by Brandon Glenn | Sep 18, 2024 | Blog
You’ve done the hard work of crafting a public relations strategy, researching the right media targets, and pitching the story to journalists.
Reporters have responded positively to your pitches and are interested in setting up interviews to learn more about your company and executives’ viewpoints. Now what?
For most companies, and in particular startups, media interviews represent a valuable opportunity to introduce their stories, value propositions, and reasons for existence to a broader audience of potential customers, investors, employees, stakeholders, and other industry participants.
However, executives are sometimes hesitant to engage in interviews because they are reluctant to put in the time to mentally prepare or are fearful that reporters will ask them difficult or confusing questions.
The good news for health IT leaders is that there is little to fear. By doing a little homework and preparation prior to a media interview, executives can approach the event with calmness and confidence.
The following are four preparation tips to ensure media interview success:
Turnabout is fair play: Once the interview starts, the reporter will ask many questions of you. Before the interview, take advantage of the opportunity to gain clarity about reporters’ intentions by turning the tables and asking them a few questions. Who is the publication’s audience? What is the reporter interested in talking about? Will she share a list of questions prior to the interview? Do your diligence to make sure the opportunity is worth the time.
Get to know the reporter: Take some time to perform a little pre-interview research about the reporter, browsing through her bio or LinkedIn profile. Read through some of the articles she’s previously written. By getting a feel for the reporter’s background and interests, executives gain fodder for rapport-building pre- and post-interview small talk, demonstrate that they value the reporter’s time and work, and set the stage for follow-up coverage.
Craft talking points: As the one asking the questions, the reporter is generally in control of the interview, but that doesn’t mean that the interview subject is merely along for the ride and must go wherever the reporter steers the conversation. Executives should come prepared with a few basic talking points that expound upon the problems they solve, the negative consequences of those problems for their customers, and why their solution is the right choice to solve these problems. Talking points should be quick, straightforward, and conversational. Repetition of key points is encouraged.
Follow-up and promotion: During interviews, executives often make points or cite statistics that require further clarification or verification by reporters. Be sure to follow up to see if the reporter needs any further information. After the article goes live, promote it through all available channels, including social media, company blog, website, and email to customers and prospects.
Unless your company is an industry giant or a household name, opportunities for media interviews don’t come along that often. When they do, set yourself up for success by investing the necessary time and effort into interview preparation.
For more media interview preparation tips, check out this post from my colleague Philip Anast.
by admin | Aug 21, 2024 | News
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Aug. 22, 2024 – Amendola, a nationally recognized, award-winning healthcare technology and life sciences public relations and marketing firm, today announced that it has been selected to implement a national public relations, content and social media program by Carta Healthcare, whose mission is to reduce the costs, save time and improve the quality of clinical data abstraction.
“As a six-time Amendola client, the agency is part of my magic formula for business development success through powerful storytelling, category creation, and thought leadership,” said Greg Miller, Vice President of Business Development for Carta Healthcare. “We are excited to have Amendola as an extension of our team to help promote our belief that data is the most essential ingredient for improving healthcare.”
Clinical data abstraction is essential for hospitals to improve patient care, meet quality standards, and reduce costs. However, manual data abstraction is inefficient, labor-intensive, and expensive, leading to poor quality data. Currently, due to labor shortages and overworked staff, these methods are not sustainable and increase healthcare delivery costs. The current manual approach is inefficient and tedious, resulting in overworked and burnt-out staff.
To that end, Carta has developed Atlas™, an AI-powered platform that automates data abstraction for clinical registries by efficiently extracting information from medical records. By leveraging AI, Atlas increases data availability and accuracy, enabling staff to focus on other tasks and clinicians to prioritize patient care. This is executed through a “human in the loop” approach, where expert abstractors review the quality of the AI-abstracted data. Carta’s team of abstractors work alongside current staff to ensure quality of data and seamless processes.
“The time and effort required to cleanse and normalize data for quality initiatives too often depletes the resources essential for delivering high-quality patient care,” said agency CEO Jodi Amendola. “We are excited to help Carta Healthcare educate the market on the importance of automating and streamlining the labor-intensive process of locating and interpreting patient data for clinical registries.”
About Amendola
Amendola is an award-winning, insights-driven public relations and marketing firm that integrates media relations, social media, content and lead gen programs to move healthcare, life sciences/pharma and healthcare IT decision-makers to action. The agency represents some of the industry’s best-known brands as well as groundbreaking startups that are disrupting the status quo. Nearly 90% of its client base represents multi-year clients and/or repeat client executives. Amendola’s seasoned team of PR and marketing pros understand the ongoing complexities of the healthcare ecosystem and provide strategic guidance and creative direction to drive positive ROI, boost reputation and increase market share. Making an impact since 2003, Amendola combines traditional and digital media to fuel meaningful and measurable growth. For more information about the industry’s “A-Team,” visit www.acmarketingpr.com, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
About Carta Healthcare
At Carta Healthcare, we believe high-quality data is essential to improving healthcare. Current methods to abstract data for clinical registries are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly. By combining artificial intelligence (AI) technology with skilled expert abstractors, Carta Healthcare helps you abstract data faster, more efficiently, at a lower cost, while delivering the highest quality data.
