Sat, 2020-02-15 13:33
Sam
Matthew Lynley: What Makes for a Great Communications Pro
[We asked Matthew Lynley, a former journalist with VentureBeat, TechCrunch and the WSJ, what makes for a great comms professional. Here's what he had to say. -- Ed.] Companies with massive budgets can hire a PR team the size of a small army. But hiring more people doesn’t make the company better at PR.
Want to upgrade to a subscription that includes SWMS news, research and consulting? Send e-mail to Sam for details.
[We asked veteran tech reporter Mitch Wagner to deconstruct two of his recent news stories, explaining why he wrote them the way he did. Mitch has done so -- you will enjoy his contribution. --Ed.]
[Enjoy this true story from SWMS contributor and PR pro Anton Molodetskiy -Ed.] You may think that journalists would rather talk to a telemarketer than answer your phone call, but the phone is still a key tool for both reporters and PR. I learned this hard way a few years ago while managing outreach for a B2B startup coming out of stealth.
Placing contributed content ideally comes without strings -- "pitch it, place it, forget it" -- but that's not how it works at Third Door Media, publishers of Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. Third Door is in the community business. Community editor Wendy Almeida wants to help but you must help her too.
Paid content is more important then ever. Here are pathways to get the dialog going with the Tier 1 shops that offer it. The rates change constantly and it's all negotiable. Here's where you start.
Podcasting is more than 15 years old now and tracking the good ones is darn near impossible but we'll try anyway. Here's a list of 26 media brands that offer at least one tech podcast, and another 18 indie tech podcasts worth listening to and pitching. We also point you, more broadly, to hundreds more.
We recently conducted a video meeting with a subscriber who sought SWMS POV on the following media relations questions. With the subscriber's permission, here are the questions and our responses. Hope you find them useful.
Newsletters sure are tough to pitch. Many lack bespoke content. Many are assembled by managing editors or junior folks with scant domain expertise. Others are columnists impervious to suggestion. Every now and again you’ll find someone pitchable, such as...
If you're looking for pitchable deep expertise in the IT infrastructure space, you can still find it in Packet Pushers, a team of podcasting publishers who celebrate their tenth anniversary this May. Freshly posted on their site is the 500th episode of the Heavy Networking podcast.
As someone who has been writing an almost-weekly Web Informant email newsletter since 1995, Sam asked me to comment on the current state of the art. It seems as if newsletters are having a new lease on life. Up until last summer, I wrote one of the Inside.com newsletters on IT security...