Press briefings – the long and short of it

Having completed a client briefing in Germany last week, which included nearly 10 journalists flying in from all over Europe, we were once more reminded how effective press briefings are for getting your message out there and building good foundations for enduring relationships.

Journalists and editors are hard-pressed for time and can certainly resist the PR agency lure to spend their valuable time attending briefings, which they fear will not result in a useful story. So one essential objective of any successful briefing has to be to give journalists some golden nuggets information; something that their readership will want to know and that would be otherwise unavailable through existing channels.

In fact in the current economic climate journalists are far more focused on the story than the hospitality. Although offering a good combination of both is likely to bring the best results. Using the briefing time and the hospitality ‘downtime’ effectively to develop the relationships between the company, PR and journalist and to really understand what makes each other tick to get the best results. Using skype, webinars, conference calls and emails is no substitute for getting the depth of understanding and quality of business relationships built via face-to-face briefings.

Press briefings may require a little more investment than new methods of communication but they still remain one of the most effective tools for getting your message out there. Briefings create ‘win-win’ PR, hitting the immediate objective of getting a peak of coverage on the current story and building the essential rapport which, through careful management of the relationships, will provide long-term and varied coverage opportunities.