Learn more about how Carta Healthcare applies the power of AI technology, combined with expert clinical data abstractors, to harness data and insights as catalysts for healthcare transformation at www.carta.healthcare.
Media Contact: Marcia G. Rhodes, mrhodes@acmarketingpr.com, Amendola Communications
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by Chris Nerney | Jul 24, 2024 | Blog
My colleague Philip Anast recently shared some advice from the Wall Street Journal via the Advisory Board regarding situations “where it’s better to slow down at work.”
Let’s be honest: In the hyper-paced world of healthcare public relations and marketing, where there’s a product rollout, speaker submission, or awards deadline around every corner, the notion of “slowing down at work” is downright antithetical. When you’re managing multiple accounts – and trying to make each feel as if they are your highest priority – you instinctively fear that slowing things down will derail your strategic timelines, frustrate your clients, and send your blood pressure soaring. Why make an already intense job even more stressful?
The answer is there are times in PR and marketing where slowing down is essential to doing the best job for your clients, your agency, and your sanity. Here are three situations when slowing down pays off in PR and marketing. These apply to in-house marketing/PR pros, who face pressures similar to those of agency workers.
When you’re the final set of eyes
Marketing and PR pros must create and process high-level, detailed content every day. Thought-leadership bylines, case studies, white papers, press releases, sales sheets, analyst pitches – it never ends. If your client is a life sciences company, you may be writing about concepts that may be ever-so-slightly outside your wheelhouse. That’s OK – you probably didn’t go to medical school, and your yearslong devotion to Grey’s Anatomy will only get you so far.
Still, when you’re delivering content assets, it’s important to get everything right. And no matter how many people look at the “final” draft of a byline, press release, or other public-facing deliverable, someone will be the last set of eyes before the news release is sent to Cision or the byline to your client’s CEO.
Even if it’s the 10th time you’ve read it, do so with intense focus just one more time. Read slowly, scan for typos, and pay attention to flow and impact. This is your last chance! Put another way, if there’s something wrong that you didn’t catch, you may be catching flak from the client, who is paying the agency good money to not mess up content.
When your client wants to do something impulsive and perhaps ill-advised
Clients can be quite emotional. Which is understandable. They’re under pressure on multiple fronts from competitors and investors. They are responsible for executing on product, market, and growth strategies. They’re probably working 70 hours a week. Plus their chief marketing officer just abandoned the company for a new job. And their kids have the flu.
Nonetheless, when the client’s CEO decides what the company needs to do is issue a press release every day for a week before HLTH to carpet-bomb the market into recognizing the pioneering brilliance of their platform (something I heard an investor for a startup insist on), you must slow their roll. Politely but firmly explain how a press release a day doesn’t really align with the rhythm of how the healthcare tech media operates – “Company X made a big splash today. I can’t wait to see what they’ve cooked up for tomorrow!” said no tech reporter, ever – and that it also would be a waste of money. (The money message eventually got through to the investor.)
Similarly, if a CEO wants to confront that editor from Healthcare IT News who omitted the company from a roundup of startups to watch in Sector Z in the coming year and clearly harbors a grudge against us, you must counsel restraint. Emphasize the importance of cultivating long-term relationships with the media, analysts, and others in the industry ecosystem who could help the company down the road. Just giving your excitable clients some time to vent often is enough to defuse a mini-crisis.
When there’s a full-blown PR crisis
Sometimes an actual crisis will arise – your client’s product is the subject of a recall or warning, a customer files a major lawsuit, an investigative article in the mainstream media that mentions the company in a negative light blows up on social media, etc. You’ve got to move fast or things will quickly spin out of control!
Making a public statement that can be easily contradicted, however, will only worsen the problem. Thus, it is imperative that you know the facts. Make sure you take the time to gather all the facts surrounding the issue and are interpreting them correctly. You only have one chance to respond the first time to a crisis. Make it count.
Conclusion
In the PR and marketing biz, you need to think fast and move fast. Sometimes, though, slower is better.
by Jim Sweeney | Jul 10, 2024 | Blog
Hey, want to hear an announcement from my company?
Or,
Hey, want to hear a story?
Which got your attention?
If you’re human, it was probably the latter.
We are hardwired to listen to and learn from stories. From the earliest days of painting on cave walls through Aesop’s Fables and TEDx Talks, stories have proven themselves to be the best way to convey information to an audience. Even business information. Write a memo reminding people to always file their TPS reports with a cover sheet and they’ll ignore it. Tell them a story about the coworker who got fired for forgetting the cover sheet and they’ll remember.
But we largely abandon the power of narrative when it comes to press releases, which tend to be dry recitations of facts fleshed out with manufactured quotes and a corporate boilerplate.
For years the standard thinking on press releases has been to cram as much of the important information as possible up top on the theory that journalists won’t read past the headline and opening paragraph. There is merit to this approach if you’re announcing something truly significant or newsworthy, like a corporate merger or a new iPhone.
