Who the Heck are You?

I’ll never forget the first time I picked up the phone as a publicist and called a wine writer. It was one of the scariest things I’d ever done. They did not know who I was. They did not know what I wanted. I was insecure about my own knowledge base and I was intimidated since this writer was someone I’d read in an actual publication.

It was also one of the most important calls I ever made.

If you are going to use media relations to help market your service or product then there can be no substitution for actually talking directly to a writer or editor. None. Yet I’ve found over the years that the majority of people either fear or don’t know how to reach out to a writer. They may be a great sales person, but the prospect of picking up the phone and calling a writer who has thousands of readers sets them back on their heels.

There are a number of things one must do before making that call to the writer. But the very first consideration, the one that comes before everything else, the one that will give you the confidence you need to get on the phone, the one that will go farthest in making your outreach to the writer a success is knowing the writer’s work.

Becoming an expert merely means that you are as completely informed as possible about the writer or editor and their work. If you don’t know what the writer has written recently and if you don’t know what subject matter they tend to cover in their reporting, then put the receiver down and back away from the phone slowly. You are in danger of hurting yourself and your business by essentially making the call blind.

In my role as a blogger, I get contacted regularly these days by people who want to interest me in an idea for a post at Fermentation. Half of all communications of this sort are asking me if I’d like to review a wine. In the more than three years I’ve been publishing Fermentation I’ve not reviewed a single wine and I’ve noted numerous times that I don’t review wine. So when I get those emails and calls I have to assume the person contacting me has not read Fermentation nor looked it over to see what I tend to write about. It sort of makes me feel like I’m a random contact to them. I guarantee that you are likely to give that member of the media the same feeling when you contact them without a formidable knowledge of what their interests are and what their audience reads.

My Media Checklist

At the very least do the following when you begin to consider reaching out to a member of the media to tell them your story:

1. Find 5 or 6 of their most recent columns, articles or posts and read them through carefully looking for how they write about topics, what their perspective tends to be and how often they publish.

2. Determine the subject matter they have tended to cover by glancing over as many articles or columns that you can find.

3. Determine if they’ve recently written about the idea or subject matter you want to discuss with them.

4. Take some time to evaluate the publications they write for to determine the audience for whom they usually write.

When I made that first call as a publicist I didn’t do any of this. All I had was some basic knowledge of who the writer was and a vague memory of reading them before. The result was in a “who the heck are you!” response to my clumsy responses to their questions that I should have been able to answer better. That was followed by a, “I don’t’ write about events - declaration - something I should have known.

The semi-indignant nature of his response was one of the most important things I could have heard and swallowed. I never again called any writer who I did not first research. Almost 20 years later I’m still in the business of Wine Media Relations. And as it turns out, I still talk regularly with the writer that wanted to know “Who The Heck Are you?

Cheers,

Tom Wark

Tom Wark is the owner of Wark Communications, a wine industry public relations and communications firm that he founded in 1994. Wark has worked with small and medium wineries as well as international concerns to help raise their visibility among specific audiences. Wark Communications also specializes in direct-to-consumer marketing and Tom himself is the executive director of the Specialty Wine Retailers Association that is fighting to extend the right of retailers to ship to consumers across the country.Tom also publishes FERMENTATAION: The Daily Wine Blog.

This entry was posted by admin on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Blog, The Industry, Wine Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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