Interacting with reporters at conferences: a guide for legal and AEC professionals
With your program in hand and trusty lanyard around your neck, you’ve exchanged business cards and enthusiastically nodded along to the keynote speaker’s most compelling points. You’ve nibbled the finger sandwiches, raided the coffee carafes and spent an obscene amount of time looking for “Ballroom 3F.” Hopefully, you’ve also remembered to bring a good jacket for those frigid caverns they call meeting rooms.
But there’s one other thing you might have overlooked.
You know those writer types who report on the issues and trends affecting your industry? Maybe they’ve even covered your firm before. Well, conferences are a fantastic place to spot them out in the wild.
I used to be one of them, and I found that conferences had two key functions:
- They helped me understand the biggest issues affecting the industry I covered and how leading professionals were thinking about them.
- They allowed me to connect with those professionals in person and build mutually beneficial relationships.
At conferences, expos and other industry events, the sea of email and phone pitches temporarily parts to make way for real, face-to-face connections with journalists. Here’s how — and why — professionals in the legal, architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industries should seize this opportunity to meet the media.
Why bother?
I know what some of you are thinking: Ugh, I have a packed schedule, and you want me to talk to strangers? Can’t I just send an email? Better yet, can’t I just leave all this to my public relations team?
While your PR team should do the heavy lifting here, there is a good reason why you should personally interact with journalists at conferences. These face-to-face meetings can often achieve things that emails and phone calls simply can’t, including conveying certain nuances and helping you establish trust and rapport, making journalists more likely to view you as a go-to expert in your field.
It’s a connection Reputation Ink has helped make for clients attending, speaking, exhibiting and sponsoring events on multiple occasions, and it can result in coverage rounding up the conference and delving deeper into relevant issues, as well as ongoing opportunities for expert commentary and bylined articles.
As remote work has proliferated since the COVID-19 pandemic, these opportunities to meet the media IRL are rarer than ever. It’s not often that you’ll find yourself two booths away from the editor of a leading national or regional publication, so it’s worth taking the time to engage.
Scope your targets
Don’t wing it. Use the weeks before the conference to find out which journalists and influencers will be there. This is where your PR team comes in, as they can typically request a list of media attendees from the event organizers. This information will be invaluable for developing story pitches and scheduling interviews or booth visits ahead of time.
Not everyone on the list will necessarily be a target, though. When deciding who to prioritize, research their coverage area and consider how it aligns with your focus or the news you want to share. Your PR team might also contact relevant journalists who haven’t RSVP’d to put the conference on their radar.
Craft your messages
As delightful company as I’m sure you are, there’s little point in setting up a meeting with a journalist if you aren’t going to give them something of interest to their audience. Figuring out what this is will require some brainstorming on the part of you and your PR team, but it’s worth the effort.
The key to crafting killer pitches is finding the crossover between both parties. Where do your firm’s goals overlap with the issues affecting the journalist’s audience?
If you’re an AEC professional, maybe you’ll be at the conference to introduce a new product, demonstrating its innovative features and benefits. Let’s say the new product enhances energy efficiency in building projects. This alone isn’t typically enough to capture a journalist’s interest, but when you can tie it to something affecting the industry or current events, it becomes more compelling. For example, you could frame your pitch around increasing demand for sustainable construction practices and recent legislation pushing for greener building standards.
If you’re a commercial lawyer, perhaps you’ll be at the conference to discuss your approach to cybersecurity and data privacy issues, highlighting your firm’s successful track record. Again — not a story, I’m afraid. But if you can frame your insights within a recent high-profile data breach affecting a major company or an impending change to data privacy laws that business owners will need to comply with, now we’re talking.
Schedule the meetings
Your meeting with the media could take various forms depending on circumstances and schedules. If you have a booth, you might invite certain journalists to stop by for a tour. If you’re speaking on a panel, you might give a journalist the opportunity to interview you afterward for a deeper dive into various topics. Alternatively, you might just arrange a chat on background over coffee.
In addition to pitching new ideas, your PR team should ask journalists what stories they already have planned. If the plan is to compile a roundup of takeaways after the conference or produce video Q&As with attendees, your PR team can demonstrate why you should be a part of that conversation, given your experience and insights into the industry’s most pressing issues.
Prepare
Make sure you know a bit about the reporter and their focus before meeting them. You don’t have to be a superfan (in fact, that would probably be weird), but it’s important that both you and your PR team don’t go in clueless. This way, instead of filling dead air with, “Um, nice weather we’re having!” you can say things like, “I saw that article you wrote last month on data centers. We’re observing that trend on the ground with our customers.”
Again, you shouldn’t be doing the legwork here, but a little bit of prep can take you far. We often compile a short briefing book so our clients can see who they’re meeting with and when, check out the journalist’s social media handles, review past coverage and other relevant topics of conversation, and practice their messaging in advance.
You might also want to brush up on media training by having a 20-minute call with your PR team to review questions and tips and practice your talking points. You can download a copy of our media interview cheat sheet here.
Keep the connection alive
Now that you’ve put a face to the name and had a fruitful conversation, don’t let your new media connection die on the vine! Regardless of whether your initial meeting results in a story, it could lead to other opportunities if you nurture the relationship.
Follow the reporter on social media and send a message thanking them for meeting with you and letting them know how interesting it was to hear their perspective on industry trends. If you enjoyed their conference coverage, tell them so. And next time you notice a relevant trend unfolding, flag it for them. Effective media relations are built on long-term relationships, not transactional interactions. If you didn’t make it into the reporter’s story this time, that doesn’t mean you won’t next time.
While the ideal scenario is for the journalist to follow you back on social media and stay tuned for your updates, you’ll also benefit from keeping an eye on their posts. You might find one of their stories inspiring, discover a new industry development or learn something useful about your competitors. Why not have that extra pulse on your industry?
Go forth!
The more you practice weaving these interactions with the media into your appearances at conferences and other industry events, the more seamless and natural it will become. So, the next time your inner hermit tries to convince you to shy away, remind them that this one extra step can do wonders for strengthening your media relations and boosting your industry presence. Sometimes, success will come from aligning your efforts with a journalist’s specific needs. Other times, it might just be as simple as saying hello and inviting them to your panel or booth.
Speaking of interactions, if you’d like help brainstorming story pitches or planning meetings with the media for your next industry event, let’s chat: info@rep-ink.com.
