Speaker 1: Hi guys, it's Alex back on our video today. Today I'm just going to talk about something that people have asked me on social media like over the years, and that is how to build a strong media relationship with journalists. So if I think back to like, you know, when I started in PR, like kind of my first kind of experience building relationships with journalists, it was, it was very simple one. So my company sent me to London, and I had a list of all the like the kind of leading business media in London. So think of like, Financial Times, Times of London, like Bloomberg, BBC, like all these big kind of business media. And I was kind of like a little bit naive going to go into it, which kind of helped, I think, because it kind of gave me like a beginner's mind. And as often like, that's like one of the best ways to kind of approach things. And yeah, so essentially, what I did was I made a list of like all these contacts, the product that the company I was representing was a smartphone company, and they weren't in any of the European markets at all. So they were completely unknown. And what I did was I literally went round to every single journalist and then said, you know, do you want to have a coffee? Can I come visit your office? And then I proceeded to do that in London over a couple days. And I think from that initial, that initial kind of meet that kind of started my media relations journey. And I think looking back, I would recommend everyone to do that or like to kind of put yourself in a deep end. But for me, like, there's like a few sort of takeaways, I think you can say, like, if you want to, you know, make contacts with journalists and build your media relations. And I would kind of put them in like two kind of fields, two kind of buckets right now. The first one I would say is like consistency. So when I met all these journalists in London, the one thing I tried to do like over the years was always be consistent in the way I work with them. So if they're a serious personality, I would obviously try and engage in a serious manner. If they were a more like they're more humor oriented, I would obviously try and be more humor oriented as well. But the point being is like my approach was always consistent. And I think they appreciate that journalists have a very kind of busy job and they have a lot of deadlines in the same way PR people do. But being consistent basically gives them stability and gives them it kind of helps them burnish your name in their mind in terms of like your personal brand and your company. And so being consistent can be anything from the way you speak to them in an email, the way you treat them in terms of like a media event, the way you do kind of admin with them, like booking flights or, you know, arranging accommodations. So you just got to be very consistent with your approach. And aside to being consistent, the other thing is, and I did touch on this is personalization. So some media, for example, are OK to engage personally, you know, ask them about their personal life. And like, you know, you can almost become friends. And I did make many friends, but others obviously don't want that. So you have to consider like the level of personalization that you're going to be. So, you know, that personalization, I mean, friendships, it also means gifts, like, you know, giving them products, you know, typically like the way it works in technology businesses, you can give out like a free sample of the product so they can then review it. And not all of these samples are returned. And, you know, many other things like inviting them to like press events, you know, overseas travel and whatnot. And, you know, that, you know, unfortunately, like AI and a lot of the kind of mass media distribution channels don't work in that regard because one size doesn't fit all. You can't just blast all the media contacts with the same level of personalization. So just to recap, in terms of media relations, two things. The first thing is consistency. So basically maintaining that consistency from the moment you meet someone all the way through your relationship with that person definitely helps. And then the second one is personalization. So, you know, basically trying to establish like the level of personalization you're going to achieve and then, you know, following that. So, yeah, that's just my personal experience with media relations and how to work with journalists. You know, that's something I've kind of honed over the years. If you've got like things that work for you or you've got questions, please feel free to leave in the comments and I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye for now.