Strategic Insights and Clickworthy Content Development

Category: Writing

Crafting the Ultimate Email Interview Response

email-824310_640More journalists have moved to email interviews, including this one.  You’d be surprised how different the responses are, and IMHO, it’s the little things that can make or break coverage.

This post assumes your client has been selected for an email interview.

#1:  Include Your Client’s Information

Wait, what?  I already gave you that stuff in my original pitch over email…

Maybe, but is it correct?  A lot of times in a pitch, PR pros will say something like, “Anil is with…” or “Anil is lead at XYZ Company.”  That may be true.  On the other hand, his LinkedIn title, or the title on the company site (assuming he’s listed) may say something more specific like VP of Technology and Co-founder.  Perhaps he was just promoted to CEO and it hasn’t been announced yet, but will be by the time the story hits.  Stuff happens.

Include your client’s information so you can be sure that it’s correct and free of typos.  Sometimes email pitches include typos that include misspelled client names or misspelled client company names (which happened this week).  Also, in the unlikely event that your client’s name or company name is misspelled when the story hits, you can show the mistake wasn’t yours (which makes a difference).

And another thing:  Sometimes an email thread related to a pitch for ONE story is unbelievably long.  Some of them exceed 20 messages to and from Ms. PR Maven.  She may have included the client’s title in Message #1, in Message #19, somewhere in between or not at all.  It’s cheap insurance (and a best practice) to include your client’s information at the top, in boldface type, with a link to your client’s website.

#2:  Advise Your Client to Provide Thoughtful, Well-Reasoned Responses

Most interviewees do this, which is great.  A few don’t.  Those that don’t run the risk of not being included in a story because what they said just doesn’t fit in.  FWIW, at the top of my email interview questions I say, “Thank you for your thoughtful, well-reasoned responses.”  The implication is provide short answers at your own risk.

From where I sit, stories have a life of their own.  I pitch ideas, get approval, fish for sources on HARO, interview people, and then weave that into something coherent.  It’s kind of like putting together a puzzle: I know the subject matter of the puzzle, but I don’t know what the pieces are (depends on the interviews) and how they’ll fit together.  Here’s why brief commentary is dangerous, if you’re working with me.

As background, brief commentary takes a couple of forms – the pithy response and the general short answer, both of which can be difficult or impossible to include in a story.

Knowing journalists use quotables, sometimes (albeit rarely), an interviewee will try to provide short, pithy, supposedly quotable quips that are “cute” and most likely unusable.  The quips are based on false assumptions about how the story will flow.

Comparatively, thoughtful, well-reasoned answers provide perspectives and the reasons for those perspectives.  This is great because intelligent minds, and even experts, disagree.  It’s always helpful to understand why.  Also, the richer commentary also provides more to work with, and therefore more opportunities (and a better likelihood) for coverage.

The general short answer typically shows a lack of effort.  The interviewee provides one or two sentences, which tend to be obvious points that others have also made and so there’s nothing original.  Because there’s nothing original (and someone probably said the same thing more eloquently), guess what?

Obviously, when I don’t use commentary I get questions about it.  I answer those questions honestly, and essentially say one of the two things above.

#3:  Make Sure The Answers Align With the Questions

This sounds obvious, but people can go off on tangents.  Sometimes, I’ve hit a hot-button issue to the point of opening Pandora’s Box.  The interviewee spews out all kinds of information, perhaps little or none of which address the question directly.

Sometimes people want to promote their products.  This is fine to some degree, assuming that’s the point of the piece, but I don’t tend to write about products or how great they are unless it’s sponsored content.  My Help a Reporter Out (HARO) posts always state “non-promotional” content, but not everyone pays attention.  If I ask for commentary on issues and trends, and receive answers about all the bells and whistles of a product, I find myself explaining why the commentary wasn’t used.

Related to this are transparently obvious self-serving answers.  I don’t blame vendors for this.  They’re doing it because PR is a promotional vehicle, but it ain’t advertorial.  Sometimes, transparently promotional stuff is kind of amusing, but perhaps unusable.  I’m really not going to quote someone saying, “what they really need is the industry’s most robust, scalable, global, award-winning, industry-leading API platform.”

Bottom Line

There are a few simple things that can make the difference between getting coverage and not getting coverage.  I’ve included three things that could help probably 40% of the people I work with over time.

If you’re already doing these things, thank you very much.  Hopefully this commentary will be valuable for you nevertheless, because even if you know the ropes, you’ll probably need to teach someone else, soon.

The Accidental Journalist

journalism

The Accidental Journalist

Who becomes a journalist “accidentally?”

I, for one, and you’ll never guess how.

It was 1994.  I was running PR and advertising for Interop, a huge information technology event.  At the time, it was my job to know all the editors-in-chiefs of the magazines that mattered, when printed publications were the norm.  I could foresee, based on the technologies of the day, that the World Wide Web had the potential to be more than a collection of digital brochures.  It was going to become a medium through which people would buy things. (I’m sure that sounds obvious if not incredible to you now, but it certainly wasn’t obvious to many people at the time.)

Armed with my flash-from-Heaven insight, I tried to convince every editor I knew that e-commerce was going to be The Next Big Thing.  I wasn’t looking for a writing gig.  I was trying to clue them into one of the biggest news stories of the time.  None of them believed me.  Finally, the editor of Internet World said, “I don’t believe you either, but write a story and let’s see what happens.”

What happened was nothing short of amazing.

Two publishers contacted me, asking to contribute e-commerce chapters to books they were publishing.  Soon thereafter, I chaired and helped plan an oversold e-commerce conference that attracted more than 500 professors and executives of some of the world’s largest corporations in Japan.  It was an unexpectedly great start to my eventual role as a journalist- certainly one I never expected.

I guess in my case, the ghost came out of the closet, although yes, I am still ghostwriting.  I am also writing under my own name for publications including InformationWeekSD Times, and All Analytics.  And, you can look forward to hearing more from me here.

Got questions or topics you’d like me to address in this blog?  Feel free to speak out in the comments section below or use the form on the Contact Me page.

Oh, and I teach writing workshops 1:1 and to groups at PR agencies in case you’re interested.