You Must Feed The Media Beast!

It happens every year during convention season. A stampede of vendors pitching products and services contact me every quarter-hour by phone, fax, e-mail, snail-mail, carrier pigeon, smoke signals, Tweeksand singing telegrams to invite me to chat with them in the exhibit area. The PR folks never seem to learn they must feed reporters actual news to get our attention.

The first wave of invites flooded inbefore RIMS. Just as I came up for air, I was inundated again by those exhibiting at the IIABA. Now it's another mass of polite, bordering on desperate pleadings to meet and greetat next week's ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum.

Will PR folks ever learn? The media beast is hungry for meaty content, and offering them junk food just doesn't cut it. Itonly makes us mad!

It's gottenso bad, I cringe whenever I hear the phone ring these days. Odds areit's a PR person insisting I just have to talk with one of their executives about something that could change the entire course of the insurance civilization, but which most often turns out to be the equivalent of an infomercial.

Even if I wanted to meet with everyone who invited me to join them on the exhibit floor, it would take weeks–not the precious few hours I have to roam the hall.

So how do you get a reporter's or editor's attention? MAKE SOME NEWS!!!

By news, I don't mean what might be important to your company, like signing up a major client or releasing a new product feature. If you really want to tout such successes or sales opportunities, buy an ad!

However, if you want to create valuable content worthy of publication for a news-starved reporter, publish the results of a third-party survey. Come out with a distinguished research report about industry trends. Or set up a private panel on the state of whatever market you are serving–Chubb did that at RIMS and earned a major story in NU, while generating a number of ideas for future articles. Lloyd's did the same in earlier years.

ACORD and LOMA have cleverly tried to bridge the gap for both parties by once again running their “speed dating” press conference, in which attending reporters sit with participating companies for a short time to get the equivalent of their elevator pitch about what's new at their outfits, until a bell rings signalling for the journalists to rotate to another table.

While I do feel a bit manipulated by the process, and don't like being a captive audience, it's relatively harmless, and since the event is run before the exhibit area opens or the conference program begins, at least there are no conflicts in terms of the media's attention. More associations might consider following ACORD and LOMA's lead as a value-added to exhibitors.

But to be brutally honest, I don't recall ever running any “news” either online or in the magazine that “broke” at the speed-dating event. So while the PR people get face-time with the press, I'm not sure ultimately how valuable the event really is.

Therefore, I return to my original advice–make legitimate news that you might want to actually read if you weren't the ones pitching it to reporters. Create something of value for the whole industry, instead of wasting time trying to corral reporters who are so overburdened that they barely have a moment to breathe.

I have my doubts my advice will be heeded, as this is not the first time I've made these suggestions. But if even a handful get the message and act on it, I'll have more than enough news from every conference.