How you can plan a virtual press briefing for international journalists and the digital assets needed to get media coverage.

Hello, and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. It's the 25th of January, which means it's my birthday. So happy birthday to me and I have in the past taken my birthday off, but it's been just too busy today and we have a busy week this week. And I want to share with you one of the activities that you may want to hold for your company. And that we're working on at the moment. And it is a virtual press briefing. Now, the virtual press briefing is where we have the media coming to a Zoom Room. And we're doing that for the DEWA, which is the Dubai Energy and Water Authority. And they have a global awards to find companies that are innovating in water technologies. And we are hosting for them tomorrow an event with some 15 media from around Asia, and the spokespeople will be in Dubai. Now once upon a time, in fact, even just last April, I will fly to Dubai to manage a press briefing for a client. Now, we don't need to do that. Now we can just go there via the internet, which frankly, is in many ways, much better. But it does create some challenges. And I want to share with you some of the pointers that we've been giving to our client in order to make sure that the press briefing goes ahead in the kind of way that we would when it was an offline event. Now, a press briefing is where you bring a number of media together, and you introduce them to a client to a product or service. And really what you're trying to do is to get engagement from the media that this particular clients services are of interest to their readers. And we do that by first of all trying to get the media to have a personal relationship, a personal introduction with our client. The reason that companies like DEWA would use a company like Eastwest PR is because they don't know those media already. And we do, and we build those relationships just in readiness for this kind of an event. Of this particular event is appealing to media in CSR, in Corporate Social Responsibility, in water technology in technology in venture capital, and environmental sectors. So what my team in Singapore have been doing is reaching out to the regional media and inviting them to come and listen to the people from DEWA to talk about the power of these awards. Now in the past, what we do is rent a room and invite the media and invite the client and there would be a stand up and there would be a presentation, there'll be q&a questions and answers. But there would also be time for people to meet each other, to give each other business cards, and to give even door gifts, for example, in brochures and flyers and so on to make it all feel very personal and tangible. That of course doesn't exist now. So how we share information has to be different. And I'm sharing this today because if you're thinking about holding a media briefing, a virtual briefing is very cost effective, very time effective, but does require some thinking about. First of all, then what we needed to do was to pitch to the media. And what we have done this time is to create a video invitation. I've used this software called Descript. And we've taken some of the client assets, I use some video and some text, some PowerPoint. And I've blended those together in Descript and made a two-minute invitation which we then sent as a video file to the media. Now we think this is going to be a bit more sort of inventive, really than the large number of text emails that they get everyday. The problem is getting them to open that video. Of course now, I had thought about using a platform called Bonj ro, which you can use for s nding videos to recipients as p rt of a campaign. And it r ally is very powerful. I've u ed it before. The issue is t at I'm using the Prowly s ftware to send out the i vitations and I didn't want to h ve a second platform So I've recorded the video using Descript. And with that I could add subtitles and quotes and also a call to action at the end. And this Descript software is really very powerful and very simple to use, I was able to create this in just half an hour, embedding some other video captions, and some text and doing a screen share at the same time using the Descript screenshare software. So we've got to send that two-minute video introduction and invitation to the media. We've got now some 14 media confirmed for this one hour press briefing. The next part, of course, is looking at the format of the press briefing in the past, because you had people there, they had to listen and you could watch them and they were out of social obligation, paying attention. But now people can drop on to mute, they can go on to just the picture instead of the video camera, for example. So we must make the press briefing more engaging. So it needs to be shorter and snappier for a start and also have more mixed media. So we shall have a 15 minute invitation in advance to the media to get online so that they could be in their seats as it were in advance of the spokesperson arriving. And this mirrors what one would have done in a hotel, for example. Then what we've got is a short introduction for me. But then we're going to show a one-minute video to start the conversation. And then we shall have a 20 minute presentation and then another video, another two-minute video, which binds in the content from the presentation. We've reviewed the clients presentation in advance. Now that's something that often didn't happen. When it was a physical presentation. Often the client wouldn't want to send something in advance, they would wait until they've arrived and then show you on the day, what they're doing. Now this is fraught with problems because often, clients give a sales presentation, instead of a media facing presentation. The difference being in a sales presentation, they put in details about why someone should buy the product or service. Whereas in media relations, we need to educate the journalists who are going to tell other people about the good or service they're not customers in themselves. So we had a good look at the presentation today, and it's very nicely presented, very professional presentation by the team at DEWA. But it is also some 26 slides and they have 20 minutes, we all know that speaking to a slide for 15 seconds or less is quite, quite short. And especially if there's text on it, so we raise the point of how quickly they would need to go through the slides. But also that the current slides are very factual or functional. But actually, when people are listening through Zoom, their attention isn't