-: So my name is Grace Williams,
and I'm a Director of Accounts at Blast Media.
So Blast Media is a national public relations agency,
so we specialize in media relations,
content creation for BBD Tech companies.
So when we start with a client we always ask
what their goal is for PR,
so what are you trying to achieve five years down the road.
Do you want to be acquired?
Are you trying to raise a round of fundraising?
Do you really want to increase your recruiting?
So do you want to hire a lot of people in the coming months?
And that will help us determine
what type of coverage they need to get.
So we do typically store mining calls with thought leaders,
so we'll identify, say we're working with a SaaS company,
so software as a service.
We'll identify some thought leaders
and that could be maybe the vice president of sales
and we'll sit down and say, "what do you experience
when you're trying to sell this product?
What pushback do you get from prospects
and what do people like about the product?"
And then we can take those answers and
develop them into thought leadership campaigns
and pieces of content to pitch to the media.
We would love for a staff writer at
Entrepreneur Inc. to write an article about our clients,
but the media landscape has drastically changed
over the past five years so, journalists to PR people,
PR people outnumber journalists about nine to one,
so there's a lot less journalists right now
and we try to help them out
especially the smaller trade publications
that have maybe an editorial staff of three to five people,
they take a lot of guests posts so,
say I'm a CEO, a small tech start-up
and I want to be known as a thought leader
in the tech industry and I want to write an article
about how AI is changing tech jobs for the better,
we would maybe draft that for them, have them take a look
and then send it over to the trade pub for publishing.
Either traveling to see a client,
Blast Media is a national agency
so, while we do have a lot of clients in Indianapolis
we have a lot of clients in the Bay,
some in New York, Boston, things like that.
So, there's travel to see clients.
We like to do a quarterly planning session in person
and then travel to a trade show.
So if we're going to the Consumer Electronics Trade Show
in Las Vegas, which is one of the largest trade shows
in the world really, then we're going to go out there
for our clients and help them man their booth.