Thinking of hiring a financial pr agency?Stop right there, fruitcake.

There's usually only one outcome when you take on a financial pr agency.

It's your derriere doing a passable impression of one of these....



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Thinking of hiring a financial PR agency? Forget it fruitcake. You'll be walking like John Wayne a few weeks in, with one of these for a backside.[/caption]

In reality, all you need to do to get fantastic media coverage for your company is read our super duper PR tips.

Our trusty tips will save you thousands of pounds of money poorly spent on people who haven't the faintest idea what they're doing.

Namely most of the PR industry.

Our latest PR Tip is on how to do a lunch.

PR Tip: at lunch, eat lunch

It goes without saying that when at lunch with a journalist, eat lunch.

The next most important thing when lunching with a journalist is to fight the urge to bang on incessantly about how great your company is.

Because that will result in the journalist never calling you again.

Ever.

Yes, you can talk about your company, give them a bit of background, but keep it short and sweet.

Why not give them a story?

Nine times out of 10 the journalist is not there to learn about your company, anyway: they are there to be given a story.

So give them a story.

If you're no good at winging it, make sure you've done some prep beforehand.

(Brief aside: I was once on lunch when the client suddenly whipped out a piece of paper with loads of story ideas 'pencilled' on it. The journalist nearly burst into tears, she was that touched by the effort the guy had gone to, and now she uses him all the time in her stories - so
can work! Especially if you use pencil rather than pen!).

Don't talk shop ALL the time

Also, do not think that you need to talk shop all the time.

In my (really quite extensive) experience of entertaining journalists, the most productive lunches long-term are the ones where you spend about five minutes talking shop and the rest of the time talking about:

I'm lying about the bottom one, but you get my drift, anyway.

Journalists, believe it or not, are human. They're on lunch, happy to be out of the office having a free steak and chips and bottle of red and will generally prefer to talk about your 5-year affair with your personal trainer than work stuff.

Which they can talk to you about on the phone tomorrow when they are writing an article.

Financial pr agency say: no no no!

A financial pr agency will, of course, say that what I'm saying is complete nonsense.

But then they're a pr agency and PR agencies know very little about the way journalists think and work.

But that's another story altogether.