The value of an exclusive partnership

Recently my company under went a number of large changes, from a buyout by a capital investment firm to new management being added to the company. With these changes, our small agile company started to have to function in a more professional manner. Previously if someone was hired on or left the company, we really only celebrated or announced these changes internally. But with a buyout and the addition of more experienced professionals coming to the team, we started more publicly announcing these through our trade publications.

In the past 2 months, we have had released to press releases about the changes in my company. In both cases we had excellent experiences and solid press coverage. We started by selecting one of the more prominent publications and contacted the editor that handles companies like our own. We offered an exclusive to the story with the opportunity for interviews in exchange for a front page article and for the article to be published both in print and online through their e-newsletter. A combination of the relationship, offering and quality of the article made this very easy. Once the article was published in the first publication we then released the article to the other publications. While we did not get our release in print in these publications, because of the quality of the info, they too included the release in their e-newletters.

When it was time to release the second press release, we used the same method and again had an excellent response and reaction. We have now created a very powerful relationship with this powerhouse publication and we will continue to build and use this relationship to help us continue to get our latest news into the industry. This is especially important for us because with a buyout and change to management, our customers are likely to be concerned that their are issues with our business. Yet this is quite the contrary and we want to be sure that they remain confident in our brand and recognize our intentions for future growth. Without managing the media and releasing this information to our customers and business partners we could easily be leaving ourself in a complicated position where people begin to lose faith in the brand.