Liz Nable 0:00
Welcome to this special recap episode of my interview with source bottle founder, Beck Derrington, from November 2022
Unknown Speaker 0:08
we had such an overwhelming response to this episode The first time we edit, I thought it was worth re releasing to recap all the incredible highlights and remind you all my fellow business owners, entrepreneurs and founders, how to grab that low hanging fruit, ie, get in the media simply and easily, using this service and getting coverage over and over and over again. For those not in the know, source bottle is a disrupter publicity platform, a free subscription service that distributes more than 25 million emails a year, each crammed with free media leads for you. It's hands down, the best and easiest way to get yourself, your business or your brand featured in the media, if it's your first time or your 500th
Unknown Speaker 0:55
Beck is a former lawyer turned PR guru, and she says she's always had a simple vision for her business, for every journalist using the service to be inundated with responses from quality sources, and for every source bottle subscriber to get publicity or famous using it, check out the show notes to discover how you can sign up to source bottle for free. And then listen to last week's episode where we recorded a fresh update on how not to use AI to respond to source bottles, many hundreds of media opportunities each day. Okay, let's go,
Unknown Speaker 1:32
Hello and welcome to media magnet, the podcast for female founders and women owned businesses, startups and side hustlers who want to learn how to grow their business leveraging the media and free PR, I'm Liz nable, and I'm your host, personal publicist. PR, strategist and dedicated hype woman. My goal with this show is to give you a behind the scenes tour of how the media works, to break down the barriers between your business and the big mastheads, so you can see how easy it is to get featured simply by giving journalists what they want. At media magnet, you'll also get access to the top journals, editors, writers and PR people in your industry and beyond, sharing their secrets and expertise on the how, why, what and when of pitching and getting featured in the media consistently, I will share with you how to build your reputation as an industry expert so successfully, the media will be knocking down your door. When I first started in small business 12 years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into. I had spent 15 years as a television news reporter working at several major networks in Australia and then as a freelancer in the US and around the world. I spent years dividing my time between working long shifts on a news desk and traveling the world, chasing stories it was unpredictable and exciting until it wasn't anymore. I decided I wanted a life where I was in charge of what happened next and where I was working to build my own empire, not someone else's. There was a lot I had to learn about running my own business, but getting media and great free PR was not one of them. I already knew what the media wanted. I knew the secret formula for what made news, and I knew how to leverage those media outlets to build my business, get more exposure, and ultimately make more sales. I was featured in every major media outlet in the country, and I never spent a single cent on PR. I took that knowledge for granted until it dawned on me one day that I could teach what I knew to other businesses, let them in on the secret, and they too could build their brands with organic media and PR, let me help you take your brand from Best Kept Secret to household name. This is media magnet, the podcast, and I'm pretty pumped to have you here.
Unknown Speaker 4:07
Hi, BEC, welcome to the show.
Bec Derrington 4:09
Thanks so much for having me. Liz, I have been chasing you as a guest you didn't know for a while because I DMed you on Instagram, and then you replied to me a few weeks later. But I've been chasing you for ages, and I'm super excited to have you on the show. Beck is the founder of sourcebottle.com if you're in Australia or New Zealand, you may be very familiar with this platform. It's as BEC describes like a Tinder for connecting journalists and bloggers with amazing stories. Is that correct? That's a wonderful summation. Yes. Okay, so surprisingly, I found out before earlier today, that you're not actually a journalist, which I just assumed you were, since you had come up with such a clever business idea. Tell me a bit about your background, your career, and kind of how you came up with seeing this gap in the market and started the business look. Yeah, sure. I.
Actually probably a frustrated journalist. I would have loved to have been a journalist, but no my my parents had other ideas for me after school and encouraged me to then pursue law, because that was a serious degree, and I had ideas of of doing a business. It was a new degree back in the last century, which is when I was really young, because I'm really old now, and and it was this great new shiny degree called Business Communications, and with marketing, PR and journalism all sort of clustered in together, coupled with business and I was like, oh my god, I really want to do that. And of course, they said no. And then they said, not only did I have to do law,
Unknown Speaker 5:44
I then had to get admitted, then I had to practice at least for 12 months before I could really,
Unknown Speaker 5:52
you know, let the wave of of just misery wash over me and really convince myself that I really did not want to do this for the next 40 odd years. And so finally I was released, and I went back to uni, and I started all over again, and and then I found my first job, so I went back and did that degree that I so desperately wanted to do, and as a mature age student, and sitting at the front of class, answering everything, and being that real past mature age student, and so, yeah. So then I was, I was I was off. Then I was thinking, Oh, this is fantastic. And I finally got a job. I was waiting tables at the time, and I finally got a job as a marketing media officer for the Queensland Law Society. Kind of fused my legal training with what was emerging as my genuine passion, and I had a most wonderful boss, and she was incredibly generous with her expertise. She was a press secretary in and from Canberra, and she had,
