PR in 2012 must focus on digital content

Much of the buzz about public relations these days is around digital. The traditional way to generate positive PR for a client has been to develop relationships with reporters and editors and then pitch them stories. If and when your story actually gets picked up, the message is in the reporter’s hands and you hope they get it right. When you get this earned media, it’s is undoubtedly a big win.

Times have changed. Competition for consumers’ attention has exploded. Social media outlets, blogs, review sites and other websites are serious threats to traditional media’s stronghold on traditional PR. Digital is real-time marketing, capable of being shared and commented on and of generating the its own brand of positive PR. Digital content or activity can even become the reason a traditional media outlet reports on the story. As a result, PR professionals are—or should be— shifting their focus.

Ann Voorhees Baker of Publicity Pros, talks about 2012 trends in PR in a blog post published earlier this week. She says the value of having close relationships with media folks will continue to diminish next year, while the value of the more direct, public relationships with social media users will continue to grow.

PR pros will need to be putting on their journalism hats, developing blog editorial calendars (like an editor would for a magazine). The PR person’s knack for pitching an interesting story angle will be used again and again to create content for a client’s blog. The need for a reporter to write the story becomes less important when you can do it yourself and distribute it yourself.

On Business 2 Community, Nick Kinports reports on the growing importance of content marketing in PR and ad agency worlds. While many professionals have been doing some forms of content marketing for years through articles and white papers, digital versions of these types of materials are becoming more important. In fact, he sites a study that shows a 16 percent shorter selling cycle for agencies that use digital content marketing compared to agencies that don’t.

It may seem like a matter of semantics, but marketers and PR professionals are both concerned with one bottom-line detail: their clients’ bottom line. While it is still thrilling to see your name or your company’s name in a newspaper headline, the unpredictable path to getting there might not be your smartest PR tactic. Exploring the power of digital PR must be a priority.