Power of Earned Media - Policygenius - "That was our big break"

This is part of an ongoing series where I'm gathering stories that show the amazing impact of earned media.

This one is pretty interesting in that the origins of the story begin on Twitter, so we're able to see exactly how proactive relationship building with journalists can reap huge dividends.

On April 13, 2014, Francois de Lame (Co-Founder and head of product at PolicyGenius) reads an article in The New York Times, Financial Advice for People Who Aren’t Rich by Ron Lieber. He tweets Ron with a compliment and shares his own unique perspective based on his experience at Policygenius.

Five months after this exchange (on Sept. 12th, 2014), Lieber publishes Looking Out for Yourself With Disability Insurance. Half the article is about Policygenius and the article contains a photo of the co-founders.

At the 58:26 mark of this episode of How I Built This, Jennifer Fitzgerald discusses the immediate impact of the New York Times article.

"That was our big break. The article went live and we had at the time a tracker that showed how many visits were on the website. So I think we literally went from, from zero to thousands within an hour of the article hitting the New York times website."

Here's that excerpt:

This may make it seem all too easy (it isn't). It's easier for these impact of these high profile earned media wins to show up with newer companies. However, I feel that examples like these help to lift up the PR profession and show in very tangible ways why earned media is such an important piece of the marketing strategy.

This seemingly small exchange is worthy of unpacking. Most of the time small relationship building messages to journalists on Twitter are not going to lead directly to a major story. In fact, looking at de Lame's tweets for a few weeks before his exchange with Ron Lieber, you can see that he's regularly engaging with journalists with no immediate responses back.

The other aspect that I find interesting is that the tweets are coming from the company co-founder and not an internal comms person or agency. I think this makes the interactions feel, to the journalists, more authentic and perhaps less transactional.

I don't think it would be a good use of time for a CEO or senior executive to be spending hours a day building relationships with journalists in hopes that they'll one day write a story about them. It may make sense in the early days of a company when the founders need to do a little bit of everything, but as the company matures it would make less sense.

I do think that at more mature companies someone within an agency or corp comms team should put together a daily action plan that does involve the CEO. If I were running comms (hypothetically, of course) I would proactively look for opportunities for the CEO to engage with journalists. You could scan your daily media brief for any articles where your company has information that they could share with the reporter that might add a unique perspective. Send the CEO a link to the article, provide the context, and then draft a tweet or email from the CEO to that reporter. Now they're getting all the benefit of relationship building without losing valuable time. This could take them 5-10 minutes a day and build to outsized PR wins.

(Don't have a curated daily media brief for your company? Hit me up - and we'll take care of it for you!)

For anyone that's interested, here's the full podcast episode:

I'm looking for more stories that show off big PR wins. If you've got one to share, let me know!