Unknown Speaker 7:00
she was just so generous, and she I just gobbled up everything she she possibly could teach me, and realized that this was sort of where I where I wanted to be. So you're sort of like a lawyer slash journalist. Yeah. Look, I'm a try hat. I was a really bad lawyer. Can I just stress I was an ordinary, very ordinary lawyer. So no one is losing out on me leaving that profession. So, but I really could see that I love the idea. I love stories, and I loved I loved understanding and teasing out what would make something really interesting. So, you know, it was this beautiful. And so, of course, that then sort of flowed into my professional career where I wasn't obviously practicing as a journalist. I was working in marketing and really wanting to go down sort of that media relations side of it, really understanding in that sort of public affairs,
Unknown Speaker 7:56
getting, sort of that meeting issues management. I really loved all that sort of stuff. But, you know, had to make a living. So then we, I moved to Melbourne, and with my husband and or I followed him down here, actually, and then we, then we decided to have a family, and we were both working in very corporate
Unknown Speaker 8:17
jobs that was high pressure and very sort of long hours and demanding, and so that wasn't going to work very well with a young family. So when I fell pregnant with my eldest son, I have three boys, he I decided, okay, well, I might just sort of try to try my hand at sort of having my own little PR consulting firm. And so I did, and I started a fan called wagging tongues. And I had, like, small business clients
Unknown Speaker 8:46
working in many services areas, services industry and but I didn't have any media contacts, right? So Lisa, I had no I knew no one, which is absolutely essential
Unknown Speaker 8:59
in your word, yeah,
Unknown Speaker 9:02
all about relationships, right? And, like, I know one so everyone that I approached, and because I had different, different vertical sort of markets that I was trying to promote, or, you know, stories that I was trying to sell, they there I was called, calling journalists, which is just the pits, it's the pits, because journalists, if you've got a relationship, that will give you a little bit of attitude, but journalists who don't know you assume that you know, particularly you know people in PR, they just assume you're an idiot, and you're just going to waste their time, and you've got to try to sell them something, not a genuine story they're going to be interested in. And they were just really rude, yeah, and so I, I was really super sensitive back then, and very thin skinned, and I just decided this is all too hard. There's got to be another way. I don't really want to talk journalists anymore. They're really scary and ferocious. And so,
Unknown Speaker 9:56
yeah, multiple times like I, you know, I exactly.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
Like, and the first thing you say when you speak to a journalist in terms of, certainly, the first thing I say is, is this a good time? Do you have ask for permission
Unknown Speaker 10:09
just first time? Like, not a good time. No worries. No worries. And, you know, I, and so I was, I was practicing all of those sort of respectful habits, yeah, when with a journalist, and they and one particular just was just just so abrasive and so revolting. And yeah, I just went, now, no, listen, I do not want to be doing that thing. And that was kind of where the sort of ruminations of my idea came into play, where it started becoming much more pressing, like I need to find an easier way, because my clients aren't doing well if I'm not following up and pitching and, you know, doing all the what I need to do, but, but surely, you know, there's got to be an easier way. And I was all over Twitter, because that was my social media platform of choice. And back then that was, this was 2009 so the others weren't even in my mind, even around and I could see journalists really engaging. So as far as I was concerned, all I could see all over Twitter at the time were journalists and PRs, and they would, because they would, you know, they were using it themselves. Journalists were starting to realize they had to develop that and cultivate their own audiences
Unknown Speaker 11:21
on this social media platform. And so they were using it and using it to call out for people. Yeah, wouldn't be great if we could collectively
Unknown Speaker 11:31
call, you know,
Unknown Speaker 11:33
provide these, you know, great stories to address these call outs. And so that's kind of where source bottle came from. I thought, Oh, great. You know, I can actually help my clients, and I don't have to actually speak to a journalist, yeah? Which always helps when you can just email or not have to deal with them directly. It can be very intimidating. Yeah, it certainly can be. And I mean, I'm finding now journalists, because I still do PR from time to time, but I'm finding now journalists, a lot of the younger ones don't actually want to talk to you anyway. Oh yeah. They just text message. Yeah. They just like, Please don't leave a message. Just text Yeah. Oh my god, yeah. What does the world become? So you so you could see them doing call outs on Twitter, like, I need, you know, a small business expert for the six o'clock news tonight, or I need someone who can talk about inflation or whatever. You could see them calling out on Twitter. And was it like a light bulb moment where you were like, Oh, my God, what if I could create a platform where I match journalists with industry experts or sources? Or, you know, it was it like a light bulb moment? Or did it kind of happen over time?
