About two weeks ago, I was asked by a friend at Digital Life to contribute an article on interesting Singaporeans who are tweeting.
With a blog post on the contestants of Supermodelme.tv tweeting their way to victory, I decided to write something about that.
Furthermore, I knew that Joe Augustine was also using Twitter as a channel to promote his podcast so I decided to add him as part of the story.
Two weeks now, I received a call from the producer of That’s IT, a digital tv show for ChannelNews Asia, for an interview on social media. I saw this as an opportunity to promote the company I worked for, so I got my boss to do the interview too.
During the shoot, I spoke to the producer and asked her if she be interested to interview the contestants of Supermodelme.Tv on how they are using Twitter to gain followers.
I highlighted the various models but Christabel stood out as she was the 2nd runner up of Miss Universe 2007.
So Christabel will be on TV and she appeared in Digital Life. Whoever said Twitter is bad for you, at least it brought Christabel fame into print and broadcast.
However, I was asked again why Christabel and not the other models. Was I using this opportunity to hit on her?
I laughed.
The reason is very simple.
Both Digital Life and ChannelNews Asia have a predominantly Singapore based audience. This makes it easier for the writer, me, and the producer, to frame the story around somebody that Singaporeans can relate to.
In true honesty, when I selected Christabel for the Digital Life article, it was on a hunch. But after doing research and found she was a Miss Universe contestant, it was easy to frame the lead paragraph for the readers to relate to the rest of the story.
If I were to write for a Philippine papers, I would have chosen Helen_SMM to be the lead.
This is the importance of taking advantage of the location to frame your story so local readers can relate too.
For PR, this is very useful in your pitches as it helps the journalists to understand why this is important to the readers.
I have been through requests from clients to pitch a story about them opening a new office in the countries and expect a big feature based on a press release.
There are offices opening everyday, what make yours special?
I asked the clients if they can share with the journalists how much investment are they going to make in the country, or are they going to increase headcount?
They said this is confidential.
Journalists are not going to spend their time on a office opening which they won’t know if it will benefit the reader.
So importantly, to get a pitch, suggest to the client to frame the messaging or the story around the locality of the readers and what affects them directly.
It isn’t easy, but at least you help the journalist to tell a story to his/her readers!
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