PR professionals can use the phone as the difference between “Yay, we got the story!” and “Welp, gotta try again.
Dustin Siggins is founder of Proven Media Solutions.
Let me tell you about the time I got a placement in a large regional newspaper using a piece of technology from the 19th century.
It was earlier this year, and we were pitching an op-ed from someone who no longer lived in the state the paper covered. I knew an email was likely to be ignored — and lucky me, the op-ed editor didn’t have an email address listed.
Which meant I could call to ask for it. And by the time we were done with a three-minute conversation, he asked for the piece. Three days later, it was live.
Imagine if I’d just asked for his email and sent a note that acknowledged, “this person doesn’t live in your state.” He never would have read the piece. But over the phone? He heard the empathy in my voice when I said “would you even consider such a piece? I don’t want to waste your time with a bad submission.”
That’s just one way PR professionals can use the phone as the difference between “Yay, we got the story!” and “Welp, gotta try again.” Here are three more.
Stand out from the digital crowd
Most modern PR professionals send a message digitally: Signal, Telegram, LinkedIn, X or Bluesky, and the still-ubiquitous email. The pro is that everyone communicates this way. But the con…is that everyone communicates this way. Good luck getting your email noticed when an editor has 999 others to check out before COB.
This is especially true when many people under 45 either prefer to avoid phone calls in the first place or, in the case of Gen Z, view it as clunky and out of style. And as every communicator knows, if the crowd is going one way — you should seriously consider going in a different one.
Phone calls can help you stand out in another way, too: Many younger reporters are still building trusted networks of sources, and their attention is ripe for the picking. Matter Communications’ Andrew Petro posted about this on LinkedIn, and it was an insight I hadn’t thought of before.
“We’re having a lot of success recently pitching reporting interns and fellows,” he told me. “They are new to their beat and still building their source list. That usually means they are far more willing to take a call than a veteran reporter with a full inbox. If you can get on their radar early, be a reliable and useful source, you can build a relationship that lasts well beyond their internship.”
CPR for your coverage
Nobody lands every pitch, even those who claim to do so. But sometimes a phone call can bring your pitch back from the dead.
That’s what happened a couple of months ago, when two editors rejected an op-ed for the same reason. My colleague immediately scheduled a call with one of them to understand not just what went wrong, but also how we could make it right.
Instead of guessing why that editor rejected our piece, Jon asked. He listened carefully, took detailed notes, and shared them with our team. We quickly revised and resubmitted that op-ed, and the same editor published it.
Could this have been accomplished with three follow-up emails? Maybe. But the telephone saved a lot of time and effort, and an editor got to hear a human voice for once in his career.
Parsing the pitch
Many public relations professionals hang their hat on media relationships, selling them to clients as though the story doesn’t matter. But sometimes, your best friend the editor, reporter or producer can help you make the story better.
There are other benefits, too. “PR pros all agree that a perfect pitch will resonate with a reporter regardless of whether you have a relationship with them,” said Chase C., communications director at Myth & Mortar. “However, if that pitch is stuck in a spam folder, you require a quick correction, or if the reporter is looking for an industry expert to comment on a story, having strong ties with the press can be a difference-maker.”
This isn’t nepotism; it’s not at all different from an editor you know being more likely to open your email instead of deleting it. The producer will explain why your pitch didn’t work instead of sending a form rejection. The reporter will spend five minutes on the phone brainstorming an angle with you.
“When you have a relationship with a reporter, the ‘pitch’ can move into brainstorm mode – which can’t be done by email,” said corporate communications executive Joseph Gallo. “I’ve spoken to reporters where there’s mutual trust and discussed an angle and gotten it from ‘meh’ to ‘yeh!’ by talking through the available elements, getting their feedback in real time, and adapting on the fly to secure the story.”
It’s a tall order to get coffee with every single media person out there, and you can marry only one of them. But the next closest thing to meaningful human contact is when the voice meets the ear. That’s how things played out in both the examples I provided above, even though we had zero relationship with the editors.
Which means when a journalist knows you, trusts you, and answers your unexpected call just because they saw your name?
That’s PR gold.
The post Want to up your comms game? Phone it in. appeared first on PR Daily.
