Given the rapidly changing landscape of media and media relations these days, if there were one piece of accumulated knowledge I could pass on to young PR practitioners — or young journalists, for that matter — it would be something along the lines of what my father told me decades ago, likely on one of those Saturday mornings out in the work shed at the back of our home: “Use the right tool for the job.”
In my media relations work, I’ve come over time to translate such advice to mean that one should use the appropriate media platform for communicating your message or that of your client — whether it’s to journalists or bloggers, it doesn’t much matter. There’s always a most appropriate media platform for communicating to a specific community. Of course, long before I figured that one out, Marshall McLuhan said it so succinctly with the phrase “The medium is the message,” meaning of course that the medium used invariably influences how the message is perceived.
As a journalist, I worked across multiple media platforms, writing sometimes in the morning about breaking news in a very brief, wire-service format; and covering it later that day in a longer newspaper piece, or even weaving the same news into a magazine feature with a longer deadline. The platforms were all very different and took into account their readership. But the lesson was simple, you would never file a 350-word breaking news story to a magazine editor, nor would you submit a 3,500 feature-length piece for a wire service editor. Right tool for the job!
In media relations, one would never submit a lengthy press release over a wire service to a TV news producer who may be sending out a camera team for an enterprise shoot for the evening news. Nor, these days, would one send to a blogger a social media-averse news release, that is, one that is not link-rich, with multimedia options, easy drop quotes, graphic images, bookmarking and social network sharing capabilities. Right tool for the job!
Increasingly, one also needs to pay close attention to the preferences of media practitioners — not just bloggers, but journalists as well — as to how they expect to be contacted. If they say on their voice mail to NEVER call them with a story pitch, you proceed to do so at your peril — and the possible peril of your client’s story. Some say only to contact them via e-mail (though we all know everybody’s email is packed with spam these days); others say only to contact them through social media; others say NEVER to contact them via social media. In all of these cases, it’s imperative that you use the right media platform to communicate with your targeted journalist or blogger.
In the ever-changing media world we live in, there is no substitute for following your journalists and bloggers across every media platform they use to disseminate news and information and to knowing precisely which media platform through which they prefer to receive communication from PR and media relations specialists. To ignore their preferences and use the wrong media platform sends them a very clear message, either that you don’t care about their instructions as to how to contact them or that you just “don’t get it” when it comes to the media in which they work … or both!
In media relations as in most things, you have first to be familiar with and then know when and how to use … and here I say it again, at the risk of sounding both pompous and redundant: The right tool for the job!
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When I started blogging two years ago about the impact of technology on news media and, by extension, the practice of public relations, I did so because I was confident I had something to say – some experience about media to “share” – and in a combination that provided a perspective I wasn’t seeing elsewhere on media blogs, tech blogs or PR blogs.
