Traditional Public Relations Needs to Change to Survive Online
Posted by Joel Falconer in Marketing, New Media, Social MediaJul 27th, 2008 | 13 responses
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.
13 Responses to “Traditional Public Relations Needs to Change to Survive Online”
Leave a Reply
About Me
Joel, it’s such a pleasure reading you. I always learn something new. Stumbled!
Terrific article, and timely for me too — right as I’m ready to put something to market and pounding me head trying to figure out how to do it the “new fangled way.”
Now at least I know not to BREAK THE LAW w/ PR spam!
Thx mucho —
Interesting point your raise about relationship building being key to successful Public Relations nowadays, Joel.
I’ve found that the good old-fashioned Press Release works wonders when you’ve cultivated a mutually beneficial relationship with the editor or reporter of the publication. This is especially true with local media outlets.
Undoutably, the same applies the other way: the Public Relation gurus will need to adopt long-term strategies -the hit and run tactic leaves today’s consumer cold.
Very good piece and a lot of it I certainly agree with. You are right that PR has fallen into a rut of short term return and has lost focus on the relationships. And, while I certainly appreciate your point to my post reacting to the PR Spammers wiki, I think you’ll find from other posts that the reason I believe bloggers should be treated very much like journalists (and some bloggers are, by nature of how they approach their subject matters, indeed journalists) agrees with you as well. I think so because I think PR professionals should focus on the relationship with the media member (blogger or not) rather than the pitch or release. The only way you, as a blogger, would reasonably consider anything I might send you for consideration for your blog is if you trust me as a credible source for information. That trust can’t happen with a press release or a couple of emails.
We do agree on a lot of points. Thanks again for the reference and conversation. Excellent discussion.
PR is the heart of everything we don these days. Even running a blog requires a good deal of PR. You always provide such an incredibly useful content Joel.
Thanks for everything mate! Shilpan
Vered: Thanks! Glad you enjoyed.
Madley: Most blogs will take your release if it’s relevant, because most blogs ask for them or have a “tips” email address. The lesson is to be careful who you send it to: solicited or not. But before shooting releases over, get involved in the community at that blog.
Scott: Definitely agree with you. The release has worked for me in the past, though it should generally adhere to convention (1 page, short and snappy)—I’ve seen people send out long-winded, bulky paragraphed releases and never get a thing. When the release worked best was when I had a good relationship with the recipient as you point out.
Jason: I think the way I placed my link there probably implies that I disagree with your take on things; I think you’re one of the good guys and are doing good work, especially in the area of educating PR people. Thank you for stopping by and commenting.
Shilpan: PR is at the heart of many things for sure. Relating with one’s public is essential to any forward-facing operation, whether it be commercial or not, and to take the principle further, the way you manage relationships with others in your life is very important.
That’s the approach I try to use on my blog: I hope to make money off of my affiliate links in the long run, once I’ve developed a relationship with my readers by providing them with lots of useful content they can use to make their lives better and richer.
Marelisa, good observation. Public relations isn’t just about pitching to other bloggers; it’s meant to be about your relationship with your public more than anything. You embody the spirit of good public relations.
You need to cater to your public if you’re in PR. This was a good observation of the industry and how it needs to focus on their public, not just as journalists but as people. I’ve already heard from three of my acquaintances that 5WPR, that has offices in NY & LA, is a good firm to use if you need Public Relations because they are always getting results for their clients within a short period of time.
John, what kinds of strategies does 5WPR implement? Is it relationship-based? I’m curious.
[…] don’t go ahead and implement your advice right away, I bookmark it for later use. For having strong opinions and for not being afraid to express […]
Hey Joel,
Just stumbled upon your Blog by mistake after goog-ling mobileme email info (nice article and informative - i will give me a break until Q1 / 09 and see what Santa Jobs delivers in the IT online CLOUD stocking !)
This is the first time I have ever Blogged (no longer a virgin blogger now) and i just wanted to share my experience on building a PR status for our company.
I know that most companies don’t have the budget for an external PR company and I know that most people don’t rate the average PR company and that’s because after appointing a PR company and the initial excitement has frazzled and everyone gets back to actually doing their day job, the interest in the fundamental reason for appointing the PR agency evaporates (wow that was a long rant ..) - creating perception.
I was lucky enough to be in the position of working with a PR agency, building and managing PR for a little privately own company based in Scotland, owned by two families and the management team, of which I was a part.
Our objective was to build the company and sell it in 5 years - very simple directive from the owners.
Using a PR agency helped in eventually creating not only a local awareness but a global industry perception of what we stood for and our products. Our company started in the early 70’s and had not really tapped into the international markets until early 2001 - it had always been a very parochial insular business depending on the local industry to feed the up’s and down’s – this was all done without PR .. didn’t even know what PR was.
We started to target our business into specific countries and follow our UK customer base as they expanded their international reach, and this strategy moved our products into Trinidad, Brazil, Canada, Singapore, Norway, Nigeria, Angola, and establishing a base in New Orleans, Aberdeen, Scotland and Singapore.
Could we have done this without the assistance of PR ? Probably. Would we have attracted a buyer for the company without PR ? Questionable. Could we have generated a worldwide perception for our product and what we stood for without PR ? No.
What did we do ?
