Additional Thoughts on -- On Thursday the podcast company Stitcher and the University of Chicago are launching a new podcast, "Pandemic Economics," hosted by Eduardo Porter and Tess Vigeland and exec produced by Ellen Horne...

We're living in uncertain times due to a terrifying pandemic that continues to raise questions that healthcare professionals can't answer (like do you develop immunity from it if you've already recovered from COVID-19 -- or could you get sick again from it?) combined with economic chaos that's reshaping our economy while creating huge numbers of unemployed workers. 

Against that backdrop, two questions we've been hearing are: "Should businesses conduct marketing and PR campaigns?" and if so, "What's constitutes an effective campaign now?" 

We recently set to answer those questions in a blog post entitled, "9 Tips and Considerations for Conducting PR When It's Not Business-As-Usual" that appeared in CommPro.Biz.  

But after that article appeared, we came across a couple of additional thoughts we wanted to discuss.

For example, one colleague wrote on LinkedIn: "The biggest challenge for companies, IMO: Being relevant while not appearing predatory." 

We think that's right, that getting the balance right -- between letting their customers know they're open for business while also being sensitive to what we're all going through, and that this is far from business-as-usual -- will be a big challenge.

For example, we've seen a lot of ads that tout the heroism of their employees. But in our article, we advised companies that their marketing messages need to match reality. That may be a problem because some of those companies don't have a great reputation for how they treat their employees, unfortunately. They need to watch out for articles such as this from VOX: “'I did not sign up for the military. I signed up for Walmart.' What grocery store workers say they’re facing during the pandemic." We think there could be more articles that highlight the discrepancy between messaging and reality, and that could be a problem.

And according to CNN's great "Reliable Sources" newsletter, "Kantor Media held a webinar about 'TV & video consumption in 'the new normal.'" One of the findings was there's been "an even more pronounced surge in YouTube consumption than Netflix, and a relatively small decline in 'co-viewing,' or people watching together. That means increased TV/streaming consumption mostly consists of people scattering to watch, as opposed to a major bump in shared or family viewing."



But to our perspective, what's important are the implications for advertising. Kantor's "researchers found that people don't feel that brands should stop marketing during the pandemic, but that companies need to be careful not to appear as if they're exploiting it -- a 'fine line,' as media division CEO Andy Brown put it....But the findings generally reinforced some key points about increased consumption, acceleration of streaming and the hunger to return to some semblance of normalcy whenever that's possible..."

We do think the desire to return to normalcy among consumers is important to keep in mind. Marketing functions should keep that in mind when considering how to approach their marketing efforts.

We also expect there to be long-term changes in how we work (more will continue to work from home afterwards) and live, and how we pursue leisure and entertainment. Companies that can anticipate how this will play out should start developing campaigns to address that.

Let us know if you have additional thoughts about how to navigate this crisis from a marketing perspective. 

9 Tips and Considerations for Conducting PR When It's Not Business-As-Usual

For businesses and nonprofits, as for all of us, the world shifted dramatically with the arrival of COVID-19. 

It's certainly far from business-as-usual. 

Yet business continues, and organizations need to continue to operate and keep in communication with their employees, customers, and other stakeholders.

This article will offer some ideas of steps to take during the crisis. But before we get into that, we want to thank: healthcare workers who are taking care of others, EMTS and other first responders,  along with everyone who work in supermarkets -- those who stock shelves and the cashiers -- and other always-essential stores that remain open, including restaurants -- and everyone in the kitchen -- now offering take-out food. We also want to thanks all those who deliver and transport the things we need as well as cable and phone technicians who are maintaining our Internet capabilities, while we're sheltering in place. 

Here are some ideas:

1. Understand that the media's focus has changed. This is important, especially if you're targeting consumer or national business media (as opposed to trade media): every reporter now also covers how COVID is impacting their regular beat. This is true for trade media, too, since they continue to cover their regular business but they are likely to ask questions about the impact of COVID.
   
