Educating clients about the traditional/new media paradigm shifts

Sally Saville Hodge

For years and years, we folks in PR have been selling clients on the value of media relations…the cachet of coverage, its impact on a profile, the value of a “third party endorsement.” The sell has always been accompanied by “we have the relationships with the media to get it done.”

We’ve done our job well. Maybe too well. Prospects come to us wanting to be in the paper or on TV or radio. They want that cachet. They want the impact. They want the credibility. And they really want to know you have the relationships.

The thing is…that kind of thinking just doesn’t apply like it used to. All of us in the business know it, even though a lot of traditionalists may have trouble admitting it. But our clients don’t know it. They’re still enmeshed in the old paradigm. As a profession, we’ve written and spoken volumes about Word of Mouth, SEO, SMPRs, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and on and on. But I think we’re pretty much talking to ourselves and not educating the clients as to the seismic shifts in media that should be reshaping their expectations on what we should be delivering.

The traditional media world is shrinking. So far this year, according to a tally maintained by St. Louis Post dispatch designer Erica Smith, over 13,000 newspaper jobs have been lost as the industry continues to lose relevance, readers and ad revenues. Many publications have folded all together. How telling is it that one of our most venerable newspapers, the Christian Science Monitor, is morphing away from hard copy to embrace its healthier Web self?

And it’s not just traditional journalism jobs and outlets that are on the endangered list. Rumblings have it that layoffs are pending at Salon.com, with the suggestion that some of these tired old Web 1.0 vehicles aren’t feeling the love so much in a Web 2.0 or even 3.0 world.

So what are the implications that we need to communicate to our clients? Three that immediately come to mind:

1. As traditional media shrinks, it’s harder and harder to successfully pitch the writers and publications that are left. The competition for their attention is relentless – and they already have plenty of ideas of their own that are going unwritten. It demands that the client be differentiated (especially those in more commoditized businesses), and that takes really, really strong and on-point ideas to make them stand out.
2. Enhanced credibility remains a benefit of traditional media placements. But credibility with whom is the question we need to be thinking about as we develop our outreach strategies. If your market is the 20-somethings (and increasingly, those in their 30s and 40s!) they may well put more stock in an implied (or overt) endorsement by a friend on Facebook or a popular blogger than a feature in the local paper. There is no one credibility end all and be all in today’s media environment.
3. “Relationships” as clients tend to think of them are changing. The traditional media relationships that many practitioners may hang their hats on are disappearing along with the journalism jobs. We need to show how well we can also cultivate relationships in other media realms – with important bloggers and other influencers, for example. More importantly, we need to demonstrate why those relationships are equally important.

Too many businesses these days have a very limited view of what PR’s all about. For example, a Hodge Schindler study of 150 fast-growing business services firms found that for half of them, it begins and ends with press releases.

We need to stop talking to ourselves and start showing the folks who are footing our bills that PR isn’t an acronym for Press Release, that “media” is comprised of an amazingly vast range of possibilities with varying levels of cachet and credibility depending on the audience, and how their interests will be best served if we strive for balance between traditional and new media in helping to build their images.