More than 20 years ago I served an internship at a small public relations firm in NJ. I remember sitting in on strategy meetings on how to promote our clients' news. During the meeting we would develop a hit list of key media outlets as targets for the release. We'd mail the release, wait a few days and make the dreaded "did you get my release/are you going to use it" follow up calls.
Today, mailing press releases has gone the way of the parachute pants (hey, I had a pair). Now it's all done at the push of a button and releases are emailed to journalists.
And the winds of change are swirling again - actually, they've been swirling for a while. Social Media and Web 2.0 - are there any bigger buzzwords in the PR/corporate communication industry right now?
SM/Web 2.0 is the sexy, now, hip thing (but so were parachute pants). PR firms and corporations are hiring social media experts. The focus has shifted from generating traditional news coverage to creating a conversation on the web. Corporations want their news blogged about, tagged and shared delivering a large consumer audience to their news, and they see SM/Web 2.0 as the vehicle to do so.
And there, lies the heart of my question. Does corporate America still care about the mainstream media? Is the mainstream media model outdated - doomed for extinction?
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Hi Joe, welcome to the blogosphere!
After working in the media, public relations and media relations for 10 years, I have no doubt MSM (main stream media) is still king.
Earlier this year, I was an account supervisor at a major public relations firm and as much our clients appreciated a blog hit, they salivated at the chance to get pick up in any of the larger newspapers or magazines. Sure a hit on a consumer blog was nice, but what they really wanted to see from me, as their “PR guy,” was a hit in the NYTimes, Washington Post, LATimes or USAToday.
A hit in a blog was cool, but wasn’t easy to quantify or monetize. To them (our clients) we were only as good as our last “real hit”. If one of our clients made it into a blog, they didn’t want “enter the conversation”…because they didn’t know how, didn’t want to learn how, didn’t want too, or didn’t have the resources.
As a supervisor, I encouraged our clients to enter the conversation, but was met with resistance. Worse, they didn’t understand the nature of blogs and wanted to know “how many people they reached” and “what’s the ROI” on that post. Of course, our firm’s corporate policy was to attach a “comp ad value” to the blog posting, which drove me insane.
While I don’t know the readership numbers for the largest blogs, I’m willing to bet that MSM still carries the heaviest amount of credibility in the eyes of the public. As long as the public tunes into The Today Show, GMA, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, etc., and read the NYT and others, corporate America will look to them as the heavyweights in the sphere and will covet their attention.
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