Help Your Clients Rock Their Next Email Interview to Land More Coverage
Plus: The recording from last week's influencer marketing workshop is now available
Good afternoon, TTC subscribers.
A quick thank you to everyone who joined us for last week’s excellent session with lifestyle influencer Veena Crownholm on influencer marketing and how to pair it with your PR efforts. We discussed how to find the perfect influencers to partner with, how to send gifted product samples that could result in FREE social media mentions, and best practices for making the partnership successful for your client’s brand.
If you missed it live, you can buy the recording for $49 (if you’re a Paid TTC Substack Subscriber) or $99 (if you’re a Free TTC Subscriber). Just shoot us an email at info@toptierconsulting.NET to grab your copy and catch up on this important topic that could add more revenue to your business!
This Week’s Topic: Helping Clients Rock Email Interviews
These days, writers have mixed feelings about using email-based interviews. On one hand, they are an efficient way to get what’s needed for a short or simple story. Plus. it’s a lot easier than trying to coordinate a phone call when everyone’s schedules are so busy. And sometimes sources feel more comfortable if they have time to carefully choose their words.
But email-based interviews also open the door for AI-related nightmares, as sources could pull a fast one on a writer and use ChatGPT to craft their responses. In fact, Jill has run into this twice already and had to alert the PR person that their client did something unethical and therefore they wouldn’t be featured in the article anymore (and that she wouldn’t work with them in the future). If you aren’t aware, anything crafted by ChatGPT is automatically plagiarism because it pulls everything from online information that’s already published. And many publications have warned their writers about the dangers of using ChatGPT in any of their copy — at many outlets, a writer who breaks these rules is automatically added to a “do not work with” list. Yes, our jobs are on the line here, so please don’t put us in jeopardy of losing work.
Required reading: The Hidden Dangers of Relying on ChatGPT for Your PR Efforts
As such, some writers won’t use email-based responses anymore (to avoid this exact situation) … and a few will even go as far as requiring the source do a Zoom call with the camera on to prove they are who they say they are. It’s a crazy world!
But assuming everything you submitted via email was on the up and up, we realize it is incredibly frustrating on a publicist's end if you have your client answer email questions and then they don’t end up getting used in a story. There are reasons why this happens.
The good news? There are definitely ways to avoid this from happening and to better a client’s chances of getting used.
When it comes to answering email interview questions, there are some tricks to know that would help out a writer tremendously (your client could even become a go-to source for them down the road!)
There are also some mistakes we see people making with email questions time and time again (some of which could get you blacklisted from working with a writer ever again, eek!). Your clients may be doing some of the things unknowingly and some of these things may be happening that you, as the publicist, are also unaware of.
Here is everything you need to know about helping your sources navigate the world of email interviews: Why writers request them, when and how to push back, tips for answering to ensure that your client’s quotes make it into the story and things to avoid that could get your client left out of a story they submitted answers for.
Here we go!
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