Over the last month, we've secured comments for our clients in The Register, Daily Telegraph, USA Today, Computing, International Business Times and plenty more publications.
Comments are one tactic used to increase company and person name recognition across a number of publications quickly, establishing our spokespeople as experts linked to a specific topic, be it cyber crime or disaster recovery.
Regular comments in leading publications also invite journalists to ask for more information, longer thought leadership pieces or interviews.
So how do you secure comments? Here are my top tips:
- Decide what you are going to comment on. Are you an expert on ransomware, robotics or cloud computing?
- Monitor for these terms to understand who covers this type of story and what is hot. A little secret, at Vitis PR we have built our own continous monitoring tool to look out for media opps, but you may want to start with something as simple as Google Alerts.
- If you want widespread coverage, can the technologies that you want to comment on affect consumers? If yes, don't be scared of reaching our to national newspaper titles.
- Provide timely comments - four days after a story breaks is too late. Ideally, the same day, and even better, within 1 - 2 hours.
- Have some canned yet easily editable comments ready - every comment should be unique, but sometimes it's good to have something written down already to give inspiration and that can be edited.
- Give comments with insight - "oh they really should have used our product" is honestly poor, so analyse the situation, give a unique perspective on it, use anecdotal experience, show how it can affect a consumer or what a consumer or business should do now.
- Keep your target lists updated - try not to spam and do add to your lists constantly as you monitor for more opps.
Anyway, good luck with your comment activity, and get in touch if you'd like Vitis PR to help you out with it.