Unknown Speaker 12:40
Oh, you know, I think it was probably a bit, a bit of both. I mean, I think I could see there was a demand for something like that. Well, there was a demand for something like that, for people like me. But a lot of small business people didn't necessarily think that. They didn't understand that. And I think part of the challenges of when I started source bottle, back in 2009 was I had to educate the market of the need for what they you know, why they needed this, yes, and that. And so PR, people got it. Journalists could sort of see it, but,
Unknown Speaker 13:16
and so I started to say, okay, and crowdsourcing was starting to become a bit of a thing, and, and there were all these, you know, these platforms. And I thought, Look, technology can answer and address anything like, or this is a problem that could be solved by technology. And so that, that's kind of and then I did some research, and there was a site at the time called profnet,
Unknown Speaker 13:40
which was, it was a paid platform, though, I think at the time, sort of looking at and mainly targeting PR something, I need this to be free for everybody. I want to, I want to crowdsource every I want people sort of, I suppose,
Unknown Speaker 13:55
level the playing field for smaller businesses that were kind of that couldn't afford a PR. They were just trying to sort of get their story told. I mean, they were. They had all these great stories, really fresh, engaging, wonderful stories that that needed to be told, but they didn't understand how the machinery worked. And I thought, if I could just democratize it, make it really easy for everybody, they'd all come flooding in and oh my god, everyone, I would be the answer to everything. And of course, that's exactly not what happened. No,
Unknown Speaker 14:26
starting your own business is never the case. It never happens like you think it's going to so, so you, you like, bootstrapped it yourself. You just invested your money. So I'm going to start and you just, how did you grow it? Well, that was a real challenge. So
Unknown Speaker 14:41
it actually was really interesting in terms of the timing, because I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I sort of, you know, I was back and forth with my the agency. I employed a really,
Unknown Speaker 14:53
sort of quite a, almost beyond my needs, type agency, digital agency, to put together the platform. Because I think.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
That I needed to create the perception of it being much bigger than just me. Yes,
Unknown Speaker 15:06
I needed journalists to take it seriously, and I needed people to take it seriously. And I figured that if they thought it was just me and my little office space. And actually, at the time I was working, I had this kind of hutch, and I had, you know, a very small child and a big red car sitting beside me, and I had loads of washing on this side. I thought if they had any idea what was happening behind the scenes, they would not take it seriously. So anyway. But it was also at the time when Kevin Rudd was prime minister for the for the first time, and he was on a show years ago called Rove, you know road and they show rove. And he came on, and he said,
Unknown Speaker 15:48
fair shake of the sauce bottle.
Unknown Speaker 15:51
On Roe v Manus, which was actually one of the really, really popular, as you know, was on primetown, yes, popular shows at the time. And he said, fair shake of the sauce bottle, and I've gone, oh my god,
Unknown Speaker 16:05
something of this. So, so I wrote a press release because, of course, that was, you know, obviously I knew how to do that. Yeah, I pitched it the next day. And I even though it wasn't right, it wasn't completely ready. And I was like, Oh my God, they're just gonna find me out. I'm, you know, serious, impossible.
Unknown Speaker 16:23
So anyway,
Unknown Speaker 16:25
and I think I basically said something like, you know, yeah, what was your pitch? Was something like, the media can give this sauce bottle a fair shake or something like that. I mean, clever, yeah, thanks.
Unknown Speaker 16:39
Anyway, I was mocked mercilessly on Twitter from a couple of very serious, older, hack style journalists
Unknown Speaker 16:50
who were, you know, scathing in their criticism of the platform and the idea their criticisms were predominantly, oh, it's a tool for only lazy journalists or others that would say, Oh, I'm going to ask for a pony and, you know, and see what happens and so. And I didn't understand why, when I'd set something up that would actually help them, why they would mock me like there was no risk for them to even try it out. But the problem with a chicken and egg business like saucepot was that I, although I'd launched it out there,
Unknown Speaker 17:26
I knew that if journalists used it, particularly if they were skeptical, which is, you know, just a common characteristic of a journalist, if they were skeptical of its benefits or if it would be useful as a tool for them. And if they used it once and they got crickets, they would think, this is crap. What a crap platform bothering this again. So, you know, I had to have to sort of try to jam in people and say, Oh my God. Because the worst of what happened is, if I launched and I had people using the service, but they didn't hear from me for a week. You know, no big deal. Like, there's no skin off their nose. They just but if a journalist used it and they got nothing, that's a problem. So I sat inside the side of it, which is, journalists are super competitive, and if they did try it and it worked, are they going to tell their friends? That's right, they kept just like, this delicious secret that they're thinking, Man, this is really good and really easy. And I am not telling a single soul about it. So I thought that they would just, you know, in these journalist networks and stuff, they would talk about, oh, this is great tool, you know, you got to use. It's free. Like, why? Why not just throw your hat during? Well, of course, I didn't. It was like nothing, and I'm thinking, Oh, my God, I've I'm trying so hard to get good results for you, yeah, but also I'm trying really hard like so if the journalist did, and I have to be, I'm so grateful there were probably a handful of journalists who used it,
Unknown Speaker 18:53
you know, I committed to using it a few times, yeah,
Unknown Speaker 18:57
regardless of the outcome and and some that reached out to me personally and said, Listen, can you tell us a bit about this and, and I really want to support you. And, but have you thought about this challenge, or have you thought about this? And you know, that would take the time. I was so incredibly grateful, but so yes, as soon as they posted a call out, I was hitting the phones as if it was my, you know, you were doing it manually to try and get results. Yeah? Because, I mean, I might have had, what, 100 subscribers at the time, like, mostly friends and sort of distant relatives, yeah. But we're signed up, you know, I'm, I'm approaching anyone that would possibly like a please, please, just someone up here. You just had your name here. This is an email like, what is it? Oh, nothing, nothing.
Unknown Speaker 19:43
Just, so,
Unknown Speaker 19:45
yeah, I was just desperate to get people on board. And so, yeah, I'm ringing up my sister in law saying, Hey, listen, I know you had a cesarean. There's this great call out. So I'm like, you know,
Unknown Speaker 19:56
whatever third story for the week. So.
