Setting Up Sucessful Press Events for Clients in Phoenix, Mesa and Gilbert, Arizona

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Setting Up Successful Press Events and Press Tours

Press tours are very effective at reaching reporters with busy schedules and email boxes that are full of the competition's media pitches. Taking the time and making an effort to visit a reporter where they work, says a lot about how important you think their time is worth.

Not all clients have products and services that merit traveling to the East and West Coast to do a press tour. However, if your product is different, provides a great demo and is easy to set up in a reporter's office, doing a press tour might be worth the time and effort.

If your company is large enough to have several divisions or several teams of executives that work on similar lines of business, you might even consider doing your own mini-tradeshow or marketing event. When done correctly, putting on your own event provides the same benefits as a tradeshow, but your company will be the only focal point. It takes a lot of hard work to get reporters, analysts, vendors, and customers to attend, but the payoff can be tremendous.

For example, in the 1990's MCI had one of the most sophisticated fiber optic networks in the world, which provided 99.999% uptime. Their network operations centers were second to none in proactive managed network services. They maintained very advanced data centers, which managed worldwide call detail records for millions and millions of calls each year. The company was also a pioneer at many information technology (IT) services such as data warehousing and data mining. The data centers and IT staff allowed MCI's call centers to generate more than $8 billion a year in revenue by predicting what services would sell best into different customer accounts. So, obviously, they had some great stories to share with the press.

However, when we teamed up with their technology PR department, they were generating less than 100 technology stories a year in the media.

Their management team decided to make the commitment to do whatever it would take to position their network as the most advanced and sophisticated network in the world.

To meet their expectations, we needed a way to introduce MCI's executives, their network, and a wide variety of subject matter experts to the press. Our strategy was to create MCI's very first Information Technology Day that would showcase their technology and their expertise in an educational format so that many different groups of people could learn about the depth of MCI's network and information technology.

We decided to follow the same methodology practiced by most tradeshows. First, we lined up seven subject matter experts, which included Convergent Billing, Data Warehousing, Registry, Data Centers, Benchmarking, Intranets, and Call Centers. Next, we built extensive media lists and we invited carefully selected reporters that covered each subject matter. In addition to reporters, we invited the top financial and industry analysts that covered the same subjects. MCI's sales team even invited existing customers and a few Fortune 50 customers that wanted to learn more about MCI's capabilities.

The seven presentations were presented in a logical order and each showed the increasing value that each technology team added to the network equation. The event ended with a keynote speech from MCI's Chief Information Officer, Lance Boxer, who summed up the parts into a cohesive whole, followed by a formal luncheon.

The luncheon was strategically set up so that executives would be able to build relationships with reporters, industry analysts and top level customers. A formal seating chart ensured that members of each group were seated at tables by subject matter, such as data warehousing and convergent billing. Needless to say, reporters had everything they needed to write many front page stories. Analysts found new ways to cover MCI's expertise in their research reports. Customers provided great testimonials. It was a very powerful event that built great relationships between MCI's executives and the most important technology gatekeepers in the United States.

As a result of the relationships that we built that day, our media coverage increased from less than 100 stories per year to more than 400 per year for the next several years. It was a PR executive's dream come true.