A couple of things to remember

This week we discovered another little snippet of Handle Your Own PR in Mother & Baby magazine. A friend who is in the late stages of pregnancy picked it up in a sample bag at the hospital. It just reinforced a couple of things about PR that I thought were worth touching on:

1. It can be a slow burn – Simone was interviewed by the magazine for this story over six months ago. As we know, magazines work months ahead but other factors can also come into play; If your story isn’t time-critical (ie. there are no specific deadlines), the article can get bumped from issue to issue, depending on the space available for that month. It can make it hard to keep track of whether stories have appeared or not. Most journalists won’t mind if you ask them if you aren’t sure.

2. Editorial can ‘travel’ – what I mean by that is that sometimes an article can appear in additional media that you didn’t know were linked to the original story. For instance, this M&B article was used in sample bags for maternity hospitals. We also got a story a few months ago in Smart Company and it was then reproduced on the ninemsn website in the Money section. Ditto with articles that appear in the small business section of newspapers. I recently got a client an article in the Courier Mail that was reproduced in the Daily Telegraph as well as The Herald Sun. What a bonus!

Have you had either of these things happen to you?