Your press release went viral and you are inundated with interview requests… now what? Those of us at Teak Media who work with the New England Aquarium had this experience recently with when the aerial survey team spotted a gray whale off the New England coast, a species that hasn’t been seen in these waters for more than 200 years.
Photo credit: The New England Aquarium
While we anticipated this was going to garner attention and coverage, we didn’t think the press release would go as viral as it did. Within the first few hours after distributing the release, we already had over a dozen interview requests for our spokesperson. We were receiving them within minutes of each other, and everyone wanted to get an interview on the books for that afternoon. How did we manage to coordinate and get everyone what they needed? Here are three strategies we used that you could do in a similar situation to ensure things go smoothly.
Prioritize Constant Communication
We have an incredible 17-year partnership with the team at the New England Aquarium, and we work very well together. This was a critical element to the success of the campaign. While we were on the distributing side of the press release, both teams (Teak Media and the Aquarium) fielded requests stemming from this outreach, and constantly updated each other as new inquires came in and our spokesperson’s availability shifted. This only worked because we were communicating as often and as quickly as possible to ensure we weren’t double booking and overloading our team member taking the interviews. While this included communicating with our direct contact at the Aquarium, this also including sharing details with the Aquarium expert doing the interview – letting her know about each outlet and reporter involved so she knew what to expect.
Use Charts and Schedules
Anyone who knows me knows that I love a good chart or well-formatted schedule to help keep things in order. This was my saving grace when it came to knowing what time we had already scheduled an interview and the time slots that were still open to add another one to the running list. For this campaign, we used a simple chart in a drafted email, like the below, to keep track for both teams as we continuously shifted things around and scheduled more interviews.
| TIME | Interview with X via X |
| TIME | Interview with X via X |
Know Your Limits
For this story, we were only using one member of the aerial survey team to handle the majority of the interviews. We knew after doing more than a dozen interviews the first day, she would likely tire of speaking on the topic repeatedly, so we had to be more selective on which requests we fulfilled. This really came down to timing and availability. It is always hard to turn down a media opportunity, but our client and the needs of our spokesperson came first. Luckily things slowed down after the first week on the interview request front, but we are still seeing some articles trickle in on the topic!
In just one week, we had over 1,300 media mentions including National Geographic, BBC, ABC News, The New York Times, Associated Press, Forbes, People Magazine, and The Boston Globe. When it feels like everything is happening at once, take a step back and ensure you have a system in place to allow things to move forward as smoothly as possible. This will likely result in a better experience for everyone, and hopefully you end up with a successful burst of exciting news and a happy client.