Unknown Speaker 20:00
To go with that, how this was so this was 2000 and end of 2009 I think, okay, and how many journalists do you have using the platform now? So submitting call outs or editors or bloggers or, well, look, to be honest, I don't have, I don't have the numbers around, because I don't ask for email addresses from journalists. So it's a bit of a challenge where people said, well, so how many I'm like, Well, I don't know. Any week, I probably got about 50 or 60 different journalists using the platform, but, and a lot of them use it regularly, yeah, but I don't know what I did, though, introduce recently Liz was a thing called, like, it's a verification tick. You know, it's kind of like thing that Elon Musk wants to take off, wants to charge people.
Unknown Speaker 20:52
But, yeah, so. So one of the challenges of the platform is that, if you want to as a journalist, post anonymously, you can and a lot of free because of the way the fragmentation of the market is and the fact that a lot of journalists now aren't aligned with one particular publication or media outlet. They're freelancers. Yeah, a lot of them post as freelancers, or they don't want to disclose the publication of their source, or they say they're a freelance journalist, and then, you know, really savvy PRs have, kind of have brought this upon themselves. A lot of these journalists would once say I'm writing for Smart Company, or I'm writing for, you know, a particular high glossy magazine or something like that. And PRs would approach those complications directly and try to sort of sidestep, I see the platform, and then they would then get in touch with the freelancer or whomever, and say, what the hell I haven't commissioned this story, or I don't know what story they're talking about. And so a lot of journalists got stung by being really open. So what I had to do is I knew the journals behind the scenes. So if I knew it was from, you know, the Nine Network, if I knew it was from seven news, I knew because the email would disclose that or their regular use of the service. But I had no way of conveying to people like this is something to take seriously. Please, please, please, even though they're saying it's freelance, or even though, you know, I know it's the AFR, and they're calling it a financial, online financial publication, or something like that.
Unknown Speaker 22:26
So I introduce this verification tick. So what that means, though, is I am starting to sort of collate a bank of journalists who are verified, who got it as soon as they enter their poster, call out. They it's registers that they're verified. And so then people take it really seriously. They say, Okay, I know this is someone credible, so customer facing, it's still anonymous, so to speak. But you know from your end that it's a really reputable you know because you've verified it on your end. Is that correct, exactly? So I know it is. And now they get a tick, like a, like a Twitter tick, yeah, attached to the call out. So, you know, as well. Okay, it's probably a good time to explain to people how source bottle works, because we haven't done that yet. So, can you explain, explain, from a consumer's point, say, I'm a small business owner. I have, you know, I have a, I've had a fitness business for 10 years, and, you know, I've become a bit of an expert in small business, but other things as well, like women in business, all that sort of stuff. How would someone like me use the source bottle platform, right? Well, it's, it's basically an email platform. It's an email like an email matchmaking service. We described it as that sort of Tinder for storytellers and great stories. So what happens is you sign up to get the emails delivered to you, and you customize your alert. You might sort of say, I'm interested in
Unknown Speaker 23:50
health and fitness or business and finance, whatever it is. And there are about 1213, so every like categories and every email, every drink up alert is customized, but there's, you know, so So you then would start receiving free emails from us up to two a day. There's about 50,000 subscribers on the service. We send out, I worked out just this today. We send out about 400,000 emails a week. We send out over about like 21 million a year. So there's a lot of emails. So it's just this email service. You get the email in your inbox. You see a call out from a journalist that might say, looking for fitness experts to comment on this or for this news story, for this publication. You then have the opportunity to respond to that as a fitness expert, someone who can contribute
Unknown Speaker 24:45
and say, Yes, put your hand up for that. Respond directly to the journalists that at that stage our work is done, we've made the connection. So we step back, and then that's when the connection happens and you say, Yeah, I'm happy to comment on this. This is my contact details. What.
Unknown Speaker 25:00
Are, then they call you, and then the rest is the way the normal sort of
Unknown Speaker 25:06
transaction works between a journalist and a good a good source. There's some definite magic to responding to call outs to heighten your chances of getting the success. That was next question. Yes, yeah. Go ahead, yeah. Look, I, I put together
Unknown Speaker 25:25
an acronym called Cora, and I, this is actually based on something that Valerie COO,
Unknown Speaker 25:32
she's a journalist. I think now she's working more sort of in art and stuff, and she has that right, has the writers center in Sydney, but she's a really great journalist, you use the service for a long time, and she put together, in her mind, what the best response was to a call out, and it had all of these elements. And so I put together this acronym. It's Cora, C, O, R, A stands for C being credentials. A lot of
Unknown Speaker 26:00
a lot of call outs. They actually ask specifically for different credentials. They might say, I need someone with X years experience, or I need someone with this qualification. And so you need to identify immediately that you satisfy the brief. Yep, I have those, those credentials that's required. So if that's that sort of, you know, tick, no brainer. Second is the most important thing when it comes to presenting yourself as good talent for a call out, and that's having a strong opinion. I mean, you know yourself, it's nothing more infuriating or boring than someone who has no opinion. That makes a really dull talent, and there's no chance you're going to get a call back.
