If traditional media relations is your primary tactic for engaging your most important external audiences, you should re-assess your approach. While independent media outlets, including mainstream and industry/trade publications, remain an important source of third-party validation, particularly for B2B and non-profit enterprises, relying on earned media has long been a strategy of diminishing returns.
Securing earned media placements is harder than ever. With less dedicated readers and less advertising, there are fewer staff reporters and editors to pitch and all of them are buried under crazy workloads with their own personal lives to manage as well. It’s kind of like when you see humanitarian agencies distributing boxes of food and supplies to disaster survivors from the back of truck. There is only so much white space to hand out and everyone desperately wants their share – even when it’s not clear who would even see it.
Many brand name trade publications that don’t even bother to list their staff contact information anymore and, when they do, the list is rarely up to date. They don’t want to get flooded with pitches and they don’t necessarily want to admit that freelancers are now a critical asset in their economic model.
Let’s set aside Modern Media Relations 101 for another day. One of the best ways to advance your business goals is to become a publisher yourself.
Back when I worked at a global PR agency, I reached out to Adrian Monck, managing director of the World Economic Forum, the independent non-profit best known for hosting the annual powerbroker confab at Davos. I had been fascinated by Monck’s Twitter feed, which was irreverent and consistently informative, pushing out eye-popping content.
Monck preached “disintermediation,” an academic way of saying: “Be your own media.”
You can read the entire interview here at your leisure, but Adrian’s big take-away was: “The key factor is an organizational willingness to engage with audiences without mediation, without having your information filtered through traditional news media. For organizations, mediation hides many things — embarrassing pitches, bad timing, irrelevance. Going directly to the audience is risky but ultimately rewarding, as you have the power to tell your own stories.”
That was in 2014. Today, it’s hard to find a PR agency that doesn’t talk about “storytelling” as a key service. It’s a great pitch, but it’s also a tacit admission that earning free media has become a frustrating and time-consuming task with uncertain business outcomes.
Content marketing has provided a new career for many former reporters and editors, but developing a successful strategy is easier said than done. Do you know who your audiences are? How well? Where do they get their news and information now? What are their consumption habits? What are their preferences? What topics and types of content would interest them? What content do you have? What can you create? What channel or channels should you use to connect with them? How will it align with your brand, the way you would like your business or organization to be perceived?
For the record, @amonck remains an interesting Twitter follow to this day, and the @wef and @davos Twitter channels pump out a steady stream of reliably thoughtful and intriguing news and information using links that drive audiences back to the organization’s web site or those of its partners. It’s a global example of what any enterprise can accomplish when it embraces a focused, professional disintermediation strategy.
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