Now the other thing you have to think about is crafting a story. Because nobody can write about you if 1
you just pitch a journalist saying "Hey my name is Angela. 2
I made a great app. Please write about me." And sadly nobody's going to really take that bait. 3
So instead what you need is you need to craft a story. 4
Think from the journalist point of view. 5
Imagine that you're the guy who needs to get X number of clicks per day in order to stay employed. 6
They need to be able to show that the stories they write gets shared, gets liked and gets views. 7
And this unfortunately is the way that modern journalism works. 8
Now journalism standards aside, this is unfortunately the reality that you're faced with. 9
So imagine that you are that tech journalist who has to churn out article after article after article. 10
Forget about things like writer's blog. 11
You know imagine having to create a masterpiece every 30 minutes. Because in reality, those are some of 12
the constraints that tech journalists face nowadays. 13
And so a) be considerate. When you are pitching a journalist give them everything that they need in order 14
to put together a story quickly. 15
So that means images, that means the media, portraits of the founders, anything that they could just drag 16
and drop into the story instead of you know playing sort of email ping pong with you because nobody 17
has the time for them. 18
The other thing to do when you're imagining yourself in the shoes of a journalist is how do you not 19
get fired? 20
How do you create a story that people actually want to read? 21
And I can bet you that story is not going to be some unknown company started yesterday, brought out a 22
new app. That's just not exciting anymore. 23
Instead think about helping them in their jobs. 24
Craft an angle. 25
Think about something that is exciting, something that allows readers to imagine the future. Or something 26
that's just pure funny and very shareable. 27
So unless you're Apple or Google, if you pitch journalists with boring stories or just facts about your 28
company or your app, you can bet that nobody's going to pick them up. 29
So you know it's fine for Apple to say "Oh we made a new support app." and Tech Crunch will write about 30
it. 31
If you are a nobody if your company is not known, 32
the fact of the matter is that nobody cares and you have to make-- and you have to figure out how you 33
can make people care. 34
So for example, a friend of ours decided to jump onto the Christmas season quite literally by creating 35
these humping reindeer Christmas jumpers. 36
It was kind of an off the cuff idea. But it had two really powerful things going for it. 37
One is seasonality. 38
It's coming up to the Christmas period, 39
Journalists will have to write about Christmas whether if they like it or not. 40
And this is a good story that coincides with the gift giving and gift buying period of time. And the 41
second thing is that they managed to have a story that's pretty clickbaity like "Frisky reindeers inspire 42
Scotts gran to design naughty Christmas jumper." 43
Now that is a BuzzFeed title. And usually the way that press goes nowadays is that you target a small 44
paper, some local paper but something that gets syndicated by the larger newspapers. 45
So for example journalists at the larger publications will read a whole load of blogs as well as local 46
newspapers just to tap into what's going on in the world. 47
Very often what happens is that you start off going for the easy bake, you know targeting the smaller 48
publications. And once you get a success there if it's interesting enough it'll get picked up by some 49
of the larger publications and national publications 50
even. So for example that story ended up getting picked up by the Daily Mail and that gave them back links 51
that gave them exposure and that helped them sell a whole load of humping reindeer Christmas jumpers. 52
Now coming back to our point, 53
this all started from crafting a story. And their story happened to be that the founders grandma came 54
up with a rude Christmas jumper idea. 55
She saw some humping ranges and decided to knit one for her grandson or something like that. 56
Now this is completely false 57
according to the guys who made this. They essentially worked backwards in terms of what is the current 58
season, what will journalists write about, 59
what is something that can get attention, get clicks, get shares. 60
Well maybe a rude Christmas jumper. 61
It's the perfect combination of traditional versus comical. 62
So his grandparents were sporting enough to wear the jumpers and let him go along with this story. 63
But at the end of the day it was actually completely made up. 64
They decided to make a product and they tried to figure out what is the best angle for a journalist 65
to pick up the story. 66
And whether you like it or not, this is something that you have to think about. 67
And I'm not saying that you have to create a false story but you have to think about what is the angle 68
of your story that can make it exciting and can make journalists want to write about it. 69
Maybe you created something that shows what the future will be like 70
or maybe you created something that nobody ever thought about. 71
But essentially the important thing to take away is to craft your story even before you start the pitch.