TJ Walker explains why accuracy matters when pitching to media. He shares a story about a publicist who wildly exaggerated a podcast guest's audience numbers, and why that kind of inflation backfires with journalists.
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Media training. Tip of the day. Be as accurate as possible when you are pitching the news media. Now, I have recently started taking guests for my talk show on itunes, which is replayed here in audio format on YouTube as well. So I'm starting to get all kinds of pitches from people. I've had various shows over the years and have been pitched many times and some people just make the mistake of sending you a generic form letters. Obviously they haven't listened to your show. That's a standard problem everyone knows. But here's another problem I've recently encountered, and that is people who are puffing themselves up to look like a much bigger deal than they are in ways that are easily uncovered. So here's what I received just the other day. An email from a publicist saying, you've got to interview my client. He's this, he's this, he's this. And he has a hundred million subscribers to his podcast and he does this. And whoa, timeout. I saw that, I said, wow, that, that must be nice. 100 million subscribers to a podcast. Apparently the most successful podcaster of all time is someone I don't know and he's willing to come on my show. This is great. So I went into itunes, looked at his podcast and he did have some shows. Now, my show hasn't been on that long and I'm a small little show. I've got 23 or so reviews. I know that some podcasts like that, the history one and serial, they've got seven, 8,000 reviews. So I'm figuring if this guy has a hundred million views or subscribers, he's going to have tens of thousands of reviews. Guess how many Reviews he had? 0. Absolute. Which tells me his audience has to be minuscule because even if you don't ask for reviews, a certain percentage of people are going to leave them. Then I thought, well, let me give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe his show is more of a video show. And I was sent some of his videos from his YouTube channel. I went to his YouTube channel, sure enough, he had a lot of great looking videos, slickly produced. And the thing with YouTube, unless you hide it, you can see how many views the channel has, how many views each video has. And his average number of views per video was like nine. I mean, this audience was minuscule, absolutely minuscule. And hey, I've got some videos that don't have huge numbers. But I don't tell people I have a show with a hundred million subscribers. His Entire channel had 93,000 views total, which is better. Than nothing. And he had less than a thousand subscribers. So I wrote back to the publicist and said, I'm a little confused. You're saying you have a hundred million, one hundred million subscribers. I'm trying to figure out where because I don't really see it. She's like, oh, I'm so sorry, it was a typo. We have a hundred thousand subscribers to our newsletters and all the people who enjoy our shows. I said, okay, well, maybe it's on some other form. Perhaps this video is on Vimeo or maybe the audio is someplace else. Let me do a little more digging. So I went to Twitter and sure enough, he had tens of thousands. I think about 20,000 Twitter followers, which is a lot more than I have. That's about 10 times more. So I'm thinking, okay, maybe he's putting his show on Facebook and through Twitter. He's got tens of thousands of people reposting everything. So I look at his Twitter feed and the average posting he had received zero retweets. Zero. He had a few that had one, maybe two. But what this tells me is he has no engagement with his Twitter followers. For all I know, he just auto subscribed to anyone who said they would subscribe back or it's robots or it's bought. But it certainly wasn't in any way a meaningful following. So, folks, it's not hard for me to do that these days. Not just little bitty podcasters like me, but media producers everywhere are looking to see what is the following of this person who wants to be a guest. How can they promote the interview if they're going to be on. You don't have to say you have a million followers. But the biggest thing just don't. I won't say lie. I don't know if there's any intentional lying here, but don't wildly puff up things to try to make yourself a lot bigger because it completely destroys your credibility. And these days, people, they don't mind if you have an interesting idea, an interesting message, if you don't have a huge, huge audience. But if they don't know anything about you and you're telling. If I walk up to you and say, I'm TJ Walker, I have the thickest head of hair. For those of you listening on audio only, I don't have a thick head of hair, it's probably going to undercut everything else I say, because you're going to instantly spot that what I'm saying just isn't truthful. So nothing wrong with putting out your social media platform, number of people you hit in a week or a month or a year, but don't do it in a way that is obviously easily refuted. I'm T.J. walker.