But, if we’re being honest, that’s the minority of releases. In most cases, the news isn’t a big enough deal to sell itself. So we, as PR practitioners, need to sell it. And stories are the best way to do it. A compelling story wrapped around a somewhat-less compelling piece of news can make an irresistible package.
Here’s an example: A chemical company wanted to announce a new polymer that would be used to line the surfaces of artificial joints. That could have been a straightforward product announcement, but I wanted to humanize the impact of the product, so I focused on the recipients of the artificial knees and hips, not the polymer itself.
I found Senior Olympics basketball players, each of whom had at least one artificial joint, and shot a video of them playing and talking about how grateful they were for the technology that let them hoop it up into their 80s. It was a step or two removed from the actual product, but it brought home the idea that this polymer had real benefits for people.
For the most part, Amendola clients are B2B and work in healthcare IT, which doesn’t easily lend itself to narrative. However, like with the above example, it’s often possible to bring it to the level of the patients and users of the technology. What does new perioperative scheduling software accomplish? Fewer delays and cancellations in scheduling surgeries, which is good for patients and clinicians. How about a new staffing platform for nurses? It gives them greater flexibility and allows them to earn more money.
Sometimes the narrative can be built around a single illuminating fact. I wrote a press release for a company whose seals were to be used on the Mars Rover. In and of itself, not that big a deal; scores of manufacturers had components on the Rover. What I learned from talking to company engineers is that it is impossible to build a seal that doesn’t leak, particularly in space; success is building a seal that leaks very, very slowly. How slowly? In this case, so slowly that it would take 1,000 years to empty a Coke can.
In the release, I told the story of these engineers working toward this ridiculously exacting specification. And it got picked up more than the dozens of cookie-cutter announcements that went out from other parts suppliers.
Of course, the stories must be interesting and short. They can’t meander and they can’t obscure the news. And they must be relevant. Don’t announce a brand of hard seltzer by telling a story about how a surfer took on a 50-foot wave and then enjoyed a can of seltzer back on the beach. Save that for the commercial.
Most press releases vanish with little notice or impact, like gnats flying into a bug zapper. But tell a good story, and people will remember it.
by Administrator | Jun 27, 2024 | News
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.—June 27, 2024 – Amendola Communications today announced it has won three top Hermes Creative Awards, demonstrating the company’s solid commitment to delivering outstanding results for its healthcare and health IT clients.
The Hermes Creative Awards, one of the oldest and largest competitions in the world, recognized Amendola with a trio of 2024 Platinum awards for its work on behalf of clients in 2022 and 2023. The judges honored Amendola with its highest awards for the following work:
- An integrated marketing campaign on behalf of Medicomp Systems, a physician-driven provider of diagnostically connected patient data solutions. Amendola won for its well-coordinated campaign that amplified Medicomp’s message and cut through the noise in a field crowded with evolving regulations and emerging technologies, including AI.
- A PR campaign for KeyCare, the nation’s first Epic-based virtual care platform. Through strategic planning and creative storytelling, Amendola took KeyCare from an unknown startup to a leading player in the crowded virtual care field.
- A PR campaign on behalf of SteadyMD, which powers high-quality telehealth experiences for digital healthcare companies, labs, pharmacies, large employers, and other healthcare innovators. Building upon the explosion in popularity of weight loss drugs, Amendola crafted a campaign that positioned its client as an authority on how digital medicine could be used to responsibly manage demand for the medications, guide patients to weight loss, and provide appropriate care.
Amendola is a multi-year Hermes award winner and is marking its 20-year anniversary as a full-service PR and marketing agency focused on healthcare, health tech and life sciences with a new logo, a brand refresh, and a shiny new website—which you can check out here.
“The agency consistently delivers amazing work on behalf of our clients, and it is truly gratifying to have campaigns for three separate clients singled out as among the best in the world,” said agency CEO Jodi Amendola. “It’s a testament to our team’s extensive healthcare experience, knowledge and overall dedication to delivering excellence on behalf of our clients.”
Hermes Creative Awards is sponsored by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals, which engages senior-level professionals to serve as competition judges who evaluate the creative industry’s best publications, branding collateral, websites, videos, and advertising, marketing, and communication programs. Its annual contest draws thousands of entries from across the globe. More information on winning entries can be found here.
About Amendola
Amendola is an award-winning, insights-driven public relations and marketing firm that integrates media relations, social media, content and lead-gen programs to move healthcare, life sciences/pharma and healthcare IT decision-makers to action. The agency represents some of the industry’s best-known brands, as well as groundbreaking startups that are disrupting the status quo. Nearly 90% of its client base represents multi-year clients and/or repeat client executives. Amendola’s seasoned team of PR and marketing pros understand the ongoing complexities of the healthcare ecosystem and provide strategic guidance and creative direction to drive positive ROI, boost reputation and increase market share. Making an impact since 2003, Amendola combines traditional and digital media to fuel meaningful and measurable growth. For more information about the industry’s “A-Team,” visit www.acmarketingpr.com, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Media Contact:
Marcia G. Rhodes
Amendola Communications
mrhodes@acmarketingpr.com
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