© 2009 Jed

Five Things that Traditional PR can Learn from Online PR

The last few days has seen some of you crazy animals talking about public relations and journalism. Charles Arthur re-stoked the fires a few days back when he suggested that public relations professionals treat journalists like car companies treat suppliers, Wadds and David Phillip both spoke about improving the reputation of the industry by regulation and then earlier today a little ruckus happened on twitter between journalists and PR’s about both parties attitudes towards each other. I thought there was going to be a fist fight and everything.

One things that I’ve been thinking of for a while now is that the best practice of online relations should be practiced offline too. Dave Fleet and Chris Norton have both spoken at length regarding blogger relations and it just seems like if traditional PR’s incorporated online approaches the PR industry would lift it’s reputation almost overnight.

With that in mind, here are the five things that I think online PR can lend to traditional PR;

  1. Cultivate individual relationships,
  2. Spend time (hours, if possible) reading through the work of the individual,
  3. Ensure that what you’re sending to the individual is relevant to them,
  4. Learn how they like to be approached,
  5. Be human with them!

If you can think of any more, please feel free to add them! I just reckon that with more of the above and less of the ‘scuse me, I don’t care how busy you are, did you get my email?’ malarkey.

10 Feb Written by Jed, on February 10, 2009 at 5:47 pm, covering Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , . Save the link. Track comments using RSS. Comment or back track, I mean trackback.
  • Jed:
    The Internet rearranges power in society. As Scott Brown (newly-elected United States Senator from the state of Massachusetts) demonstrated, web tools enable POPULIST messages to rise like a flood and overturn the better-financed establishment. The latest example of an ONLINE POPULIST darling winning a bit of advantage over a powerful adversary is Hillary Machinery Inc. of Plano, Texas. This small business is locked in a strange lawsuit with PlainsCapital Bank, a much larger business. What is your opinion?

    http://bit.ly/public-relations --Ben

  • @jedhallam I’ll try my best, Rock Star. I liked this post of yours: http://bitly.com/17AbG


    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  • geetarchurchy

    Hi Ruth, thanks for the comment, it’s greatly appreciated. Agree with your points entirely – it’s just a shame that sometimes lazy PRs let the good ones down!


    I also think, as an aside, every PR team should have a lemon cheesecake client. In fact, if there are any lemon cheesecak manufacturers looking for some PR help, i’m more than happy to be paid with the aforementioned lemon cheesecake.


    This comment was originally posted on <a href="http://geetarchurchy.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/journalists-prs-and-cake/#comment-205" rel="nofollow" title="“Journalists, PRs and Cake” (http://geetarchurchy.wordpress.com/)">The Seldom Seen Kid

  • If by ‘cultivating the relationship’ you mean behaving professionally, I couldn’t agree more. Not calling at deadline time, familiarizing yourself with journalists’ topics of interest/expertise and with their medium and its ‘take’ (liberal, populist, hyperlocal, global, national, you name it), not calling or pitching the wrong journalists, not respecting preferences in the way journalists want information, not being an ill-informed pest on the PR side – agreed.


    But you’ll be waiting a long time for a lemon cheesecake from me. Unless I suddenly acquire a cheesecake producing client. :)


    This comment was originally posted on <a href="http://geetarchurchy.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/journalists-prs-and-cake/#comment-190" rel="nofollow" title="“Journalists, PRs and Cake” (http://geetarchurchy.wordpress.com/)">The Seldom Seen Kid

  • Personally, I've never seen a PR person send out a bad pitch, nor have I ever seen anyone target a journalist for a pitch inappropriately, but then I only got into the biz in 1997 and the folks I worked with were brilliant.

    However, as my last blog post indicates, I am getting really really tired of people equating public relations with marketing communications. It's usually marketers who do that, as they attempt to move up the food chain, but it's often ill-informed mainstream media.


