Finding a PR “opportunity” v. opportunity finding your company

As a journalist, I had to deal with all sorts of answers coming from communication departments, marketing managers and PR agencies. Writing for a financial daily shouldn’t be that hard, right? It’s actually easier than working for a traditional newspaper where Economics is just a couple of pages and Social is the main area of interest.

The thing is, when dealing with companies as a reporter, you have to pass the Marketing & Communication Department in order to get an interview or, basically, any other information that’s not on the company’s website. That being said, most medium-to-huge companies work with PR agencies. PR agencies want money. For that money, they have to work.

The circuit of an e-mail

The first step for PR agencies with smart employees is to market themselves in front of journalists as the primary source of information when it comes to their clients. So to get an interview with some manager from a company, you have to send an e-mail to the PR agency. Because every corporation’s communication department works directly with the agency, if you pass the agency and send an e-mail to the company’s representatives, you’ll usually be sent back to the PR agency. Because, well, the agency usually answers most of the press requests, including writing the answers to reporter’s questions.

Now, here’s the fun stuff. Being a long time reporter, you might know that eventually you’ll be sent back to the PR agency. So you go ahead and send them the request. What happens next? The agency gets the request and goes to the client saying: “We found a huge opportunity for your company’s [insert here department] manager to be featured in an article in Publication X“.

The opportunity

Usually, the agency puts it like this: “We found you the opportunity, We’re good, aren’t we? Now pay us the performance bonus“. Though, that didn’t actually happened. What really happened is that opportunity found you. It’s actually fascinating seeing how stuff works. The relationship between a PR agency and a company’s communication department is really interesting to watch and see how an interview with a manager opportunity for a company is being rewarded though it shouldn’t happen.

I’m not talking about small companies where a PR agency actually does its job and finds opportunities. That’s different. In these cases, opportunities might come through good relations between PR workers and journalists. “Hey, dude, a client of mine could be interesting for your paper, what do you think?”, “Hey, cool, give me the contacts“. But PR opportunities usually come through good press releases if they’re well written, when there’s a news factor involved.

Everyone can write a press release and send it to a mailing list, but you have to give journalists the news, not the info. For some agencies, that’s hard to do. And that’s why most journalists agree that the best PR workers are… well, former journalists.