Yesterday, I attended the Publicity Club of New York’s “new” media beat lunch, which featured journalists from Business Insider, Huffington Post, The New York Times, Mediaite and PaidContent discussing the business of covering the media beat today. Given that the room was full of PR people, the discussion inevitably turned to each journalist’s preference for working with our profession. While much of the content wasn’t new to me (I guess not everyone is personalizing their pitches because the media still tells us to do so at these events!), I did glean a few insightful nuggets.
The “tip” that stuck with me most came from Rachel Sklar, editor at Mediaite, a site published by Dan Abrams focused on the media business. Rachel stressed to the group one key message – “make yourself useful.” It sounds so basic but is also completely logical as a guiding principle. From a simplified perspective, the media will only use us if we’re providing information they need – and feel their readers need to know. To this end, providing a source, data, new product or interesting story angle that will be “useful” to their own quest to deliver the best insight to their readers will always enable us to break through. Our pitch efforts go unaswered when we’re not providing anything of value to their readers. Especially in the midst of today’s information overload.
Trying to gather some additional insight on the topic, I did a quick Google search using the following terms – “content + useful + public relations.” I was startled when one of the top search results was an article titled, “Is the PR Business Extinct? Yes,” written by the CEO of SYS-CON Media, Fuat Kircaali. He contends that, “Today’s PR firms are sitting ducks in the way of tomorrow’s social media freight train. They will join the extinct species of dinosaurs right about the same time as newspapers and most print magazines.”
While the article makes some intelligent points, Kircaali fails to admit that a lot of PR firms already know this – that we have already jumped on the social media train, and are currently using it as another channel for providing useful content directly to our clients’ target audiences, instead of solely going through the media, as “traditional” PR practitioners do. I like to think that at Bite, we employ a strategic mix of both approaches – and always make ourselves as useful as possible. Ultimately, social media simply provides PR with more opportunities to be “useful.”