going to be as focused as it is when they are in the room. Because there's no power of personality. They're also not, if you like in a collective experience. So in the same way that when people watch a music concert or a movie, the collective experience creates an energy in the room and a sort of a level of understanding, which is absent in a digital meeting. So we then talk to the client that was a theme for the press briefing. They want to share information about this $1 million award. In fact, there are a number of different payments under these four different awards anything up to $100,000 for one award. And the functional aspects are perfect. But what I had shared with the client is that what we really need to do is to create an emotional attachment between the journalist and the spokesperson and the message they're giving. Because we can always share the facts and the figures later. What we really need to do is to get them to understand that the awards are a catalyst for change within the organizations that enter and win. So we need to get the Speak PR program where we talk about Storify personalizing, engage, amplify and to know, we need to get the presentation to really talk to the personalization aspect. And we need to make the hero of the awards, not the award giver but the awards recipient. What do they do with the money? How does it impact them when they've got the award, and most importantly, how will they bring fresh water technologies to those people that are thirsty around the world. So we have to then think, with the client about making this into a story about the winners, and a story about the people that will benefit from the winner's technologies. So we've moved on then from the idea of the theme, and we look at the assets we need to offer the media. Now the client wants to give a PDF file to the journalists of the presentation. But for the journalists, that's useless, because they can't open them and edit them. So what I've done is I've exported that to a Word document because they can use that file, cut and paste the images and the text directly into their articles. What we're also doing in the press kit is we're including videos, which are the short form and the longer form videos of the announcement about the awards, but also interviews with previous winners. We've also interviewed a winner from a company called Liquinex. And we are including the case study into the press kit in case someone is interested enough to then create a link to a case study of a winner. And we're also of course going to be including details of the prize money, and the details of how a company can enter. Journalists are very short of time. And they're asked to file two, three, maybe four stories per day. Our job is to get them all at the building blocks so they can assemble a story, rather than necessarily originate a story. Many journalists are covering stories with domains that they're not familiar with. And so we also need to recognize that we must give them content that they can understand quickly and easily. That's another part of our Speak PR program is that content will be engaging, if it is both simple and new, but also that it is relevant. And so by setting context for the journalists and giving them the content, so that it's easy for them to understand, but also easy for them to share, we will help them do their jobs. Now, this all takes place in the background, the client as far as they're concerned. And in fact, as far as any client is concerned, then uses the most important news in the world. And rightly so. Our job as the agency is to bridge the expectations of the client with the needs of the journalist. And using a video-based virtual media conference creates some slightly new challenges for all parties concerned. So if you are thinking about holding a press briefing, I would encourage you to do so. But don't approach it in the way that you might have done a previous event in a fixed venue with people turning up. The video and the Zoom interview process means that the media may or may not ask as many questions depending on how shy they are. So we can use the back channel of the chat room to ask some of the journalists that if they've got questions, and sometimes so the more shy journalists will ask the moderator, for example, me to ask questions. Now that would never happen in a normal press briefing because they couldn't whisper in my ear a question. So actually, the virtual press conference is really good for those people that are shy. And we've talked about that before about trade shows. And virtual trade shows being really good for those people that are shy. Press briefings are still a key part of anybody's Media Relations program. Really, really encourage you to think about hosting one if you have got something to share, how you make it interesting, how you theme it, how you create the assets, how you facilitate the conversation around that is a skill set in itself. Now what I also was talking to the client about was the need for them to all be in situations where it's well lit, where they have microphones available and headsets. Because what you also want is and an event which has good production values. We're going to record the event, of course, and the opportunity then is to create digital assets content from the content. This is the repurposing of content. We'll have sound bites, we'll have recordings, and we will have both moving assets and still assets. What I mean by an asset is a piece of content we can use, which could then be used on social media by the client, as well as by the media. So in that sense, it's a really efficient and effective use of time. So if you're looking at creating a press briefing, I can really encourage you to do so feel free to give me a call, and email me a jim@eastwestpr.com if you've got any questions at all about how that might happen. If you need any help, that of course, we'd be more than happy to do so. So thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. And you've been listening to the program that explains how you can do PR yourself without a big team without necessarily even outsourcing it by using some technologies. We all know Zoom, but one for example, like the descript.com for creating your content. If you like this, please do sign up to our newsletter eastwestpr.com or come to the website at speakpr.co where we have the information about our five stage methodology and the six week mastermind. My name is Jim James until we meet again, I wish you the best of health a sustainable business and that if you've got something to share, think about hosting a virtual press briefing.