Media Relations & Monitoring
It is critical for any company to build networks and alliances in the media, especially in this day and age when it has become so easy to communicate with your stakeholders with the variety of communication tools available at your fingertips.
Both traditional as well as new media offer opportunities to your company to engage with your customers and present the most accurate image of your company.
Our experience
Baird’s CMC associates, with their decades of communications management expertise, help you and your employees build relations with traditional and new media sources as well as make best use of the communications tools at your disposal.
We also conduct media monitoring exercises with the help of our global partners who can analyse and assess newspapers, magazines, online blogs, Twitter handles and Facebook pages in English as well as national languages to discover media issues (or opportunities) for your company.
Rather than a pile of clippings, we can show you patterns, links and motivations. Rather than press release distribution, we can show you how to work with journalists on their interests and priorities
Baird’s CMC associates have worked for several decades with senior journalists and media experts all over the world. Our associates are trained communications experts; several of them run communications management consultancies in the countries they are based in and many of them started off their careers as journalists.
Our media relations experience ranges from inviting media personnel from Europe to a new product launch in Nepal to media monitoring exercises in Greece and Libya.
Our Work
- Baird’s CMC and its Brazilian associate, Fundamento Produções, was given the challenge of creating a dengue-specific campaign for SBP, an affiliate of the company Reckitt Benckiser. Thus was born the Nossa Cidade Sem Dengue (Our City With No Dengue) campaign, an initiative for the awakening of a collaborative awareness to combat dengue. It included a close relationship with the press to secure more coverage.
A study called Eu Amo Minha Cidade Sem Dengue (I Love My City With No Dengue) was conducted through a partnership with a biologist, entomologist and professor of public health, João Paulo Correia Gomes. Conclusions and findings were communicated using press releases, infographics, presentations and banners, as well as an exclusive event for journalists in which an interactive tour took place, guided by the specialist
- A major international foundation and the Ministry of Health of a Southeast Asian country asked Baird’s CMC to conduct specialist media training for the Deputy Health Minister of that country and to work with officials on planning for crisis communications about health, food safety and nutrition issues.
The country had a fast-evolving media and social media sector but very few journalists with expertise on health or science issues. Much of the international media coverage of healthcare in the country was highly critical and most of it was not well informed. Baird’s CMC helped the health minister’s office draft its media strategy and helped them put a system in place for media and other enquiries
Is your company adapting to the changing face of media relations in the world today?
Besides the journalists who cover health for the major newspapers, who are the other people in your network?
Are the popular bloggers who have thousands of followers online on your network?
Do you adequately engage with the people who tweet about issues that matter to you and who post popular articles on forums on LinkedIn?
- A major international organisation asked Baird’s CMC to create a messaging strategy for journalists as well as story ideas and fact sheets to help increase the profile of pneumonia and diarrhoea, killer diseases of children under five in India. The aim was to highlight the severity of these diseases and the fact that vaccines to combat them are readily available in the private market
- An HIV media monitoring exercise for a large international company in Greece, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia and Iraq, which included monitoring traditional media such as newspapers and magazines. We helped pick out the few that could really swing policy on a sensitive issue. We kept track of blogs, Facebook groups and online health sites as both early warnings and a way of measuring reactions to a fast-changing situation