on a Friday. So you built that piece in, which I think is really smart because a lot of people come to me and they say, hey, I want to get media for my event. And it's really hard because they don't have anything built in that the media would really care about. Right. So when you did that, that piece of it, did you then pitch that to say he'll be available, or how did you get them sort of interested in that piece of it? And plus, I mean, it was free, right, for other people to come.

So— It was. So, you know, I think all of those things, I just kind of intuitively thought, if our goal as an organization is to spread the message of how humor is helpful for resilience, for health, the brain, for all of these things, and we want to serve the caregiving community, Let's actually do it. You know, let's open this up. So I personally sponsored this space to make sure we could get it. I personally made an investment that I made for our nonprofit to support us. But instead of just saying, here's the money, you guys do what you want, I said, here's the money, I'm spending it. So just pretend it's not there because I made some investments that I don't think they would have felt safe enough to make, not knowing how this would all come together. And one of those was paying a very small stipend to Yakov. Getting someone like that, and by the way, he gave us such a deal because he was very passionate about our cause. So I would say to anybody, find someone with a soft spot for what you're trying to do and let them know the benefits. So here's what ended up happening. He was going to come speak for a conference of about 250 people. So not really a big conference, not really making a lot of money. Sure, he could— Right. —so it wasn't that bad. But I was thinking, how do we make this a win-win? So for him, I said, I'm going to double the attendance by doing a free outreach event. We're gonna have 500 people instead of 250. We're gonna video, we're gonna try to livestream it. We did not end up livestreaming, but we did end up recording, so now we can actually sell the recordings and raise money for next year's events. We're trying a lot of those different things. But I do think that, and then even to him saying, I'm also gonna try to get you some media coverage. So it was a benefit for him. He's got a new show, he's got, you know, he wants to be in the media. He's working on some projects, so, For me, I almost felt like I was the middle person of saying, okay, Yakov, I'm gonna give you more media exposure, then to the media saying, I'm gonna bring you Yakov Smirnoff, we're gonna make this timely and give people some real takeaways in the segment itself. And then what ended up happening, the guy ended up pitching like a bunch of books from several of us who are authors that had no idea he was gonna do that. Right. So again, it's like all these pieces kind of came together. And now that I'm thinking about doing next year's event, I'm doing the same thing. So we have a theme. Who is a comedian? Because ours happens to be comedy. Sure. Would be passionate about serving this population. And why not ask and also start to network with other people who may know someone who knows someone? Because ultimately, I think a lot of times we assume those people are busier than they are. We assume that, you know, that we couldn't afford them. And there really is no harm in asking, especially if there's a connector. And it turns out in this In this case, we had someone who knew someone who knew him who put us in touch. We did an interview that was supposed to be 15 minutes that lasted an hour. And honestly, even in that conversation, I ended up helping Yakov with some ideas about speaking to corporations, and he's now become one of my close friends. Oh, how funny.

Wow. So many benefits.

I know. Wow. Wow. I really do believe in synergy. I think if you put it out there, right intention and you truly go into each one saying, how can I serve? Then, and you're not doing that because you want to get something, you genuinely want to help people, then those opportunities start opening up because people feel safe and then they know that, you know, you're really trying to do something helpful for people and you're not trying to, you know, manipulate anybody in the situation. Right.

And what about the actual, like, dollars and cents of it? Did you, do you think it did work to convert people to come in and buy tickets in the end?

So that's such a funny question. This is another thing I want everyone to understand, is that this is a relationship and it does take time. So I would say, you know, for, for me, it's also why I said I'm going to spend my own money and do this because I don't want anyone looking over my shoulder. My hope was that we would have enough money raised that we could livestream and provide this for free for caregivers all over the world. And then it was like, okay, this is the first time we're ever doing this. Maybe we should aim for that next year. So we didn't raise as much money. We didn't get the sponsor. I'm thinking all these people are gonna sponsor. Yeah, no, not so much. But what we did do is we did bring some people. We had some very key executives at some very large companies in San Diego who said that they would absolutely be part of this next year. They would like to help sponsor. They would like to come again. Obviously the friendship that I got with Yakov was amazing. But I have to say for me personally, the greatest reward, and I know this isn't exactly dollars and cents, is I showed the media clip during dinner the next night because I was so blown away by how it all unfolded, and I thought people would find it funny because it is hysterical, and I'm not funny. It just— funny. And I had a standing ovation pretty much the whole time from people who said, "You represented us so well, and you were able to tell people who we are and what we do." It gives me goosebumps thinking about it. And so now we have this this 17-minute video clip to show for next year to get more media, more sponsors, more attendees. And so honestly, I would say it all worked out. The benefits to me were massive. You know, we did get more attendees. The stories I got from people off the street who came, who found us, you know, we actually had one person who saw the news coverage on an airplane and ended up coming because we were right by the airport. You know, does one person really make a difference? In my opinion, it totally does if that's someone who needed that. In that moment. But I think we'll really measure more of the kind of dollars and cents next year in Chicago, because I'm going to do it again. But this time I have more leverage because we have that video footage to show here's what we could do. And one of the other gals who's actually local in Chicago won an award a few years ago. She's America's first laughter champion. And she had a chance to showcase for just 10 seconds, you know, why she won. Well, now that's someone we have in Chicago we can build media around, and we're starting that now. We're ahead of time. We're going to start planning. So you are.