Unknown Speaker 26:41
You know, be quoted in a future story if you've got absolutely no opinion and nothing meaningful or interesting to say. So if you want to, if you want to ingratiate yourself to a journalist, or you want to sort of have a better chance of getting success, but have a strong opinion represent, you know, be prepared to back
Unknown Speaker 27:00
your opinion with you. You know your qualifications with your opinion. So if a call out on the benefits of tea versus coffee and which is better for your health, for example, so you would say, Okay, well, I think tea. I know that tea, based on this research, I know that tea is better than coffee, and I strongly believe that this year, I always say, use these sort of catnip type words in your response. I have a strong opinion about this, or I am firmly of the belief. Or, you know, research suggests, and I I, I'm a strong advocate for whatever it is, because journalists go love it, but they also good journalists want to show a balanced story. So so you don't just say, look, I've got this, this much qualifications, and I can comment on this. It's like boring, right? And if you've got a sea of other responses, well, that's a meaningless and forgetful response, but you're trying to sort of say, I need people who are saying coffee is better than tea, and I need people who are saying tea is better than coffee to sort of balance it up. So if you make it easy for the journalists by saying, I've got a strong opinion and I think tea is this, then they can say, okay, great. And I know lots of journalists who repost a call out, and it'll say, now I'm looking for people who think coffee's better, you know, because they
Unknown Speaker 28:21
demonstrate both sides of the of an argument. And so, okay, so that's strong opinion, absolute dead set, most important.
Unknown Speaker 28:30
And then what's the next zone? Are real experience. So, you know, if you're talking about
Unknown Speaker 28:38
like, you know,
Unknown Speaker 28:40
activated almonds and its impact on digestive health, you might say, Okay, well, you've got the expertise this, my opinion, and activated almonds are fantastic for whatever good bowel health.
Unknown Speaker 28:52
And in my like, you know, I've been treating patients for the last five years on blah, blah, blah, and, you know, in my relevant experience, because, of course, all of that stuff you're doing, all the work for the journalist, you're making, then go, Oh my God, this, this person is fantastic you're doing. So you are delivering it to them on a platter, absolutely. And then the final one, the A which is really fundamentally important, as you would know very much, is showing, demonstrating you are readily available or available at short notice. You know, it's another thing I sort of say, just throw in at the end. My direct line is, my mobile number is I'm available at any time between these hours and happy to or I'm readily available at short notice. I mean, journalists love that, so they're the four elements of a really good response and definitely likely to heighten your chances of success. So if there's say 50 or 60 journalists using it, do you say each week, roughly at a time, how many responses do you average or like, What are my chances? Is there, like, 10,000 responses to every call out, like, how to you know, what? What am I up against here?
Unknown Speaker 30:00
You
Unknown Speaker 30:01
look in really popular ones you're you definitely are in the high double to sometimes triple digit responses. So my advice is always to respond quickly, right? And so if you've got sort of that framework in mind, make it really easy to respond really, really quickly within the first 30 minutes of you receiving the call out, if you can. But for the others, like, if I were to look at, you know, obviously there's a, if you look at a lot of different call outs, sort of, you know, 20, whatever day, then you think, okay, the average, I know, based on the data, metrics on the database, is about seven responses. Oh, wow. Okay, that's not too bad. That's not too bad so because sometimes they're very specific
Unknown Speaker 30:45
and sometimes they're
Unknown Speaker 30:50
Yeah, well, I mean, I do get a lot of journalists saying, Can you please take my call out down? I've been inundated, and I and good journalists want to respond and say thank you or acknowledge. A lot of journalists don't, but good journalists and lobbyists do want to acknowledge, and they don't want to have to keep acknowledging when they sort of say, oh, and dismissing saying, Look, thanks so much. But I've actually found my sources already, so they get in touch with us all the time and say, look, and you pull the call out early, even though the deadline might be two days away. So I always stress to people, please respond quickly and just ignore the deadline. The deadline. The deadline is really informative from the perspective of saying what type of publication, if they're not giving a lot away, you know, the shorter the deadline, then the more likely it's to be sort of radio, TV, even print.
Unknown Speaker 31:42
The longer the deadline more likely to be sort of blog, whatever you know, maybe not as high an audience, or they know that it's it's going to be pretty hard to source that kind of person with that expertise. So those sorts of that's the way the deadline can give some insight into the type of call out, but
Unknown Speaker 32:01
meaningless when it comes to when to respond. What about things like couple of questions? I'm going to just going to put them all into one question so you can answer in one go, so in terms of your actual response. So I know, because I've done it before, you get, like, a little pop up and it says you just got a little space where you can put in your email and then attach attachments, if you feel relevant. What's your opinion on attachments to your application? How long should the email be? And is there anything that is like a must have in that email? I know we've done the Quora so those things, but anything else that's relevant, or is that really annoying to put in attachments and that sort of thing? Look, you know, it's really interesting you ask that. Liz, I mean, you're a journalist, so you know what you like. If you were to post a call out on there, you'd know what you're looking for. Some journalists absolutely hate it when people attach press releases, because I think that's a generic thing. I'm looking for something specific. Others really like it because it's great backgrounder for them
Unknown Speaker 33:02
and so. And some really love images, and some go look just cut to the chase. So it's very peculiar to that particular journalist, but I think more is more
Unknown Speaker 33:16
less when it comes to text, but more is more if you want to, actually, if you want to add, you know, you can just say this look, you know, please see a press release attached that's as a backgrounder to sort of further, you know, just, just communicate like adults. I always think another really good thing to include. So, yes, address the Cora. The Cora can be addressed in two to three senses, like really succinctly. And of course, that's right, like, you know, keep it short, stupid kind of stuff, yeah, but,
Unknown Speaker 33:49
but I feel like, if you want to, if you want to, sort of,
Unknown Speaker 33:55
I don't know, separate yourself, highlight, you know, get a little bit of leverage, injection personality in your response. It's not a job interview. So, so I sort of say, like, I give a couple of examples when I talk to people about you using the Cora and and so one of them might be, you know, I'm a health and fitness expert with X years experience. Another one might be,
Unknown Speaker 34:19
you know, my friends call me the health junkie or the health assassin or the whatever. And as as a way of differentiating yourself from the other health experts, if you inject a bit of personality, a, yes, again, good talent, but B, it kind of makes you memorable. It makes that response memorable and say, Oh, which was that health junkie? Or what? Which one was that. And so I kind of feel like keep the text as brief as you can. If you can refer to something else in terms of, like, this is a blog that I've written, or this is something else, or this is some research that I found, hyperlink it. Don't, don't attach stuff that you don't have.
