I challenge anybody to succeed with a skyline shot in Wellington which includes the Beehive. If you want a landscape shot for a website it’s yeah/nah and I did a complete circuit. Closeups of its rather tatty presence flanked by the solid bulk of King Dick can be picked up from various angles. But you only get portraits, of course.
So on the bike to the new cable car shed early one morning and I was lucky to catch the sun coming round from the east as it does and no wind or rain which is a bonus. And yer ’tis — as the Poms say anywhere southwest of Reading.
You see, people had been complaining. Words like ‘old-fashioned,’ ‘20th century,’ ‘untidy’ came from colleagues and even family members boasting experience in technology and design. ‘it looks like the back page of a community newspaper’ someone was unkind enough to say.
I suppose I’d thought that the 20th century wasn’t that long ago, but ok, ok, maybe I hadn’t noticed, and, true, various notables had been falling off their twigs rather untimely in recent months. So let’s do something, I said, bravely.
But the pic was just the beginning. I was forced to participate in conversations about branding even, and other esoterica. In vain I said the business ethos was summed up in one little acrostic — K.I.S.S. — and they said ‘That’s insulting. You can’t call people stupid. And anyway nobody’s used that since 1990.’
But K.I.S.S. or no, it’s turned out all right. Thanks, friends, (he says through gritted teeth) for the clean layout, the simple connections between Home page, Blogs and the databases, and keeping me from loading up with family videos, fancy fonts, shots of my cat, and quotes from anybody I’m reading at the moment.
So if you want to look at what I’ve (ok, we’ve) done, go netmedianz.com and see what I mean about Wellington on a nice day. And pretty soon you won’t be able to go via netmediaglobal, netmedia.bz or any other of the speculative URLs I’ve been collecting, just netmedianz.com.
And of course the very cost-effective MediaPasifika/Mediamine package — an all-Kiwi setup — is just what you need to handle media relations tasks on our patch. Not forgetting Asia and Brazil.
Month: May 2016
BRILLIANT DISTRIBUTION AND CAREFUL PLACEMENT
You can’t do better than to optimise coverage for your stories in the media relations business. But stories, like it or not, are audience-driven, and key to optimisation is understanding each story’s potential in relation to the relevant media and the voices that make them up. It’s the receptivity factor which governs results. But how do you know its strength? How to play content for maximum cut-through?
Journalists, or content providers if you must, craft stories for their audiences. People in PR have to do the same thing, but of course at one remove. Without direct access to the page, programme or screen they’re at the crossroads of the placement or distribution dilemma.
In our top-down world the big stories go global fast but still demand a level playing field in terms of access. The Netmedia set are brilliant at distribution. Client Fish and Game for example gets its releases to newsdesks all over the country with one click on the pre-built News Express service with MediaPasifika.
Outside of which organisations covering changes in law or regulations which affect people’s lives can pick the chunks of relevant media, prioritise the story to the best available journalist with the target function facility set at, for example, business/chief reporter/newsdesk/editor and then adding producer/bureau chief for the audio-visual sector. Add low-res photographs — enough to spread across the different sectors — with on-call hi-res versions to hand. Job done.
Placement is much more demanding under the ‘optimise’ criterion. Options might include: negotiate an exclusive with a major daily; re-write the story from more than one angle and provide different illustrations across as many outlets as possible; prioritise an important magazine with customised content and schedule release of a shorter version to others to suit its deadlines but widening coverage of core content. Go into the newsrooms and choose who you want, make your own notes about who you find to build your own unique portfolio of media contacts.
Leigh Catley, Horticulture New Zealand communications manager, with a stream of varying needs stories to process says ‘MediaPasifika works for us, it really suits the needs of New Zealand communicators.’
netmedianzdotcom 