2. Recognize that COVID-related layoffs have shrunk a lot of newsrooms. A lot of businesses are suffering -- we're not trying to minimize that. But for PR and marketing functions that work with reporters, it's important to realize that a lot of local and trade media have initiated significant cutbacks on staff. That means that newsrooms may not have the resources to cover your story (even if they did just a few weeks ago).
3. Re-evaluate your communications and marketing objectives, strategies, goals, announcements and product roadmaps. Whatever you planned for 2020 may no longer be relevant, starting with launches and trade shows -- especially launches at trade shows. While we don't know yet when the general economy will reopen, you should like at key themes, plans, announcement and goals and adjust them given current conditions. It will require being more flexible and more sensitive to context than usual. 
4. Stay relevant. Look for ways to support and contribute to your community because they need that support. For a software development client, we suggested offering tips for programmers working from home -- and found some interest among trade reporters. Make sure you and your messaging stays focused on employees and customers (and not on the company itself unless its how the company is taking specific new steps to help employees and customers).
5. Postpone unnecessary announcements. Not all announcements are equally important. Those that aren't should be pushed back or dropped. A potential client asked us about issuing a press release to announce a new CEO for a small, international healthcare product company. We told them to hold off on that press release. While trade media continues to publish, it seems like it would be better to wait. For one thing, the news might get lost or overwhelmed amid the COVID news. Please note: some announcements are absolutely necessary; those should go forward but make sure you understand the context of when and how you issue the release. Also keep in mind: your news may not get the coverage it would have just a few months ago.
6. Don't try to generate coverage because you're doing something about COVID. Every organization has had to shift its operations to adjust to the current crisis. So doing something to fight COVID isn't enough. You need to have something special to stand apart from what everyone else is doing. There's a lot of COVID messaging. ads, content (including this blog entry) and spam so you need to find ways to break through the clutter. Keep in mind:  Jumping on the COVID bandwagon risks making your organization look desperate. 
7. Find a way to stand out by doing something unexpected but that fits with your brand. This won't work for most brands, but Steak-umm's social media experimented has paid off, according to the Wall St. Journal: "Steak-ummEmerges as Unlikely Coronavirus Misinformation Watchdog: Processed-meat maker encourages Twitter followers not to trust everything they read; ‘peak irony’ for a brand builder." 
8. Content remains important. Trade media remains interested in bylined articles; we've been in touch with a couple of editors in different sectors who have been requesting content for May, June and July. They’re thinking ahead but some of the planning is taking place now. For the short-term, you still need content for your blog and social media if only to show that your organization is active and current. 
9. Think long-term. There's still work to be done, even during a crisis. After the dot-com crash and in 2007-8 financial crisis, we used the down time to develop new processes and content for when we came out the other side. We're working with clients to continue to develop relevant content (some of which will be posted after the crisis is over), and we're doing that for ourselves, too. 

We're going through something that requires the sensitivity of the post-9/11 era and the post-financial crash of 2007-08. And it may be weeks, if not months, before we're able to get back to some sort of normalcy. (Unfortunately, our guess is that this will happen later rather than sooner.) And we think that once we're on the other side of the crisis, there will be significant changes to how we live, work, shop, educate, and entertain ourselves. Companies need to start thinking about what that future may look like. In the meantime, it's an opportunity to re-evaluate what your organization does and how it approach and update that.

The Future of Media Relations

One of the challenges for public relations agencies and their clients is how to adjust to the news business that finds itself under attack in several different ways.

To understand some of the challenges for public relations, we need to address what's going on in the business of news.

1. The business model for news organizations is broken. Americans are used to accessing news without paying for it. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time and money to produce quality journalism so news media need to develop a sustainable business model. Some organizations have been doing well by establishing a paywall through which non-subscribers can access a handful of articles per month while subscribers can access all they want. The problem is that not every news organization is able to get readers to pay for its content. The New York Times, Wall St. Journal and Washington Post have seen the number of online subscribers increase but the Guardian, a UK news site that had been providing free access to raise awareness in the US has been asking readers to donate to the site -- and we bet they're not seeing much money from that. Meanwhile, online subscriptions are often priced lower than print subscriptions and online ads absolutely generate less money that print ads even though online ads provide much more useable data. Right now, the Washington Post, LA Times and Time magazine are all owned by billionaires who are able to afford to preserve prestige media properties. Unfortunately, there are not enough civic-minded billionaires. Worse, that doesn't solve the underlying business problem. 
2. The incredible shrinking newsroom. A decade ago, most newsrooms used to employ more reporters to cover the news, and the amount of pages that newspapers and magazines had to fill was larger. Today, news reporters have to cover more news with fewer resources and less space. Locally, at the Boston Business Journal, a terrific weekly, staff reporters typically file four or so stories a day, may have a weekly newsletter they produce and then must write a longer article for the weekly printed edition. Radio reporters now also have to write up a print story for the website in addition to producing their stories for the radio. All of this is to say that there are fewer reporters and they have to produce much more. This makes it challenging for them to take meetings, cultivate sources, uncover stories that need to be told. According to the UNC School of Media and Journalism's Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, the result of all this is that "Many newspapers have become ghosts of their former selves, both in terms of the quality and quantity of their editorial content and the reach of their readership." (See credibility issues, below.)
3. The growing number of "news deserts." We're going to see that term a lot more in 2019. According to UNC, a news desert is "a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level." When the concept of news desert came to light, it was often thought to affect rural areas only that couldn't sustain local news media. With layoffs and the shuttering of online sites and weekly papers in New York City (like the demise of the Gothamist and the Village Voice), it's clear that news deserts can afflict big cities, too. Either way, this is making it harder to tell local stories.
4. The credibility of news media is under attack. There is at least one area of commonality between liberals and conservatives: each group has key media it favors (due to confirmation bias, i.e., their echo chamber) and those outlets whose reports they disagree with and don't believe. Americans increasingly hate either Fox or CNN; the New York Times or Wall St. Journal, for example. With Trump and others calling articles they don't like "Fake News" or "the enemy of the people," and people on the other side pointing to Hannity (who had said he wouldn't campaign for Trump but then came out on stage at Trump's last rally before the midterms), etc., the problem is that the credibility of journalist and media outlets across the spectrum is now being questioned.  That's a real problem for PR functions and agencies who work with reporters, editors and producers to tell their clients' stories. If there are those who disbelieve the New York Times or Wall St. Journal, will they believe your organization's news in those or other outlets? Seems doubtful. 

