PR Week's take on tech and PR
About a week ago, PR Week's Keith O'Brien published the first entry in a new column, "What goes online," for the publication. Keith focused his initial effort on how public relations firms have reached out to bloggers and have not always gotten the responses they expected. This new column will cover, in the magazine's words, "how technology is changing how companies interact with – and position their wares to – consumers." And it's about damn time, if you ask me.
We've heard tons of things from the market, PR pros who know (and don't know) what they're talking about, bloggers, and others involved in this equation, but this marks one of the first solid efforts I've seen from a dead tree publication (sorry, force of habit) to put two and two together on a regular basis, and not have the random column or op-ed here and there from someone who's handling the merger between tech and PR on a regular basis. If anything, this item and its follow up to come should probably be part of the welcome package to all new PR firm staffers - even if just to show the pitfalls in not paying attention to what you're doing when pitching blogs. We should all hope that we're not becoming so reliant on media lists that we think we can just pitch people without developing any sort of relationship when it's warranted - because that's most certainly happening in the blog world. Firms are finding out about the Technoratis, Instapundits, and Google Blogsearches of the world and going to town, thinking they have now harnessed the blogosphere. Hear that bell ringing in the background? It's your wakeup call - go address it, and don't hit the snooze button. If you do, it's going to affect your firm - and your clients (see: KFC / Gawker - here and here) - and recovering won't be as easy as you'd like.
Tip of the day: Individual blog pages are called permalinks because of one thing - they're permanent.
