Selling in stories has moved beyond the realms of the telephone pitch

01/04/2012 // Market Harborough, UK // emilie.legrand // Punch Communications

Long gone are the days of taking journalists out to lunch to secure coverage for a press release. As technology continues to develop, more journalists are moving away from accepting traditional pitches from PRs to more innovative and social methods, says PR Company Punch Communications.

“Media moves quickly, and therefore so does the PR industry,” says Kirsty Shaw from PR, social and search agency Punch Communications. “Journalists are becoming more and more stretched as budgets are squeezed and their job becomes more pressured. Therefore more and more journalists are moving away from accepting pitches from PRs via e-mail or telephone, instead the relationship between PR and journalist is becoming more social taking to networking sites such as Twitter and Google+.

“Contacting journalists via Twitter is a difficult task, with just 140 characters to make a pitch PRs have to find innovative ways to sell their story in few words as possible. Some are utilising press release hosting sites and using shortened URLs to pitch their story to journalists. However, this method sometimes comes across as spamming and often a more tailored and personalised approach is the way forward.”

Google+ also provides the perfect platform to pitch to journalists with unlimited characters available when sending personal messages. Kirsty continues: “G+ has created another communication channel with journalists, providing they have opened up their profile to receive messages from people who are not in their circles; this is an ideal way to make an approach. Pitching via social media sites is not just relevant for tech PR agencies; Twitter and Google+ are more weapons to add to a PR’s armoury.”

Punch Communications is a PR, social media and search agency with a global reach and client base to match. For more information, please visit www.punchcomms.com.

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