Unknown Speaker 35:00
Do hyperlinks, definitely better. But if you've got a press release or something, just just flag it as a background and not the answer. Please don't assume that that's going to do the heavy lifting, because it might. Yeah. What about understanding who you're responding to and who they write for, and that what that publication would produce? How important is it to, like, read the room, like, if you've never watched,
Unknown Speaker 35:25
let's say, Australian story, and they're doing a call out. Are you just fishing in the dark if you try and respond with a pitch? Because in my opinion, it's that they normally would have a specific way they would tell a story, or a very specific way they're looking for you to pitch to them. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I really do. But unfortunately, you don't necessarily know, and because they cover it up so much. But like at the moment, you know, SBS, the feeds been using a lot. They've been posting a lot of call outs now, they're very specific, and some of them are quite unusual things to respond to.
Unknown Speaker 35:59
They probably wouldn't care. Like in a lot of those sorts of examples, if you're saying you know, they want someone who's experienced this, then it really doesn't matter whether you're reading the room. They're they're looking for people who have great story to tell, or something bit more raw. So it probably wouldn't matter if you're if you if it's got an online finance publication, and it's you can see that it's a little bit drier, if you have that insight, then you can
Unknown Speaker 36:24
count, tailor as much as you can to that. But I think brevity
Unknown Speaker 36:31
respond accurately and addressing exactly what they want and injecting a bit of personality at the same time, I think are the three best things, because I think it's be very, very hard to tally your response too much. Yeah, I think you're right. Like, if you are responding to something like that, SBS,
Unknown Speaker 36:50
who's calling out for human interest, stories and experiences, then you're talking about your experience. And that's a different pitch, trying to get in a product guide, or trying to, you know, talk about inflation or interest rates or make your business relevant. It's kind of two separate kind of skills, isn't it?
Unknown Speaker 37:11
Tell me a bit I know. So the service is free.
Unknown Speaker 37:15
How do you are there ways to, like, level up your industry expertise? Kind of for people to go, oh, this is someone who speaks really well. Like, do you get stars if you do a good job? Like, how do you kind of, like, how do I go if I'm getting really good traction as a business owner or as a source, my source? Yeah, yeah.
Unknown Speaker 37:36
Can I, like, lift my game and elevate what I offer and get good reviews. Or how does that work? Yeah, look, it's, it's, it's a freemium platform. So the core service is free, and there's, like, a free level, a free number of, you know, you drink up alerts you can open and respond to for free, etc. And then there are
Unknown Speaker 37:58
sort of ways that you can uplift and you can so you can get an expert profile which automatically attaches. And so there are different benefits to to that. Where you've got this kind of online, customized profile, you get a star like different things, so that people know that they don't they it's really easy for them to do a background and they can take probably your response bit more seriously. If you've committed to the platform, you've had to put some skin in the game. Okay? Well, that person's probably fine. The other thing we're about to launch is which is coming in the new year. I was hoping it earlier this year, but, you know, technology,
Unknown Speaker 38:40
early in the new year, it's going to be like an expert profile directory. So, oh yeah, for a long time, I haven't, I haven't ever wanted journalists to be able to search through an expert profile directory, because I kind of cannibalize as the service. But at the same time, I think, well, journalists themselves are desperate to to find great people and at very short notice. So,
Unknown Speaker 39:04
so why not if I can actually give them a service where they can search your directory and find exactly the person they're looking for, interview that person, then every day when they may not need to post a call out, they may not need that other arm of the business, and I'm thinking, Well, why not offer that so, so I'm sort of launching those expert profiles, sort of condensing them into a directory where they can search through the keywords contained in their online profile to see whether they can respond to the call out. And so that addresses an even more immediate need, so they can okay at two o'clock in the morning, I can find that person, and I can get my questions and send it out and whatever. Yeah, maximum. It's better for everyone. And how does one get oneself on the expert directory? Well, that's, that's the subscription. That's the change. Okay, there are years and yeah, so,
Unknown Speaker 39:58
yeah, that that's kind.
