How Do You “News?”
[This post was written by Will Ruben, an account director at 3Points]
Today’s real-time, social media-driven landscape has created a 24/7 news cycle in which information is constantly flowing. Staying current on all industry news pieces that matter to you and your business can be a full-time job. How do you efficiently consume the most relevant and timely news?
One answer is to have your PR firm serve as your news dissemination outlet. At 3Points, we keep our clients well-informed about news stories that matter to them. PR is more than just earned, owned, and social media (our three pillars): it’s also about keeping our ear to the ground and ensuring you are aware of key pieces of information that could impact your business.
We’re not the PR firm that’s merely going to send over your company’s media placements and press releases from your industry’s biggest names. That’s simply where our news gathering starts. We want to help you stay updated on key industry issues, gather competitive intelligence, and dig deep into regulations, all while staying focused on your business objectives and avoiding noise. To that end, here are three different ways we deliver this important intelligence to clients.
News Briefs
There are many different ways to get your news presented to you. You can subscribe to industry newsletters that hit your inbox every morning, build a finely tuned Twitter timeline or utilize Twitter Lists, or set up the good, old-fashioned Google Alerts. All of these methods are suitable for finding news, but none are perfect options for curating and compiling stories. We’ve found that the above tactics can either provide too much or too little info — time is money, and it’s not time-effective to comb through news that’s not relevant to you.
To solve this problem, 3Points offers News Briefs as a service (News-as-a-Service, did we just create a new delivery model?!) to our clients, where we collect the most relevant stories and then create a curated list completely customized for each client. Some categories that you can expect to see in your News Brief include: news on your prospective customers and competitors, general industry intelligence, technology trends, and, of course, coverage of your business. You can choose to have your News Brief delivered on a weekly or biweekly basis — whichever option best fits the needs of you and your team.
We have found that News Briefs can help not only as a filter for the most important current news, but also as a resource for your sales team, facilitating convenient opportunities for them to touch base with leads. We’ve seen the timely sharing of one article quickly turn a cold lead into a hot one.
Slack News Thread
If you prefer to have your news served up immediately when it’s hot off the presses, 3Points does that, too. One of the benefits of working with us is that we create Slack channels with our clients (for those who want to), which creates opportunities for real-time communication without cluttering your inbox.
In those Slack channels, we’ll create a #news thread in which the team at 3Points will share news items that are relevant to your team, whether it’s an industry-shaking update or just something you may find interesting.
We often find that our clients use several of the news stories that we send them as fodder for their social media channels or as content to be shared in their client or prospecting newsletters. Getting relevant news sent straight to your devices can quickly arm you for important conversations you may be having later that day or week.
More Traditional Communications (phone, email, texting)
3Points is happy to work with our clients on the channels they prefer. We can seamlessly integrate into their Slack channels, or we can stick to more traditional routes such as phone, email, or texting. Trust me, we do all the above on a daily basis.
Some of our clients ask us to digest the news and provide them with a quick breakdown of what it means for their business via email or phone. Others prefer for us to text them on their personal devices (who doesn’t have their phone next to them 24/7, anyway?) when sending links to hot news items. Flexibility of platforms is vital to providing the most value to our clients.
Interested in learning more about our news monitoring and other 3Points Services? Hit me up at will@3ptscomm.com. I’m always happy to meet new people and find out ways we can help. Getting you the news you can use puts you in a position to be successful, more informed, and help you continue to focus your time and energy on the tasks most important to you.
