I recently told a friend of mine who is a journalist that I was doing online PR. “Ah”, she said, “you’ve become the enemy!” We had a good old giggle, but this illustrates perfectly the love-hate relationship journalists have with PRs and why it is such a challenge for us PRs to pitch to them.

Just to explain how it all works, here is what I do. As a PR, it’s my job to ‘manage the flow of information between an organization (my client) and the public (target market)’. Just like with offline PR, I need to create personas, or target market segments, find out which publications they read (in my case websites) and then get their products onto these websites, for free. Some people think this means pushing out an offline press release on a news wire, but it is much more than that and with online PR particularly, the relationship with the journalist is key.

It all starts with the pitch. Although a good pitch with an interesting story will make a journalist’s life easier, the majority of pitches they receive are average and just take up valuable time resulting in the ‘hate’ side of the relationship. To deliver a good pitch, you need to know the website inside out so you pitch the right content, contact the right person, at the right time and preferably on the phone as you often get a much better response. It helps if you have researched the journalist so you know who you are dealing with and you need a lot of grit and determination as you could be shut up in mid-sentence or just told flat out that your pitch sucks.  Do this all badly, and your name will be remembered as that nightmare person who doesn’t know what they are doing. Do it well you can really start to build up a good relationship with a journalist. The recent Gorkana breakfast briefing I attended with the editor of Sky News Online, John Gripton confirms this. He said that he does indeed have good relationships with certain PRs who have continually delivered.

Apart from making it easier to pitch in the future, this relationship is key for maximising the value of your online PR piece. Whereas offline PR often ends at placing a story, online PR takes it a step further by getting a link too. If I’m writing a piece myself, I’ll include a nice link with good anchor text, job done. But more often than not that link is left out or if the journalist has written the piece, they don’t automatically add one. Asking for a FREE link in a PR piece (and preferably with some juicy anchor text) is much easier when you have a good relationship with the journalist.

And it’s great when this PR wizardry pays off. This month I secured some brilliant coverage for rehab centre The Causeway Retreat on the online PR Holy Grail: BBC News Online. With 9,771,000 monthly unique users and a fierce reputation, an article plus link from this site is just about as good as it gets. The combination of a good angle and statistics on executive burnout, concise and to the point pitch emails and a good phone manner resulted in a visit to the centre from a BBC journalist for a piece on Executive Burnout being on the rise. By setting all this up and being present on the day to make sure things ran smoothly, I’ve been asked to help with future features, opening a door to one of the most influential sites in the UK.

Shortly after that I was back again showing around The Observer who also broke the story, to 16,058,979 monthly unique users online and 409,970 newspaper readers - demonstrating that our efforts are also impacting the offline press as well. Again, a close working relationship with the journalist ensured they got what they wanted and we got the coverage.

So although PR is all about building relationships between a brand and the public, building relationships between the PR and journalists is an essential part of it to facilitate the process and it takes a certain type of person to do it! It is a delicate process that takes experience, creative flair and determination.

If you need help with dealing with the press, give us a shout.