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.� 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.

We are paid to help clients reach one or more audiences. Thus, it is important for us to understand where members of these audiences get information they consider credible. So, if an audience important to a client views a certain blog as most credible, then that placement is more important to us than a newspaper. If an audience considers the local newspaper most credible, than that is the most important placement. Let me give an example.

The Hitachi Foundation is a client of ours. They are at the vanguard of efforts to build career paths for low-income employees in the manufacturing and healthcare sectors, career paths that help workers develop career-building skills and build assets, beyond only collecting a paycheck. Through the projects they have supported and the partnerships they have formed, the Foundation has uncovered unique lessons that are valuable to employers seeking to build a skilled workforce from a mostly unskilled entry-level population. One set of lessons grew out of the M-Powered project focusing on the metalforming industry. Our task was to help them get those lessons directly to employers in this industry.

We learned the information sources these employers consider credible: other business owners, trade associations and trade publications, and blogs serving their industry and the workforce development field in general. Thus, we designed a media outreach strategy that included word of mouth from business owners (online and offline); distribution via trade associations; and outreach to selected blogs. The result was that the lessons the Foundation developed got to the people who could make a difference with those lessons. And that made this kind of outreach even more valuable to The Hitachi Foundation than a traditional, less targeted approach.

Does that mean that future projects we do for this foundation will not include traditional media placements? Of course not – it will all depend on who they will want to reach.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Communications, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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