The PR agency was also a young company run by young dynamic people thirsty for success – this was a key driver for us selecting them to work with us. Yes it could have been an easy option to pick one of the well known PR guru’s but on a cash flow which included geographical expansion and product manufacture we needed to align ourselves with a similar hungry company – this is good advice. The PR Agency was going to be used primarily to handle Press Releases, features & editorial.
I should also mention for later that our international expansion including the appointment of country agents/representatives working on a pure commission basis which also featured in our international PR development.
So, with a good PR team in front of us we launched into the PR black hole. It is all too easy to appoint an agency then leave them alone thinking that they will be looking after your best interests, pushing and guiding you up to maximum exposure – being Scottish we stretched every pound and ensured that our expectations where understood from the start. This little blog-ette is about the things that worked for us.
I have learned that PR Agencies know about PR, but ‘YOU’ know more about your own business than anyone. With this in mind our strategy was to ‘make’ the PR agency (PRA) fully appreciate the key drivers in our business, its growth and industry perceptions around the world. Our business model is based on the rental of products to the oil & gas industry and as such in a year we could book 200-300 contracts – I wanted to make sure that every contract was delivered in a PR story, press release style, to the industry across the local country newspapers, industry journals and online industry websites with the expectation of seriously increasing our profile within the industry globally.
We made sure that our country agents contributed to the PR effort and that contact was made by our agents to the local business editors of the newspapers to establish relationships at a local level and fed back to the PRA. We met with journalists at every opportunity whilst at Oil shows and exhibitions to create a familiarity about our products and to promote the unique features of safety and quality (always a big seller in our market). I know what you said about releases not working Joel, but I have to ask you to park it to the side in our particular instance until you get to the end.
With 200-300 contract stories to be prepared or grouped we needed a detailed Press release plan which allowed us to focus on certain dates, or on a certain region or country. This was reviewed weekly in order to keep the foot on the PR gas. The key thing here is not to let the PRA drive you – remember, you know more about your company than anyone.
Providing the PRA with consistent information in a format which they could understand was paramount to having good 1st drafts for review. I planned a form which included all of the contract details, quotes which we needed in the PR and specific technical selling points on safety, budget, timing, contracting strategy and not to forget Contract values.
As we found out early on, to get our releases out there, and published we had to include the value of the contracts otherwise the hit rate dropped significantly. Now I have heard a bunch of people in the past going on about disclosing contract values in releases and how its feeding the competition with valuable information – IT DOESN’T MATTER, ITS IRRELEVANT. What I mean, is that it is very difficult to scrutinise what your eventual contract actually includes with any specific customer and therefore it is a worthless piece of information in a Press release made important by the editors. It DOESN’T MATTER that you have made the world aware of the contract value it’s how you write, and what message you send out to your customers that’s the important thing.
The way we addressed our releases was based on what we wanted our customer’s perception to be of the company and not the contract details as such.
Press releases were approved by me and released against the PR plan and we used the quotes from management as a means of including our ‘perception message’ and exposing our growth plans. This helped gain recognition within the industry as a leader as we slowly expanded our geographical coverage.
One fun thing we did every year with the PRA was an April fools story, some outlandish technical breakthrough for the oil and gas industry. Our last one once the introduction of wireless electricity which could be provided instantly minimising set up and hook-up in remote areas. Our company became known for the April fools story each year and we received emails of congratulations on a grander story each year.
A couple of other PR items which assisted our global awareness :
• Qtrly newsletter which we mailed (yes the old fashioned way with a stamp) to all our customers. Not to just any one we had an address for by qualified customers we had spoken to and knew they had a need for the products.
• Ongoing customer database cleansing and verification (this is a whole other ballgame which I will not go into in this rant)
• Listing our company in the many FREE (yes FREE – remember we’re Scottish!) online industry directories and industry websites – about 40 in total so far. This is also a great way to increase link popularity online.
The PRA we worked with developed closer relationships with Key journalists in our industry and as a result of our niche products, we were usually at the top of the list for free editorial and even features to align with the journal themes sometimes on safety, quality or a regional feature.
I am not in any way trying to paint a picture that the management of a PRA is a breeze – It’s Not and be aware of this when you are going into a major PR project like this. I was told some years ago (more now than I would care to remember) that most things can be achieved with hard work – we achieved it and it was all done with hard work from both sides; Hard work from the PRA to constantly follow, understand and write releases aligning with our ever changing business dynamics and even more hard work from us to ensure that the PRA delivered.
Let’s skip forward a couple of years to when we sold the company. We were approached by a USA based company $1.5 billion turnover.
They thought our PR was excellent and thought we were much bigger than we actually were – we had used the constant PR feed to the industry to create a larger perceived entity and as a leading provider worldwide. As the saying goes … they were so impressed they bought the company – and the figures stacked up of course.
Since the acquisition, the PR has tailed off and the budget cuts in PR have impacted our market awareness. In addition the parent has dropped the strong brand name we created and rebranded to their subsidiary company who have no international exposure – go figure …
Oh by the way if you are interested the company was called Duffy & McGovern – Google it you will see the full story.
That didn’t seem too bad for a first Blog – my fingers were a blur - I might even do this again !!
Keep up the good work Joel.
[…] are being thrown on the window, with Twitterers tittering through tweets about companies who still think traditional advertising is working. It seems like these days everyone in using some form of social media: my mom’s has a […]