Unknown Speaker 40:00
That's the monetization model
Unknown Speaker 40:03
for the business. Yeah. And so if someone's starting out, I know a lot of the feedback I get from small business owners, and you are a small business owner, so you get this you're wearing multiple hats, like, my background is journalism, you've worked in the media and PR, so we kind of get it. So to us, it doesn't feel like such a mountain, but for so many small business owners, like they might be working in their business on the ground every day. They've got a million things that they need to do. They need to do their best. They need to do their accounting. They need to do sales. Someone's sick, they just go, I can't, like, can I be bothered? Like, can I it's just such a like, I don't even know where to start, but I don't I mean, when I see it, I go, there's so much opportunity, and it's free. Like, you're getting free exposure for your business. Like, it blows my mind. What some baby steps people can can kind of take on board from the from this episode, and go, Okay, I'm just going to touch, like, dip my toe in, and some basics that they can respond to their first call out, and perhaps start to get some traction, to see that it's, it's really, actually a really simple process, yeah, look, I, you know, I think sometimes it's just you need to wait in you just need to try. I always say there's a couple of things.
Unknown Speaker 41:08
Firstly, just subscribe to every topic. Just get get every call out delivered, because sometimes they're a little bit left of center, but they're, they're actually really good in terms of cultivating and growing your online profile. And I think it's hard for businesses that think about PR and try to sort of align it with marketing or direct response advertising. It's not that, it's it's an accumulated effort lots of little touch points, particularly in a digital space that helps people find you when they're looking for someone that that knows about what you know about. And so I kind of say, look, it's, it's, it's low hanging fruit, it's a reactive media platform, so you can find out what journalists are looking for at the exact time. And if you can answer that and use that little framework, that core framework, then
Unknown Speaker 42:08
you just get you it's like fishing, if you just get your first bite, it becomes almost addictive. And it's like, oh my god, I can do this. I can do this. And the thing is, they can do it, yeah, you just got to try. And everyone's exhausted and tired and whatever. I totally understand. I know some, you know, business leaders have said when that comes to source bottle, they outsource it to
Unknown Speaker 42:33
do you know some someone in their office, and what they have to do every day is just scan the call outs and find anything that's relevant.
Unknown Speaker 42:41
Others say, put together some pre like, pre pre prepared, pre like, ready to go, template, style responses. I always say that
Unknown Speaker 42:55
there are a couple of evergreen story angles, yeah, that I'm ready to go with any time.
Unknown Speaker 43:02
You know, journalists love a stereotype. They love someone who fits the mold. They also love someone who breaks the mold. So I've got a couple of go tos that whenever that they come around all the time. You know, work life balance as a busy mum of and I'm like, Okay, I'm a busy mum of three, and I have no work life balance, and I can absolutely contribute to that, but I can have that response ready to go, yeah, other ones like, you know,
Unknown Speaker 43:28
story angles, like a woman in tech. Well, that supposedly breaks the stereotype. I don't know how to write a single bit of code, but I can certainly try to jump on that bandwagon and pretend I'm a woman in tech, you know, whatever it is, yeah, mompreneur, gross. I hate that experience. But, you know, if I'm happy to, you know, cut myself out as
Unknown Speaker 43:53
as a mompreneur. So, so I kind of feel like you can, there's a whole lot of little strategies, micro strategies, that you can do to make this easy, yeah, but, but I don't want overcomplicated either. So, you know, I say Cora, and I say all this, and I say this is the perfect response. But sometimes just being, you know, being honest and earnest, and just telling your story, journalists gonna love that. They love the fact that this platform actually sometimes removes that,
Unknown Speaker 44:25
that spin doctor element of a PR, and they get direct contact with someone with their honest, earnest story and and I love that, I love that, I think, for someone who's starting out too, is they often get caught. Okay, I'm going to give use myself as an example, if you we've been in fitness. We've had fitness businesses for a long time. So other people in my industry I see will only pitch themselves, or if they're going to pitch as a fitness expert, but what they don't see is their the other hats they wear in their business and or their personal life, and how that could relate. So for example.
Unknown Speaker 45:00
A call out about how interest rates are affecting your you know, daily budget, or you can relate to that because you have a mortgage or you have a business loan. You know, the staff, you know, the staff shortages that is around Australia. That's something I can talk about. Women in Business, like you, the work life balance, how covid has affected my business, long term market trends post covid.
Unknown Speaker 45:22
You know, small business like building brands in a community, like there's so many, most of what I talk about in the media has nothing to do with my bricks and mortar business. It's all about how what I know, what I've learned, relates to the news of the day. And that's any business, really, if you think about it a bit outside the box. Oh, absolutely, you know, you're like, This podcast is all about telling women's stories or, you know, and of their business. Now, it happens to be that I talk in about PR, and that's my business, but that's really not what we're the fundamentals of us talking is about, oh my god, you know, I started this business at it. It was a labor of love. It took me years and years to finally get it going. Oh my god, I'm exhausted from it.
