How to deal with the media

John O’Neill worked as a journalist then began online strategy and digital agency Komosion. He believes SMEs need a clear and direct approach to handling media and PR campaigns.

“I think smart businesses understand that it’s in their interest to communicate through the media, and a smart business, a smart company, will by definition be looking to understand how those needs for media has worked and will seek to meet them.”

“It’s really about your philosophy and your model. I mean you can outsource (PR) and you can in-source if you like, but the thing that you really need to do is be clear on your own strategy.”

“It helps if you don’t have someone inside your business to have someone who understands the media and how it works, what its deadlines are, how it builds on relationships with journalists and all that sort of stuff, and again it’s about like how much of that resource do you need.”
“The most important thing is to be really clear about what it is that you want to communicate.”

“It’s all about the intensity and speed of communication, and as we all know, it’s also that immediacy and intensity can also lead to error, so it leads to I suppose ever more crafty ways of manipulation.”

“From a corporate perspective you’ve really got to be very clear about what it is you are communicating, so yes, I think be ready to respond quickly but the old journalism adage, if in doubt leave it out, holds – don’t just take the opportunity for the sake of it because you can do yourself some damage if you’re trying to respond so quickly but you’re not really clear about what you want to say or why you’re doing it.”

Read more about John O’Neill and Komosion.