“This is a Football”
It’s football season, and I love it. I love college football and I love pro football. And despite being a lifelong Minnesota Vikings fan, I have long admired their cross-division rivals the Green Bay Packers and their long history as a great football program.
For those of you that may have little knowledge of the game, the Packers were coached by one of the greatest coaches of all time – Vince Lombardi. Lombardi was head coach during the 1960s and today’s Super Bowl trophy is named after him.
According to team history, Lombardi took over the Packers in 1959 at a time when the team had lost all but 2 of its last 12 games – the worst record in Packers history. During that summer’s practice, Lombardi was so dismayed by the lack of performance that he stopped practice, called the team together, held up a football and said “Gentlemen, this is a football”. Lombardi thus told the team they were going to start the season by reviewing the basics and ensuring that they were executing on the fundamentals of the game. The Packers went on to finish the season 7-5 and Lombardi was named coach of the year.
Lombardi understood that grasping the fundamentals was important before the team could advance into learning offense and defensive strategies. Reportedly, from that winning season on, Lombardi began every preseason the same way – by saying “Gentlemen, this is a football” in the first team meeting.
To paraphrase, if you don’t know what the football is, you can’t execute the plays.
Marketing professionals should do the same. Marketing should go back to basics with regards to contacting and trying to work with the media, and this process starts with first identifying the members of the media actually writing on the topics relevant to one’s marketing efforts.
A member of the media (no matter how “influential” they are in general) won’t have influence on your market if they are not actually writing on the topics that matter to that market. And if they don’t have influence in your market, they may not produce measurable results for your marketing efforts.
Software tools for marketing today make it far too easy to create “generic” lists of media contacts and then use that list to send emails to the media. Software tools in the market today provide either fairly generic beats, or do not update the beats regularly based on what the journalist is actually writing on.
To work well, a marketing professional needs to be able to use tools that mine a database of articles and blogs to see who is really writing TODAY on topics relevant to one’s market. MediaSync allows its users to do exactly this. MediaSync is, first and foremost , designed to allow a marketing professional to search for members of the media based on what they are actually writing about and not just on static or generic beats.
Yes, we also allow you to search on beats, bios and other fields. But for marketing to work today, finding matches on topics people are really writing about is a fundamental step in one’s marketing efforts.
That’s going back to the basics of marketing. (If I had a football, I’d hold it up and point at it now). And MediaSync can help deliver on this quickly and easily.
Enjoy the football season. Go back to the basics, and let MediaSync help you find Influencers that have topical relevance to your marketing efforts. MediaSync can make your work easier, so you can relax and enjoy the weekend games.
