Zone5ive: The relevance of PR in the age of social media
By Alexandra Reid
Yesterday’s Zone5ive was a hot ticket. In fact, the near-capacity crowd Tweeted about it so much it trended on Twitter. The event’s success can be owed to the fact that co-presenters, our own Francis Moran and Kathryn Schwab of Cyan Solutions, demonstrated what they were talking about by producing a content-rich presentation that they – and attendees and event organizers from OCRI – promoted aggressively, predominantly through social media.
In their presentation, Moran and Schwab laid out the necessary ingredients that companies need to garner media coverage in both traditional and new media. According to Moran and Schwab, the two key elements are strategy and content. Companies must have their PR resources – either internal or external – research and then target relevant media and provide them with irresistibly rich content in order to ensure their stories get told. Blasting news releases out in hopes of getting covered simply don’t work. The media landscape is shrinking, budgets are being slashed, and the pressure on journalists to produce unique and brilliant stories is weighing down more than ever before. Don’t make them do any more work than they have to. Plan out your story and package it for them. By providing the right journalist with the right story at the right time, you can vastly increase your chances of getting your clients’ story told. New media channels are no different. By providing the right audience in the right forum with the right story at the right time, you can help ensure your content gets shared through reposts, retweets, comments and mentions, which can also boost the relevance of your content in the eyes of journalists.
