Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.
As a journalist who likes to write favorably about the Philippine startup scene, I often get asked by entrepreneurs on what they can do to help me. Though I tend to demure from this question – it’s part of my job yadda yadda yadda – what follows is how I would respond if Filipino social norms would allow me to be brutally honest.
I think these tips would be effective ways to strengthen your working relationship with journalists you’ve worked with in the past. By providing them with value, they will – out of human nature – try to provide you with value in return.
1. Make a carousel and put their stuff on there
Most tech companies have a carousel on their website – a section with links to past features and write-ups of your company. If I’m a local journalist on your beat, I want to see my work up there. Yes, it’ll be great if the added visibility will drive traffic to the article, however little, but the real benefit is one of ego: You feel good when other people seem to take pride in the fact that you’ve written about them. Like you’re Gore Vidal or something.
2. Choose them for #FollowFriday
For #FollowFriday – the hashtag initiative that allows one Twitter user to champion the following of another – tech companies should choose journalists they work with regularly. There is no other choice that makes more sense. If you’re going to choose purely out of self-interest and not out of politics, journalists represent the greatest investment.
If you promote a journalist to your followers now, many of them may follow. Thus, when the journalist inevitably writes about you again, they can then broadcast and amplify your message as a third-party to your mutual followers. You can think of #FollowFriday as an opportunity to create a megaphone.
3. Get your employees to follow them
Okay, not everyone may listen to your #FollowFriday appeal, no matter how enticingly you pitch your journalist in under 140 characters. Your employees, however, do have to listen to you. Or at least they should. So you should encourage them, gently but firmly, to follow your journalist of choice.
Such an unconventional action would seem to serve only the interest of the journalist, but it also serves your own in a surprising way: It gets your employees into the frame of mind that they can be ambassadors for your company in the online space as well.
4. Boost their articles on Facebook
As page owners on Facebook, your company has a magic button that can increase the visibility of a post as much as tenfold. This is the boost button. You should use it for articles written by journalists. It’ll get more eyeballs on their write-ups, which hopefully enhance your brand’s message or narrative.
You may not believe in boosting as a social media policy in general, but you should grant exceptions in the case of company features. If a third party is out there waving your company’s flag in some way, the least you can do is give them a boost.
5. Let them know stuff off the record
All journalists are journalists because they are, at their heart, curious in some way. The same holds true for business, tech, and startup journalists – the people most likely to write about your companies. While they publish for public consumption, they ultimately write for personal curiosity.
Telling them stuff that they can’t possibly publish – from proprietary information about how your company is doing to Machiavellian business strategies you have planned for the future – gets them excited about your firm. This passion will shine through in other, more mundane things they write about your venture, knowing that there is more going on than the public can justifiably know at the moment.
6. Emphasize the power of their voice
In journalism, as in any fast-paced field, it’s easy to rush from assignment to assignment, lose sight of the bigger picture, and end up going through the motions. As an entrepreneur, you are already used to conveying your passion to others – you might as well use this experience to help remind others of theirs.
Journalists, for example, do have a voice and a powerful one at that – they can shape how people think of technology and business. Reminding them of this fact, whether subtly or directly, will make an impression. It’s so far afield of what the entrepreneur-journalist relationship should be like that they are bound to think of you more as a friend, and in so doing, treat you accordingly.
7. Invite them to your company events
Company events, at least in the tech world, usually involve drinking, and that’s always a good thing. You should invite your favorite journalists to some of your internal events, and if you don’t know what those are, it’s the kind that they don’t have to write about. These are good because they show you want to socialize with them and get to know them as people, yet maintain a healthy professional distance (work events are, after all, still work).
If you or your team members are able to strike a personal connection with a journalist, he will begin to think of himself as a stakeholder. If he is personally invested in your team and professionally interested in your team’s mission, you will get some great writing, my friend.
8. Let them work at your office
During war, journalists are often embedded with troops on the frontlines. Well, the best entrepreneurs are fighting a war in their respective industries – against incumbents, against cultural forces, against the Philippine government and its laws. Give journalists front-row access to this battle by inviting them to observe and work at your office. You may not be immediately comfortable with having civilians around, focused as you are on the war at hand, but you’ll quickly see that this kind of integration is beneficial. The journalist will produce insightful, compelling writing that could have only come by having observed you fight in the trenches.
The post 8 unconventional ways to get tech journalists to like you appeared first on Tech in Asia.