Good. That's the thing. Like, people think, you know, oh, it's going to just happen like that. It really is the relationship building and the building of the story and all of that stuff. And so for you, I mean, this is great. You know, I think that there's so much value to thinking ahead, but also knowing that this is ongoing. —this is not just gonna be one and done.

Yeah, and just to add to that too, Paula, because I think people who haven't worked with somebody who's lived in media the way you have does not realize how important it is to have a pair of eyeballs like yours reading this content. Because I have been told for a long time that just intuitively I do well with media. I kind of talk in soundbites already. I make things really common sense. I tend to think in 3 tips, you know, all of that kind of stuff. But the pitch is so critical. And so if we think we know what people want to hear, when you have someone who's actually been in the business and can say, I got pitched this every day, like, or fresh, or I like this, what if you did this with it? I mean, it doesn't even take a ton of time, but it saves you so much time and energy of trying to learn on your own. And when you have people like you who've done it, like, why would you stumble through trying to learn that on your own when you just don't have to, right?

Like, well, thank you. Yeah, the trial and error piece. And that's— and it happens, you know. And I feel bad because you're right, like I always say, go for— from a place of service. And so there are people that can be served by this, but they're not getting through, you know, your message isn't getting through because your pitch wasn't good enough, right? And if your pitch was just a little bit, you know, more exciting, more interesting, the media would pick up on it. And then think of all those people that you could help. So it is a different language in many ways, just because you're passionate about it.

In fact, I think sometimes a little less passion is going to be more effective. Because if I just ramble about how this saved my life, you know, when I was depressed and couldn't get out of bed in the morning, some people will connect with that, some people won't. So it's like, sure, I can make that point and people feel, wow, this person's really vulnerable and authentic and I like that. Now tell me what to do about my life. Sure. That is so important. And I think the other thing that I'm really still working on after seeing you present last year is is the clarity on those key points because I have so much information that I always feel like I can tap into that, but there's something about when you're on the spot and it's live. It's like you just lose, it's just, you just lose so much of that. So if you have your go-to, and that's something I'd never wanna feel rehearsed or sound rehearsed. Right. But I have to say, I'm still working on that more, having those kind of go-to, just like a standup comedian's gonna say, you know, they, This is not just randomly being funny. This is a craft, art. And I think media and communications has to be the same way.

It has to be something you practice. And well, exactly. It's from doing it over and over and over again. But if you wait until, oh my gosh, my, my thing is a month away, it's not enough time for you to really get the skills. You know, you need to, you need to build on it. Yeah. Well, thank you. I appreciate you sharing and I'm so glad that what I, what I helped you with helped.

They got you out there. Absolutely, absolutely. And so I'm gonna probably be refining my— I, I said once the conference was done I was out and I needed a break, but then I signed up to be on the board as the marketing chair, so I'm back. And I'll be into it next year. I think it's fascinating. I think it's a little bit of an experience as well in kind of the neuroscience of learning and, you know, what people are drawn to and why. And so it's kind of a fun little experiment that helps me in other parts of my life as well.

Great, awesome, good, I'm glad. Some really great stuff there. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I was really happy to help Heidi get out there in a big way. Obviously she's really passionate about this, and now more people know about it. And next year will be even better because now she can implement all of the stuff she learned from this time and all of those great contacts that she made. So if you like this kind of stuff, I share it all the time over on my website paularizzo.com. Co. So head over there and I have a little freebie for you. It is my checklist to become a go-to media expert. So if you go to paularizzo.co, you can grab that now. Thanks for listening.