    And I've always refused to have a fax machine (not sure anyone ever figured out how to use them properly, they were a complicated technology with really tiny complicated buttons).
  • @Jed thank :-) I think it makes sense sort of...
  • Jed
    OK, so maybe I dropped the ball a little bit - like Stuart mentioned, and as I said to Becky McMichael and Nick Leonard on twitter - my digital beginnings have somewhat twisted my vision on how traditional PR has always operated.

    God, I can't even use a fax machine... Old school.
  • Start with #2 to see who you want to do #1 with. Use #5 and #3 and #4 will come naturally.

    This is really how any interpersonal relationship is successful. Do more listening than you do talking - you'll learn a lot more.
  • I have to agree with Stuart and co, these five points are pretty much the holy grail of 'traditional' PR or media relations.

    I've only been working in social media for a few months, but as far as I'm concerned, you need to take the same approach whether you're practicing traditional or new media relations.

    Cultivate individual relationships - always been the case. You need to get to know your journalist, read their articles find out what they like etc if you're ever going to work well with them.

    Spend time (hours, if possible) reading through the work of the individual - as above, I always try to have read the last three things the person I'm contacting has written. It gives you an in-road and also boosts their ego a bit!

    Ensure that what you’re sending to the individual is relevant to them - again, if you know your audience this should be easy.

    Learn how they like to be approached - This is trial and error. Everyone is different and the only way to find out is to try or ask! Some people prefer a phone call, others an email - and in SM I suppose a Twitter message or Skype call!

    Be human with them - we are all people! Take off the PR or journo hat and we all like to be spoken to like a real person, not a job title.
  • I think these five things are great but they have (or should have) been done in traditional PR for years! As a college student in PR, we learned this in our Intro to PR, PR Writing and Advanced PR Writing courses (repetition=retention?). The problem is that too many practicing professionals dismiss these early lessons because they might not be "expedient." But when you think about it, it is always faster and easier to do something right the first time, than to have to go back and fix something you half-heartedly did. It's kinda funny that you have this as "Traditional learning from Online" when in really its more like "Online doing what Traditional should have been doing (and claimed to be doing) in the first place."
  • Agree with Stuart, these are the best bits of offline PR that anyone beginning in 'online PR' (still hate that term) should really get to grips with. In many ways, there have been too many wide brush-strokes in the journo/PR debate of the last week or so...
  • Jed
    @Matt, that is simply one of the best analogies I have ever heard. It fits, it works, it's great!

    @Stuart, a few people quickly pointed out that quality PRO's have been doing the above for years and that's how they became quality professionals.

    I think I might have overlooked that due to my introduction to PR - I had no one to warn me of the dangers of email blasting, I found out the hard way! It wasn't until I started getting into online PR that I realised that wasn't the right way - so then I merged this into my offline practice.

    Maybe I'm a digital native after all?...
  • Agree with all your points Jed, but I think you've got it back to front demonstrating that you're definitely a child of the digital age! What you describe is EXACTLY how traditional MEDIA relations should be done. We need to be careful about using the term public relations as I'm not sure you could actively apply all of your five points to every facet of public relations practise.

    Good media relations people didn't learn any of those points from online PR folk, they created that best practice years ago.

    That's what I did when I first came into public relations as an account exec. The main difference today is that it is harder because of the far greater volume, but easier because the internet makes information so much more accessible.

    The problem is that too many people (often for very understandable reasons) don't practice media relations properly, just as there are lots of examples of online PR being done well and not so well.
  • These are five things that I thought would be common place in the PR world when i managed to somehow fall into it. But, they're not.

    I was taught at journalism school to treat PRs as you would a freindly neighbour, just because they're coming round with cakes, doesn't mean they're going to be nice cakes, but you won't know if they're nice cakes if you don't bite into one every now and then. But why should you bite if you don't trust the person bringing you the cakes?

    I think offline PR needs to realise that the mass sending out of e-mails with little time or thought taken over them is not the way to get your neighbour to bite.
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