Public relations is no longer about relationships.

Traditional PR is now about trying to get journalists to notice you and your sensational little stunts. It’s about getting the media to do the relationship building for you.

This is why public relations practitioners are failing online, especially in the social media space. By its nature, and by name, social media is about developing relationships with others, whether they’re content producers or consumers.

But public relations isn’t about long-term relationship building anymore. It’s about the short-term instant return of sending out a press release and seeing how many bites you get—if any actually get past the spam filters. It seems some PR people still have the attitude that bloggers are like journalists and you can send them whatever you feel like.

But bloggers aren’t journalists; news organizations want your press releases because they need to fill up their pages. Blogging is a different world, where unsolicited marketing is called spam. Unless bloggers ask for your releases or have a “submit a tip” form or address, you cannot send this stuff to them at all.

You might not like it, but don’t ignore the warning. Spam, unsolicited email of any kind, is an offense by law.

Instead of firing off a release, you need to take another route. Long-term investments in relationship-building will get you somewhere. Don’t even think about pitching until you’ve contributed to the community and developed some kind of relationship with the author, and even then, you have to approach ‘the pitch’ differently. Releases don’t work here.

There’s a lot of hate for PR people out there, and having worked as one, I’ve felt it. It’s not necessary because there are good, competent, social-media-aware PR people out there, and many of those who aren’t competent in the social media field are learning. Bloggers: don’t hate PR people by default. PR people: don’t spam and later claim it was an accident. Spamming is not ever accidental, and it will possibly get you in legal trouble and almost certainly get you on lists like these.

To succeed in the social space, public relations practitioners need to change their job description and their attitude. They need to spend time building up profiles and reputations, and they need to rinse and repeat the process in every social space they wish to use.

Furthermore, they have to add value to build that reputation. Which means no more spamming, no more “just handle it with a release.” It means hard work and long-term investments and connecting with others who you can give something valuable to.

If you’re in PR and you’re trying to infiltrate the social web, you need to think of it like this: your current public is made up of journalists. Maybe not the public you want the journalists to get you in front of, but you are shaping press releases for journalists. They’re a more immediate public.

Your public in this space is not made up of journalists. It is people. Broad, eh? They might be content producers who can review your product on a well-known blog, or they might be people with 32 followers and an archive of an entire 27 tweets on Twitter.

Since you can’t divide your public into well-defined slices, you need to cater to them all. And that means giving them information they can use.

In short, how to transition from old media to social media as a public relations practitioner:

  • Think long-term investments, not immediate returns.
  • Think relationships with people, not broadcasting to an audience.
  • Think about how people can use your information, not how you can use them.

They’re basic guidelines, but you’ll see better returns with this attitude than with the traditional system that doesn’t work anymore.

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