Advanced tip for press conferences. Let's say you hold a press conference. Oh, nobody showed up. What do you do? Just hang your head in shame. Declare to complete failure, resign the account get fired fire yourself.
No, there are ways of rescuing a press conference that went bad. This has happened to me many times. And it may have nothing to do with something you did wrong. It may be that in your town, there was some emergency there was a huge fire explosion, something happened and all the media went there instead. Nothing you could do is just bad timing. Here's what I've done.
In many situations like this. Let's say you hold the press conference at 11 nobody shows up. 1115 nobody shows up 1130 nobody shows up. What I then do is call the local radio stations. And TV outlets if that's your focus, and say, We finished the press conference, but and then mentioned the name of the client or the colleague I'm working with, would be available to come by your station for a quick interview, if you want to grab a couple soundbites. And a huge percentage of the time, they'll say, oh, that would be great.
We wanted to send somebody but we were short staffed, you drive over to the station, they interview you out front and you still get on the news. As a practical matter, there's no difference than if they had come to your press conference. This is even easier. with local radio stations, you call up and say we finished the press conference, which is technically true is finished. You don't have to tell them nobody showed up. But in mention the name of the principal is available right now by phone if you want to do a brief interview.
Again, I've done that many times. And the radio stations. Oh, thank goodness, that would be great. We didn't have anyone to send But we'd be more than happy to do a quick phoner. So there are times when you releasing something new, something go to put spotlight, something you thought was important enough to warrant a press conference, nobody showed up. And you can still get as much coverage just by the follow up afterward and do that with newspapers and trade publications as well.