Using Twitter To Get Major Exposure
Yesterday I met with the honchos of a suburban hospital. They want to compete with the “big boys” ie the city’s academic medical centers. That means generating some citywide coverage.
I told the staff that I could do that, but only with their help. They had to question their staff to help find the great stories that are all around them.
At which point the hospital’s CEO said, “Frankly I’ve given up on the media. We just got a national award for our diabetic care. Not a single station or newspaper showed any interest.”
Of course not. That story is dead on arrival.
To understand what the media wants, you first have to understand how it works.
Every day the news isn’t observed, it’s created. At 9AM each morning TV producers and newspaper editors reconstruct the day’s wire stories and other “news” into a flowing half-hour screenplay. Their goal is to make “the news” mimic fiction. To make “reality “just as entertaining and involving as any novel or TV drama.
If there’s a fire, reporters must “Find me the dog who saved the family’s life or the smoke alarm that failed for lack of a 50 cent battery.”
If interest rates are down, they’re railed at “Find me the young couple that can finally buy their own home. I want emotion!”
Reporters then spend the rest of the day making their boss’ screenplay real. They’ll bring home the imagined story their bosses want (whether it’s accurate for not.).
That’s how it works. So how does this knowledge benefit your practice or hospital?
Well, simply put if you can anticipate, you can participate. If you know what stories the media is likely chasing, you can quickly offer up your own expert, make the reporter’s job easier, and get the attention you want.
It’s not hard; the stories the media picks up are usually quite predictable.
In general they:
§ Have Emotion
§ Apply To A Broad Audience
§ Are Visual In Nature
§ Lend Themselves To A One-Sentence “Tease” (For Promotional Reasons)
For over ten years those are the stories I sought out every morning. I went to 20 internet news and medical sites and singled out those I knew met these criteria and would get broad coverage by the end of the day.
Frankly I loved the process. It was like panning for gold nuggets. I enjoyed it so much that, even though I’m no longer in TV, I still do it almost every morning. For instance, last week buried in dozens of medical stories was one about how “obesity shrinks your brain” and another about a new “Viagra soda.” Gold. (I didn’t say substantive, or even worthwhile. I said gold.) By the end of the day those stories were everywhere.
Now, though, I don’t put these nuggets on CBS, I put them on Twitter.
My goal is to give practices and hospital marketing departments an edge. If you know in real time what a paper or TV news show is working on, you can be part of the process.
For reporters struggling to actualize their producers’ daily screenplay, logistics is everything! The clock starts ticking the moment they get their assignments. I’d get daily migraines waiting for PR departments to get me the expert I wanted. If you had proactively offered me that expert, I’d have been so grateful I would have been that much more flattering about your organization!
Every morning I put 3-4 of these upcoming stories on my Twitter page. Some stories won’t apply to your organizations, but some will.
And when you call that assignment desk or reporter and you’re already in their heads, they’ll be impressed. What’s more, the next time they need somebody for their news piece or article, they’ll call you first.
Our Twitter id page is “tvdoc.” Please consider it…because everybody wants to have an edge.
