Help keep your company in the public eye
by treating your PR department like a newsroom

The new form of public relations is about being a part of an industry, economy, global trade picture, and many other facets of the universe that your company works within. Provident Partners' president and host of the Marketing Edge Podcast, Albert Maruggi frequently writes about how business communicators need to think more like journalists. For marketers and public relations professionals, the social web opens a wealth of opportunities for those that think differently about public relations. If you are still counting clips, this is not going to sit well, however, if you want to count conversations, influence, and interactions then this methodology is perfect for you. Most significantly, every person and every organization has the potential to become a media outlet.

With blogs, podcasts, YouTube, Twitter and a range of other social media tools, it's never been easier to complement traditional communication tactics with new, vibrant, direct outreach to the people who are most interested in the unique stories you have to offer. For some organizations, this presents an opportunity to join an already lively set of conversations taking place about your brand and your industry. For others, more often the smaller and midsized businesses who might not be household names, these new Web-based tools gives you a chance to be heard and to hear from people who previously would have gone unnoticed.

Journalists are adapting their work to meet the demands and the potential of the social media world, and business communicators need to do the same. For example, Steven Baker of BusinessWeek writes for many platforms: short pieces for his blog, longer articles for print, additional material for his audio podcast. He advises PR people to consider all forms as you put together assets that tell the story. "We've always done it that way" won't cut it. Try new approaches, use new tools, and reach new audiences.

As an example, we worked with a client looking to bolster its position as a thought leader in the agricultural commodities markets. When a major news story was breaking, we wrote and distributed a statement from the client's key market analyst, but so did everyone else's PR team. We made our messages more compelling by also recording a brief, 90-second sound bite to distribute along with the written statement. The editor at a major trade magazine loved the idea and published both the written statement and our sound bite his Web site. (And he mentioned in an e-mail what a great idea it was!)

For a company that develops software for manufacturing businesses, we visited a customer's plant and filmed a documentary-style video piece showing how the manufacturer's business operations were improved after the implementation of our client's software. Here's one example from that series of videos: