This week’s EMLer interview is brought to you from a quarantine room as our ‘subject’, Senior Account Exec, Katie Robertson, has suspected German Measles. Bio-suits are all the rage in the Boathouse at the moment! From the far end of the meeting room table, I asked Katie how she turns her clients’ products into creative feature articles for the trade press:

“It was a whole new world of technology for me when I first started at EML back in 2006 and although my History degree didn’t seem like it would have obvious uses in tech B2B PR, I’ve been able to use a lot of the skills I learnt in Uni since I’ve been here. History teaches you to be diligent in your research and I’ve been able to apply that to get to the heart of the story for the clients I work with.

I think that once you know what the editor and readers are looking for you should always try to look for the aspect of the product that is most interesting to you. That way it should be possible for your writing to be driven by your enthusiasm, and that will come across to the reader.

Part of the challenge of writing for PR is that our clients can sometimes be so involved in their technology and products that they see everything they do as very ordinary -yet when you delve into some of the stories there are some extraordinary projects going on that have a genuine impact on our day to day lives; things that you don’t give a second thought to as a consumer, like HOW mobile phones keep getting smaller or HOW my tiny MP3 player holds so many tunes. It’s a real eye opener.

What I love about writing for my clients is the freedom to shape and create a story around their products that brings them to life and can genuinely answer some of the questions or design problems the readers have. It is often a long process from pitching, writing and getting approval up to the day the article in the magazine lands on your desk, but it’s always really rewarding when you see an article you’ve written in print (even if it has someone else’s name on it!).”

Next week IT’S THE BIG ONE! We’re talking to co-founder and MD, Richard Parker, about running the good ship EML, but until then, if you’re itching to get creative (hehe), drop us a line about the kind of stories you’d like to see covered in the news or how you might re-address some of the least interesting news stories.