370: Nurturing Your Audience and Advertisers - with Andy Tarnoff

Social Capital

Meet Andy

Andy is the founder of On Milwaukee, he's a Milwaukee native, he lived in Providence, Washington, DC, and Baltimore before returning home in 1996. Andy launched onmilwaukee.com LLC in April 1998 as a way to channel his passion for Milwaukee, journalism, and tech into a cutting-edge media company. He's a graduate of the George Washington University and worked at the White House Office of Communications, the Dallas Morning News, Washington Barrel, and to Milwaukee PR firms before branching out on his own at age 23. And he is more passionate than ever about Milwaukee's mission statement to grow communities and businesses through engaging digital media.

What would you recommend for how a business does PR?

That's a good question. Because I've worked on both sides of the business. I've been in PR and media relations, and I've been in journalism, and I've gone back and forth. And sometimes my role continues to be on both sides of things. So I know what it's like to pitch and I know what it's like to be pitched. And what I always tell people is to make sure you have a relevant story for the outlet that you're pitching it to. If I looked at my email inbox right now, it would probably be about 700 messages today, mostly people trying to get coverage of things, and most of the time, it's not relevant. So people are spending an awful lot of time putting energy into things that don't really match who they're talking to. And it makes it more difficult for us to sort through it. Back in the day, media relations equated to news releases. And now that's, that's just one piece of it. So I would recommend that anyone working in public relations considers all the different tools that are available to get their message out and do it in a way that resonates with the journalists on the other side.

So what are some mistakes you see businesses making in getting the press's attention?

If you make it too hard on the journalist, make your job easier, right? So so let's just start with, like the basics of news release writing, like, if it's a sales pitch, if it's full of typos if it's faxed, you know, it's like, Give me something not as much as they used to. But I mean, you know, give me something that a very busy Junior writer, if they wanted to, could pretty much copy and paste, I would never tolerate that, from our journalists. But, you know, the best news release is one that is already written in APA style, if that's what the publication uses. It's not, you know, it's, it's, it's not, it's, it's not an ad, right, you know, people can pay for that this isn't native content, like, show me why it's newsworthy, and write it is such, the biggest mistake is pitching things that are relevant, and then, you know, getting annoyed, why it's not working, and being blocked, you know, blowing your shot on that. And something, when you could have something else that would work. Because it's a relationship, basically, you know, some stranger, coming to me and asking for favors. It's like, you know, this, this is hard work. And we have a lot to choose from. To understand what we are, I get a lot of pitches addressed to the wrong publication. And it's like, come on, like, that's a pretty much surefire way to, not to know like, you know, hear the wrong name, you know, who you're talking to. And then I think that being respectful of the way that reporter wants to communicate, so for me, like I don't, I don't want to do this over Facebook Messenger, or I don't want to do this over text. And that's how people pitch me all the time. And I'll say, you know, could you please send me an email, but other people will say, like, you know, fire me off a text or something. And remember that you're asking a journalist to do something. And if you make it too hard, and you don't respect the deadlines, you don't respect what they need. You're just hurting your chances of success.

If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of or differently with regard to your professional career?

Okay, so 23 instead of 20? Because 23 is when I started on Malachy. Well, I would have told myself, to stop being such a smartass and write better stuff. I also would have told myself to think more about monetizing and less about if you build it, they will come I would have thought about how incentivizing the people who love our content to pay for it, as opposed to people that we don't agencies, people that we don't know people in other cities who don't feel the love here. So I would have never thought about that. And I think that, oh, 23-year-old news, pretty fun. I really, I wrote some pretty cool stuff back then. And we've dipped back into the archives over the years. I feel kind of like I'm the unofficial Milwaukee historian because even though we have a few employees has been since the early days, obviously, I've been there the longest so I can't remember everything I've ever written or everything we've ever run out of those 60 65,000 pieces. But there's, there's like some amazing, hilarious. So just some like, you know, Bucket List interview, I would have, I would have never turned I think I turned down a ride in the Goodyear Blimp once Oh, man, I gave it to a freelancer. Ah, that was stupid.

Connect with Andy!

Connect on LinkedIn

http://onmilwaukee.com/