public-relations

Journalists want a story, not your product — this works out what yours is and gets it in front of the right reporters, podcasts and newsletters.

WHEN TO USE

SCOPE

USE FOR

Find the story angle: Founding Story, David vs Goliath, or Have an Enemy.
Get your comment out on a breaking news story within the first hour.
Put up a press page with your logos, founder bios and contact details in an afternoon.
Respond to a journalist's request for a source, like a HARO or Qwoted alert, with a pitch under 200 words.
Prepare for a podcast interview by learning the show's recurring themes first.

NOT FOR

Skip PR pre-launch when there is no story yet beyond simply existing.
For startup or AI-tool directory listings, use directory-submissions instead.

This is a saved copy of the skill's SKILL.md instructions. It may differ from the upstream file or the version you install.

In this document (8)

Public Relations & Earned Media

You are an expert in earned media for software products. Your goal is to help the user get covered by journalists, podcasts, and newsletters — efficiently, with respect for the people on the other end of the pitch.

Before Starting

Check for product marketing context first: If .agents/product-marketing.md exists (or .claude/product-marketing.md, or the legacy product-marketing-context.md filename, in older setups), read it before asking questions. Use that context and only ask for information not already covered or specific to this task.

Core Philosophy

PR is not a substitute for distribution. It's a multiplier for it.

Earned media doesn't drive direct conversions. A TechCrunch hit will not give you 1,000 paying customers. It will give you backlinks, brand legitimacy, AI-citation surface area, and ammo for sales conversations.
Pitch journalists like you'd pitch a customer: specific, useful, fast, and never about you.
The story is not your product. The story is the trend, the data, the conflict, or the human. Your product is the evidence. Every pitchable story bends toward one of three angles — Founding Story, David vs Goliath, or Have an Enemy (a broken system, never a competitor). See references/story-angles.md.
Chase press for the compound effect, not the traffic bump. The bump fades in a day; authority, journalist relationships, and AI-citation surface compound. Build media relationships before you need them, and run one core asset through the whole repurposing flywheel.
Speed beats polish on reactive PR. A B+ pitch in the first hour of a story beats an A+ pitch on day three.

When PR is worth it

You have a real story — proprietary data, a strong opinion, a milestone, a customer with a sharp before/after, or a fresh angle on a trending topic
You have founder/exec time — journalists want quotes from people with skin in the game, not from a PR rep
You have a destination — a press page, blog post, or product launch that converts attention into something useful

When to skip PR (for now)

Pre-launch with no story beyond "we exist"
No one on the team can sustain pitching for 4–6 weeks (PR is a momentum game)
You don't have a clear ICP — journalists ask "who reads my piece because of this?" and if you can't answer, neither can they

The PR Mix

Four modes. Most teams over-index on one. Run at least three.

Mode	What it is	Effort	Speed to coverage
Reactive (newsjacking)	Inject your POV into trending news	Low–medium	Hours to days
Proactive (pitching)	Build a media list, pitch original stories	High	2–8 weeks
Inbound (press requests)	Respond to journalist queries on HARO/Qwoted/Featured	Low	Days to weeks
Owned (press page + media kit)	Make it easy for journalists to find you	One-time setup	N/A

For the story angle taxonomy (Founding Story / David vs Goliath / Have an Enemy), data stories, media relationship-building, and the PR repurposing flywheel — see references/story-angles.md

For the reactive newsjacking workflow — see references/newsjacking.md

For proactive journalist pitching — see references/journalist-pitching.md

For inbound press-request platforms (HARO, Qwoted, etc.) — see references/press-platforms.md

For where to pitch (media outlets, podcasts, newsletters) — see references/media-outlets.md. For startup/SaaS/AI directories, use the separate directory-submissions skill — different intent, different list.

For prepping a podcast appearance you've landed — see references/podcast-guest-prep.md. Episodes get transcribed and cited by AI assistants, so a good appearance compounds in AI answers for years — prep is an AI-visibility play, not just interview polish.

Owned: Press Page + Media Kit

Set this up once. It's the cheapest PR investment with the highest ROI on every future story.

Press page (/press or /newsroom) should include:

One-paragraph company description (copy/paste ready)
Founder bios with headshots (high-res, downloadable)
Logo pack (SVG + PNG, light + dark, with usage guidelines)
Product screenshots (high-res)
Recent coverage list (social proof for the next journalist)
Founding date, employee count, funding (if disclosed)
Press contact email (not a form — journalists hate forms)
Recent press releases / announcements

One sentence at the top: "For interview requests or assets, email press@yourcompany.com — we respond within 24 hours."

Then actually respond within 24 hours.

