THE ART OF SCHMOOZING
Essentials in the PR/Mediaverse
By Alan Goldfarb
Dec. 19, 2022
Schmooze. A Yiddish word meaning a good talker, a tummler, a kibitzer. Any way you use it, being a good schmoozer is the stock and trade of the best PR flacks; and a way to ingratiate oneself with the folks a publicist wants to target in order to get “ink” for one’s client.
With Covid, the art of the schmooze has all but vanished like an ice carving at a bar mitzvah. But you know who would keep the fires burning and melt the hearts and minds of wine writers everywhere? Grizzled guys like Harvey Posert, Bob Mondavi’s longtime publicist. Or Dan Solomon, Gallo’s flackery wizard. Now those publicists knew how to schmooze. When they talked to you, you asked them, “So, when can I write about your guy?” or “What do I have to do to taste your boys’ wines?”
Or take Tim McDonald, please. Tim was/is the kind of PR whiz you didn’t know was a PR whiz. He’d charm the pants off you; make you feel as though you were the only one he was talking to. The upshot: you’d write glowing things about his charges. Tim’s still out there schmoozing up a storm at this event or that.
I wouldn’t know. I hardly schmooze anymore. I was never good at it but I know that kibitizing with the media is what the best flacks do. Because if you don’t, trying to garner stories about your clients is tantamount to shooting guppies in a very big pond. Your chances of hitting a fish and reeling it in, is bupkis – nil.
The pandemic has curtailed much of a publicists’ greatest skill of reaching a writer or a podcaster; and has clipped the personal touch of forging a relationship with those said media members. The times I do get out and attend a wine event these days, the only media members one is likely to encounter, are those so-called “influencers” – a whole different breed that instinctually makes me gag for fear I may swallow the tiny bones hidden within the flesh.
No, these days I find myself adroit at schmoozing with the media via text, email, or phone. I’m good at it, too. Mostly because of my writing skills – my No. 1 asset as a longtime wine journalist – I know how to reach certain media members by spinning a genuine yarn; fostering relationships, and currying good vibes and fuzzy feelings.
To my way of thinking, the only way to get media attention for one’s clients is to be an authentic, natural schmoozer. Harvey and Dan and Tim had it in their bones to realistically touch the funny bones and marrow of the media. There was no pretense about those guys. They were mensches, authentically good people, who imbued their warm personalities onto the press. They made writers feel special because goodness knows, no one else is out there doling out praise and appreciation for media types; especially these daze, what with journalists being held in contempt along with SCOTUS judges and congressional hacks.
Which is precisely why I feature many of the media types I’ve worked with as a publicist, on the front page of this site; those who’ve given my clients good ink through the years. Journalism is in my skeletal makeup. I grew up reading two newspapers a day in Brooklyn; and dreamed of being a sportswriter – which I became – after admiring those so-called “chipmunk” sportswriters, who in the late ‘50s and ‘60s “told it like it is”. When I moved to the left coast, I quickly made a lateral move from sports writing when I realized that wine and food in the Bay Area, was the No. 1 sport.
Now, as a flack, I still hold journalists dear. They are underpaid, underrepresented, and underappreciated. Thus, I schmooze them – in the most honest way I know – so that perhaps they at least might give my clients’ wines a sniff, literally.
So, I’m thinking of Harvey and Dan, and Tim and all those women out there still toiling and kibitzing and schmoozing and cementing relationships between the other side of the wine world – the PR/Mediaverse.