Online PR Tactics Are Changing the Game

The Internet prompts tectonic shifts in the way PR and media relations will be done now and in the future. Technology, economics and changing public sensibilities have changed the PR game forever, though you’d never know it from talking to agency publicists.

 

Start with the basic PR assumptions:

 

1. PR influences mass media to put ideas, products and brands into the public consciousness and conversation
2. PR works through editorial decision-makers who set the national or global news agenda
3. PR targets large audiences to accelerate and optimize brand impact and buzz
4. The value of the implied third-party endorsement combined with the speed and reach of influence-able media makes PR worth the effort

 

Now consider the current media and editorial landscape:

• Mass media audiences have significantly declined and fragmented. Niche media rules.

• Famous vehicles like daily newspapers, Time, Newsweek and the national nightly TV news have much smaller audiences and cannot keep up with the news cycle.

• The number of journalists and name columnists and their relative influence is declining.

• The power of editors to shape the national or news agenda is much less than ever before.

• Almost anyone with a blog, a camera phone or a video recorder can gather, edit and transmit news, potentially influencing public debate or potentially initiating a viral sensation. John Q. Public can still claim his 15 minutes in the spotlight.

• Reaction to and analysis of events takes place in real time and is influenced by a growing number of voices and sectors empowered by widely and cheaply accessible technology

The recession has reduced the number of working journalists and forced leading news organizations to eliminate or consolidate foreign and specialty reporting, question the value of subscribing to wire services and find ways to share resources or rely on freelancers to fill the shrinking news hole. If you work with publicists you know that the remaining few writers, editors and producers are hard to reach, even harder to persuade and usually unwilling to take a flyer on an off-beat story. Brands, topics and ideas that don’t neatly fit the few remaining beats or synch up with spread-too-thin coverage strategies die of loneliness.

 

Because the basics of news gathering are changing online PR tactics are becoming more important to access to and attention from the media. It also requires you to think of PR much more like advertising where the message can be directly transmitted to customers and prospects without an editorial filter. Here’s how and why.

 

Everyone Searches. Google is the universal go-to-resource. Those same reporters who won’t take your call, use Google and other search engines for ideas, sources, data and color commentary. If your press materials aren’t online and aren’t searchable you have no chance of either influencing the media or of going direct with your message to people interested in your brand, your category or your subject matter.

  

This mandates understanding and using different tools. You have to consider the means of distribution; e-mail directly to press lists and online distribution to insure searchability and to capitalize on those sites that import PR feeds as content. You also must build SEO tactics into the language and construction of press releases.

 

Video is Vital. In the old days a black-and-white glossy would do the trick. Today you need a video. Why? Three reasons; YouTube is the second most searched site on the web. If you want to be found, huge numbers of the public and the media search there. Video is expected. We live in a sound and motion universe and your customers and prospects as well as the media who cover you expect brands to present themselves and their key actors on video. Video gives you the option to more carefully control the explicit and the implied message and has the potential for significant consumer or media pass-along.

 

Everything is a Conversation. One-way media is dead. Everyone talks back to, edits, reviews, and comments, adds to, shapes and criticizes everything. Every story is fluid and many more people develop the angles or the extensions. If you doubt me, think about Britney Spears. How many different sources, from the credentialed press corps to people down the block weighed in on her circumstances, revealed new behaviors, surfaced photos or offered insight and opinions? How impossible was it for her or her people to manage, control or spin the story?

 

In a world where everybody finds out what is happening at lightening speed on a growing range of devices, the game is about interpreting and analyzing the experience rather than presenting new information. Zillions of bloggers are becoming reporters, reviewers, photographers, interpreters and commentators. There are fewer authoritative voices but many more voices that can advance or sidetrack your cause.

 

So PR pros need to monitor mentions and reputations, transmit and receive RSS feeds and keep track of advocates, enemies and the forums they participate in. They also need to understand how to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media to follow and to influence the on-going conversation, which is often monitored, catalyzed and promoted by leading websites and TV or cable networks.

 

Comments

[Dan]

It's a good post Danny, but part of the problem of the web is that everyone also thinks they know what makes PR work. I think one of the better aspects of the web is that it reduces costs for PR professionals so that they can start offering their services at better rates to smaller businesses.

For example, http://www.publicityguaranteed.com is an online PR service that only charges clients for when stories get placed. That sort of pay-for-performance model is something that only the web would allow, so it's another way the web is democratizing PR.

[Vince Bianco]

Dan, good post and wanted to make you aware of a completely different approach to online PR - reaching out to consumers directly through paid placement of PR content directly onto the premium news site page. Check out http://www.NewsforceNetwork.com.

Thanks for allowing me to comment.

-Vince