There’s a saying about commencement that gets used in lots of commencement speeches – it’s not an end, it’s a beginning. Media coverage is the same way – while it’s a goal of a media campaign to get stories in newspapers and on the air, it shouldn’t be an occasion to say, “Job well done,” but rather, “What do we do next?”

The first step, of course, is to let your audience know about the coverage. Social media provides you the most immediate reach – Facebook and Twitter make it very easy to link to online coverage, and despite speculation about Facebook and Twitter’s impending demise, it’s still quite useful for pointing people to stories, especially if your followers start getting it out to their networks.

You also want to make sure to get links to the stories up on your own website. There should already be a page on your website that’s set up to highlight coverage; if you don’t have one and don’t feel you have enough coverage yet to justify a whole website page, you can at least create a section of your About page or something similar to highlight media.

While links to media websites is the easy (and fully legal way) to highlight coverage, you want to make sure that you archive any coverage you do get and keep physical and digital copies. Some media websites will keep coverage up forever, but others will only keep links active for a couple of months, so you want to make sure you don’t rely solely on those.

It’s a good idea to create PDFs of print articles for easy distribution and reprinting – copiers are becoming a thing of the past when it comes to preserving print. For TV segments, if you don’t want to go through the trouble of getting a segment off your DVR, you can find a clipping service (every major city typically has at least one), which will get you a copy of your stories as a digital file or a playable DVD for around $75 per segment. Most TV stations will not provide copies of stories for you, even if you ask them nicely, so if you’re expecting TV coverage that you want to preserve and use, make sure to budget the cost of those clips into your campaign.

You also want to assess which particular quotes form the articles are most helpful, update your marketing materials with those when you have a critical mass, and utilize them in any fundraising you might want to do as well.

One of the most valuable aspects of media coverage, when it’s positive and it tells your story, is that it’s a trusted third party endorsing you. But while media might indeed tell your story, it’s ultimately up to you to make sure people know that they’ve told your story.

Phil West, Guest Contributor

PR Professional