Turning Trust and Transparency into Earned Media with Gini Dietrich

Gini Dietrich, author of the book and blog Spin Sucks, joins Doug Simon, President & CEO of D S Simon, to discuss the value of being transparent with journalists and how earning their trust can help lead to earning media with your content.Doug and Gini also discuss the findings of the D S Simon Media Influencers Report. If you would like a copy of the D S Simon Media Influencers Report: please click here.Gini Dietrich's VlogViews:“It’s interesting. It used to be you could build relationships with journalists and have those relationships that go throughout your career and you use those relationships that go throughout your career. That all has been flipped on its head. And so, for those of us with experience and who remember the old ways it is kinda like, how do we do this now? Are we supposed to use social media because that seems very strange, but of course it works. And then with the newer, younger professionals they don’t know any other way to do it.  So there is this collide of how the heck are we supposed to be earning media. And to your point, if you’re creating compelling content, the media want it! They want to syndicate, they want to aggregate, and they want to curate it. It’s almost easier now than it use to be!”"It’s astounding to me that Americans spend 152 hours a month watching some sort of television. Video, online videos, Netflix, TV. That is five hours a day. I don’t know who has the time. But it actually is good for communicators, because as we evolve multimedia pieces into our communications, it makes for something very powerful for us."“I think what is interesting is that trust and transparency piece in the report, there’s a couple of things in there that I thought were interesting. Proper disclosure around spokesperson is not attributed, so journalists can’t use the video because of that.  The idea that we aren’t being completely transparent and authentic, that also leads to journalists don’t trust us. The statistic was really pretty high in that journalists don’t trust communications because we aren’t doing the basics such as disclosure.“There is that traditional old way of doing things and that was to keep things very close to the vest. And not say that so and so is your spokesperson. The fact that it would be 70%. If it’s 70% higher that they’ll run it if you disclose, and it’s required by the FTC to disclose, why wouldn’t you do it? It makes no sense. ““Don’t try to mass distribute something. If you have a video you’ve created, or other multimedia pieces that you are doing with your news release, make sure that it is to targeted relationships that you are either building or have already built. And disclose anything that you can, because you have a higher likelihood of it being place of it being placed than if it’s not."//