Last week on this blog Dean Rotbart made an impassioned plea for PR people to be more responsive to journalist inquiries.
It was a well-written piece, and I fully agree with his points. In thinking about how PR has come to a point where the basics of responding to a journalist inquiry are too often lost my attention was drawn to Dean’s passing comment about using a release for SEO improvement.
The line reads “The release may be designed primarily to bolster the SEO results attained by the issuer, although I assume that most companies that pay to distribute news releases are still hoping to get free media coverage from mainstream news outlets.”
This touches on an important struggle in modern PR, negotiating a company’s relations with media and supporting (or driving) company marketing efforts.
On the surface, the two should not be at odds, and in many ways they are not. An organization comes up with a marketing program and the PR staff develops an approach to media to drive press coverage. It is the foundation of pretty much every global PR firm.
However, as PR has grown as an industry and seized on new trends, using its core strength as communicators to become a larger part of an organizations marketing efforts, too many have lost sight of the importance of media relationships. The end result is a larger population of the PR industry with no ability, or interest, in working with the media.
Below are few thoughts on why and how this has come about:
Put crudely, when an organization puts out a release it may be more focused on driving results with bloggers, producing Facebook traffic or creating a buzz on Twitter. Therefore, when a radio show producer calls and wants an interview the idea of earned media coverage on radio is completely foreign.
There is a lot of exciting new work being done in PR these days as organizations lean more heavily on PR to have a conversation with their consumers. The fundamentals of creating and keeping good media relationships have empowered PR to claim this larger role in organizations. As PR embraces its new role we must be careful not to overlook media relationships as that is what makes PR strong communicators in the first place.
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