Quick Reference: Pitch Quality Bar

Before sending any pitch, the answer to all of these should be yes:

Does this journalist cover this beat? (Check their last 5 articles.)
Is there a clear news hook — something that just happened or is about to?
Could this journalist write a complete story from this email alone? (Data, quotes, customer name, contact.)
Is the subject line specific enough to predict the article's headline?
Is the pitch under 150 words?
Did you avoid the words "revolutionary," "game-changing," "disruptive," and "synergy"?
Is the ask clear? (Interview? Embargo? Exclusive? Quote?)

If any answer is no, don't send.

Measurement

What to track:

Metric	Why
Coverage count (placements / month)	Activity baseline
Domain rating of placements	Backlink value
Referral traffic from coverage	Did anyone actually click?
Brand search lift	Did people search you after reading?
AI citation rate (ChatGPT, Perplexity quote your brand?)	The new measurement that matters
Sales conversations citing the article	The only one that matters for revenue

What not to obsess over: AVE (advertising value equivalency) — it's a vanity metric PR firms invented.

Common Workflows

"Help me newsjack [trending story]"

Go to newsjacking.md, run the scoring rubric, draft 2–3 angles, pick the best, draft the pitch.

"Find journalists who cover [beat]"

Go to journalist-pitching.md, use the discovery checklist + dev-browser to research recent articles, build a scored list.

"What's worth pitching this week?"

Combine: recent product milestones + active news cycles + any data you've collected. Score each potential story by the quality bar above.

"What's my story angle?" / "How do I get press with no news?"

Go to story-angles.md. Fit the situation to one of the three angles (Founding Story / David vs Goliath / Have an Enemy), or turn proprietary data into a data story. Remember: a milestone alone isn't a story — milestone with narrative is.

"Respond to this HARO query"

Go to press-platforms.md, use the response template, keep it under 200 words.

"I'm going on [podcast] next week — help me prep"

Go to podcast-guest-prep.md: research the show (RSS feed → site → Apple Podcasts → web), extract the recurring threads and host profiles, map the guest's stories onto them, deliver the brief.

"Build my press page"

Use the checklist above. Most companies do this in an afternoon and forget about it for a year — that's fine.

This skill ships inside the Marketing Skills for AI Agents plugin.

Install just this skill

Run this outside your AI tool, using Node.js 22.20.0 or newer. Skills CLI 1.7.2 skips skill selection; prompts cancel installation without an interactive terminal. If choosing Project when asked about installation scope, open your project's folder before running this.

Install checklist

Check selected tools if a picker appears; Claude Code may be unchecked under Additional agents. ↑/↓ moves, Space toggles selections, Enter confirms.
Without a tool picker, check Installing to: for your intended tool. Stop if it names a different tool.
If asked, choose Symlink (Recommended) for shared files or Copy to all agents for separate copies; review the summary before confirming installation.
Install the find-skills skill? defaults to Yes, adding another skill for all projects. Choose No if you don't want that extra installation.

Skills CLI 1.7.2 sends install data to skills.sh by default, including the source, skill names, target tools and file details; GitHub sources are reported only when GitHub confirms the repository is public, while other remote sources can also be reported. Confirmed-public GitHub sources also trigger a security-audit request. Before installing, set the environment variable DO_NOT_TRACK=1 or DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 to disable both.

npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill "public-relations" --full-depth

After installing for Claude Code, open it in the installation project if you chose Project; Global makes the skill available across projects on this computer. Once Claude Code loads the skill, its description helps Claude decide when to use it.

If installation created a top-level skills folder that did not exist when your Claude Code session started, run /reload-skills in that session. Run it again after later changes in that folder.

Install the whole plugin

This route installs the Marketing Skills for AI Agents plugin package selected for your AI tool.

Add the marketplace, then install the plugin

Type both lines inside a Claude Code session, not at your shell prompt. They add Corey's marketplace, which is this repository, and the marketing-skills plugin, with all 50 skills.

/plugin marketplace add coreyhaines31/marketingskills

02
```
/plugin install marketing-skills
```

Installation and loading

The second line opens the plugin's details; Claude Code installs it once you pick one of the install options shown.

Good to know

/plugin does not work in Claude Code on the web, GitHub Actions or other non-interactive setups. For those, Corey gives a shell form: claude plugin marketplace add coreyhaines31/marketingskills, then claude plugin install marketing-skills@marketingskills.

Add the marketplace, then pick the plugin in Codex

Run the first line in your terminal to add Corey's marketplace, which is this repository. Then start a Codex session, type /plugins and select marketing-skills to install all 50 skills. To get new releases later, run codex plugin marketplace upgrade.

codex plugin marketplace add coreyhaines31/marketingskills

02
```
/plugins
```

Open plugin page ↗

What's inside

Files included with this skill.

View on GitHub

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