Subscribe to FeedTruth forward, but to where?
by Jeff RosenbergI’m placing a big bet. I’m betting my business (12 years of toil) that I know where public relations must head. I’m betting that I know how we’ll be telling the truth a decade or two from now. (In the future I’ll Blogenberg about truth and PR – and if you’re now thinking that’s an oxymoron, your cynicism needs a dose of creativity.)
Recently I attended a press conference at the National Press Club. It was extremely well run. It was very well attended by national press. I’ve no doubt the PR firm that did the work – with whom I was very impressed – celebrated “mission accomplished.� But accomplished what? I’ll tell you what – they accomplished getting their news to the same intellectual elite, opinion leaders, and politicians that represent the target of every National Press Club press conference. That’s not unimportant. But it’s not enough, not if you want to make a real difference in how people think and behave.
What’s the P in PR? It’s Public. If you want to engage the public today, getting in The New York Times is not enough. It’s one piece, but nowhere near enough.
What has more impact in our world today, The New York Times or YouTube, the Washington Post or MySpace? What has more meaning to real, everyday people, the Los Angeles Times or a conversation with a neighbor? What resonates more for you, what you hear on NPR (no knock on NPR – I’m part of that small Republican NPR listener demographic) or what you hear from your colleagues or friends?
This isn’t another argument for going gaga over online social marketing, which if not put in the context of relationships and word of mouth (more future Blogenberging), becomes little more than spam. Rather it’s an argument for combining e-mail and online social marketing with the tenets of Word of Mouth Public Relations (WOMPR). It’s an argument for understanding the client and the mission, the current relationships of the client and the new relationships to be forged – organizational and individual – and crafting a campaign that uses an array of strategies to spark conversations, from traditional media relations to online and off-line tools to spur word of mouth. In other words, activating the P in PR.
This isn’t theory for us. We’re already doing this kind of work for one federal agency and a foundation. And it’s not new theory for us – it’s a new modification to what I’ve been telling clients for more than a decade (another future Blogenberg). It is though, a big bet for me. A bet that, when I say traditional public relations is important but not enough, that we can be the “enough.�
(I hope you’ll Blogenberg along the way with us, to see how the bet turns out.)
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I think you’re right, though you’re going to fight a tough battle as other PR pros will howl and scream at the thought that the easy part of the job (sending out press releases to their contacts) is going to be replaced with the very difficult of building communities of interest one-by-one.
It comes down to control. The only things we can control are our personal interactions with other people, and that’s the basis of social networking. If we do a good job being personal, our connections expand and our message gets more play in the extended network of our connections.
Good for you for stepping up. My question is 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 blogpost the same value as writing an editorial?
The effect of some social networking and some blogposts is greater than the mainstream press, but the vast majority are not even close to as influential. The infrastructure and the expectations are behind the elite, which while changing, still has a huge advantage.
But a 5-10 year time frame is about right. As businesses start enjoying real success, the movement to smaller, more targeted groups will make sense.
Comment by Jim Durbin — April 17, 2007 @ 6:31 am