My Blogenberg of last Tuesday elicited some interesting, to-the-point questions from Jim Durbin of brandstorming. In my post, I talked about our intensive effort to understand and navigate a communications market that is becoming ever more segmented. I talked about our efforts to expand “media relations� at a time when Americans are expanding their own, often individual definition of “media.�

Durbin asked three questions:

• How do you quantify and bill for that time?
• Is time spent talking to a blogger the same value as talking to a friendly reporter?
• Is writing a blog post the same value as writing an editorial?

His questions go to the heart of how I must look at today’s PR challenges as a businessman. After all, my ultimate job is to make sure I can keep a small PR shop in a city full of behemoth PR shops running, and running profitably.

In my last Blogenberg I wrote that this more sophisticated approach to outreach is really “a new modification to what I’ve been telling clients for more than a decade.â€? The starting point for every campaign, every outreach project remains the same: Who does the client want to reach? Everything else reveals itself in the answer. The difference is that there is much more to reveal itself. It used to be that the strategy available to us was traditional media, with various cuts by market, circulation, audience, etc. Today, there are myriad strategies available to us – from traditional media to blogs to podcasts to online and offline word of mouth. (more…)