Unknown Speaker 46:09
That's part of the that human story is probably what's most endearing and has greater longevity than me talking about the intricacies of how my business works, and people, you know, it's, it's all about that sort of serendipity footprint, like, I sometimes think that it's so important in the digital space to have lots of eyes the fire, you know, source bottle can make you famous for being, you know, being an owner of a cavo, as well as also running a really great sort of business that might sort of generate yield results that way, in that particular expertise, like if I made pools, or, you know, whatever, if I made headphones, it's an I just think it's so important to understand that we're not it. The world isn't the way it used to be. It's really important to have that holistic brand online so people can come at you and find you through sort of almost sometimes mysterious things, like it might be, you know, a story that is on something quite oblique. I know Susie Campbell, a PR, who, who I've done work with, she always tells a story that she she's English and and there was a call out about doodle dogs, right? And, of course, the word doodle didn't necessarily have that silly, snarky kind of approach the way Aussies might, kind of because she's English. And so she kind of earnestly approached and responded and said, I've got this, you know, I've got a doodle dog, and I think it was a Labradoodle or something. Anyway, she responded, and she responded quickly, and the journalist came out and took some pictures of her and the doodle dog and whatever. And then, and they got talking, and sort of developed this relationship. And she said, Oh, what do you do? Because I'm in PR. And she said, Oh, that's fantastic. Oh, my God. Okay, well, and so then all of a sudden, she kept getting Yeah, not only for her own stories, but also because she had clients who might be able to help, and because she'd had this great sort of rapport with this journalist. So it doors open,
Unknown Speaker 48:15
and sometimes in unusual ways. And I just don't think you should ever close off an opportunity that's
Unknown Speaker 48:23
yeah, anyway. And the great story, it's really just five or 10 minutes, and you couldn't, you can get the emails, what, like, once a day or once a week or whatever, and probably better to once a day, right? So you can respond quickly, yeah. Well, so you get up to two a day, if you're Yeah. So you get up to two a day. And they're designed, though, Liz, so you can just scan them really quickly, like they're just very easily scanned.
Unknown Speaker 48:49
And if you like it, great. If you don't ignore it, dismiss it, delete whatever. Or, you know, have have a sort of allocate a certain amount of time after 10 and two in the afternoon, the two times that come out 10 and two. And if you sort of say, Okay, we'll be disciplined. I'll file it, and at 1030 I'll have looking at, is it there? Scan it. Nothing of interest. Move on. Just try to sort of introduce it into sort of just daily habits, because you're right. Doesn't take long to scan. Certainly doesn't take long to respond, but it can be quite significant. Can have quite a significant impact. Yeah, and look, it's probably, I mean, in my opinion, this is what I do. But in my opinion, I would say you build that time into your marketing allocation each week, because it's free, like and if you are do have a really niche area of expertise, the likelihood of getting picked up and getting featured is, you know, you might have your paid digital your Facebook ads, or your Google Ad whatever,
Unknown Speaker 49:47
or, you know, a traditional advertisement somewhere, but this is just a compliment, like the icing on top to everything, and it rolls over time and you get momentum, and like you say, it's a digital footprint, so that contributes to your organic SEO driving forever.
Unknown Speaker 50:00
Not like social media. That's right. That's right. The other thing that I think is, really, I wanted to sort of just add so the call outs sort of, you've got a lot of different people using the service in a way that maybe it wasn't traditionally designed for. So you have journals, obviously, that's clear, that's the way it's designed for, for different journalists. But then you've got things like, you've got sample bags and goodie bags, or you've got, you know, different TV shows that are looking for prizes that they want to promote to their viewers, that sort of things like, oh my god, what a great opportunity, but you've got to put a bit of skin in the game. The other one that sort of emerged as a really good opportunity is, sort of case studies. So PRs might say, if they're putting together a really good sort of media story, they might think, Okay, well, I need, I've got a skin product I need,
Unknown Speaker 50:53
I need a dermatologist to talk about the damage that sun, the sun, can do to your skin, because this product is the solution, right? So when they're putting together a press release, they obviously want that third party, independent, objective, expert voice. Now, if you've got a pick that, and so they put a call out for a case study for someone with that medical expertise that's happy to to contribute and give some sort of, you know, talk about the detrimental harm of of the sun, and then be showcased in their media release that they're pitching to a journalist as an expert, a dermatology, dermatological expert on some damage that then journalists might use that and quote that person, yeah. And so you've got a PR working for you, promoting your expertise. So there are lots of different ways that the service can really help you. You just have to, yeah, leverage it, use it, dip your toe in, give it a well, well, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. I know we tried a few times. We got there in the end. So it's
Unknown Speaker 51:58
source bottle, www.sourcebottle.com,
Unknown Speaker 52:01
not.au Do no. Well, yeah, I mean, it's, it.com's but you can get, okay, Donna, you got the.iu now, but it's not tomato sauce either, by the way, because I have
Unknown Speaker 52:12
s, o, u, R, C, E, B, O, double T, L, E, but I'm going to put the link in the show notes to anyone who
Unknown Speaker 52:19
is driving or something and can't write that down, it'll all be
Unknown Speaker 52:23
thank you so much. Liz, thanks so much. Vic, you know be curious about it. Pleasure. This episode of media magnet was brought to you by my signature group coaching program, the media masters Academy. The media masters Academy is a live, online, six week course taught by me and designed to teach you how to become your own publicist and give you exclusive access to pitch the country's top journalists and editors. Doors open just three times a year. Check it out at Liz nable.com along with a ton of free resources to help you get started taking your business from Best Kept Secret to household name right now, if you love this episode of media magnet, please share it with your business buddies or on social media and tag me at at Liz underscore navel. And if there's a specific guest you want to hear from on the show, or a topic or question you want to know more about, please tell me so I can make sure the show stays dedicated, especially for you. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
