Director of Accounts, Blast Media

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.