You just never know where a story is going to stick
By Leo Valiquette
Last week, I spoke about how many PR practitioners fear to pick up the phone or otherwise attempt to engage with media beyond simply hitting “send” on a media release.
I want to follow up by emphasizing that, for a PR program to be effective, it must be consistent, persistent and applied over a period of many moons and fiscal quarters. Because, frankly, there is no telling where a story may stick or when a notable journalist may come out of the woodwork asking for the perspective of your organization’s brain trust on some timely and relevant issue.
Public relations or, to be more precise for our purposes here, media relations, can be broken into two general categories. First, there is the transactional effort, where the goal is to get media to pick up on a breaking news item that doesn’t have much of a shelf life. The second is building a rolodex factor by positioning your organization, or key individuals within your organization, as go-to resources the media can rely on for comment and insight on specific subjects.
These two categories are not silos. Every time you reach out to a journalist the effort contributes to building that rolodex factor, even if the justification for your call is a news item that will be as stale as month-old bread by tomorrow.
