When looking for earned media, get your owned and paid channels in order

[Editor’s note: This post is an excerpt from The Digital Pivot: Secrets of Online Marketing.]

Sarah Evans is highly skilled at the use of social and digital media to generate earned media coverage for her clients, who include PayPal, Cox Communications, MGM International, and Walmart. She’s a digital PR strategist who knows how to leverage online tools to see what makes news on any given day—and she’s one of the best.

Her Twitter lists alone are proof of her ability to use technology in service of media relations. She uses them to monitor what journalists in different categories are interested in by checking their tweets. Based on what’s trending, she writes an informal, weekly email with a list of story ideas pegged to the news trends of the day. By sending a collection of pitches, rather than a single story idea, she gets more attention because her pitches have more potential.