So these factors add up to making it more challenging for PR functions and agencies to conduct traditional media relations activities such as media tours and background interviews. That's not to say those things don't happen; just that it can take more work to score those.

On the bright side, there are new outlets that provide quality journalism -- like Vice, Vox, Axios, Quartz -- but they may not have the name recognition, and their staffs may be harder to reach. Many reporters don't list their phone numbers. For that matter, some of these outlets don't list phone numbers so the only way to reach a reporter is by email and there's no good way to follow up. (No one really likes following up but it has proven to generate coverage. Being unable because there's no phone number means it's harder to report back to clients about where things stand. And you can only email so many times without a response before it turns into a credibility problem for the publicist.)

Additionally, these new outlets may have an edgy persona so good media professionals need to continue to find quality media and vet those outlets to help clients – whether internal or external – understand the value of targeting media they may not have heard of but who may be influential and worth pursuing. That additional layer of vetting requires additional time.

More than a decade ago, my rule of thumb was that it would take a half hour per reporter on your media list. So if you had a list with 20 reporters, it might take 10 hours between calling all reporters, scheduling and coordinating an interview, providing background on the reporter for the client, etc. Now it takes longer because you also have to check reporters' tone and the stuff they post on Twitter. That's a big difference. (You don't want to pitch an A.I. client to a reporter who is consistently posting that A.I. is a danger to society.) 

Yet we feel that traditional media relations won’t fade away. Instead, media relations will continue to be an important means for organizations to communicate their stories, and good media pros will need to expand the definition of the media to include YouTubers, Twitter, Instagrammers – just as they’ve been doing that with bloggers.

Five Tips for B2B Startups Considering PR and Social Media

I was recently asked for five tips for B2B startups considering PR and social media. I came up with these five somewhat random tips, and will come up with more next month. This is not meant to be comprehensive but they are intended to help be specific to the process of PR and social media.

Let me know what you think.

1.      If your startup has never engaged in PR before, ask the following questions:

·        Are you ready? We’ve had some clients who thought they were ready to launch but weren’t. It can take time to actually be ready – but you don’t necessarily need a finalized product or service. You do need to have strong positioning and compelling messages, a clear understanding of what differentiates your business from the competition. This can be a challenge since startups often pivot their business model until they get traction.

·        Who will be coordinating the PR program? Will it be the founder, a marketing executive, an office manager, or someone else? And will that person have the time and resources? We’ve worked with people at those levels, and have made it work but it can be difficult if PR is just another plate they need to keep spinning.

·        Do you need ongoing PR or is project-based a better fit? From an agency perspective, an ongoing PR campaign is better – and not just from a cash flow perspective but because it enables long-term strategies -- but that may not be ideal for cash-stretched startups with not a lot of news. Talk to your prospective agency; if they aren’t interested in project work until your startup has established a regular flow of news, they might not be the right agency for you.

2.      Are you goals realistic? There are two levels to this:

·        Are you realistic in terms of your story, resources, customers, etc.? You may have a great product and a great proof of concept, but if you don’t have a paying customer, some media won’t be able to cover you. (This is particularly true in B2B markets.) We’ve also been told by clients that they want to launch within two months but when we get in, we find they’re not ready (see #1, above).

·        Are you realistic in terms of your goals based on your budgets and internal resources? Recently a prospective customer with the related businesses asked us to 1) Pitch radio and podcast interviews for both businesses 2) Get bloggers to write about them; 3) Identify speaking opportunities; 4) Provide content to external sites that will create back links; and 5) Maximize earned media. All these goals were reasonable – except his budget had only enough in it to pursue only one of these goals, not all five of them.

·        Are you realistic in terms of outcomes? You may have a great announcement but the media and those on social media may not be able to write about it. A reporter once turned down a story about a $30 investment round because he had declined to cover a larger round that had been announced the week before.

3.      Can you be a thought leader? To be successful and to engage with current and prospective customers on social media, you need to continually develop new content on topics relevant to your customers. You can use these pieces to show that you understand your customers’ pain points and can help them address them. These thought leadership pieces don’t have to be white papers and case studies – they can be 300-word articles. But it is important to make sure these pieces are useful and not all about you.

4.      Even if you don’t have the budget yet, plan for marketing integration. That means, make sure whoever is writing your thought leadership content also knows what your keywords are. Make sure your sales keeps you informed about key trends affecting your customers as well as customer wins and milestones – those are things that can be turned into articles and press releases. Make sure whoever is handling your social media is aware of what everyone else is doing – they can post content about your latest article or case study, about your trade show booth or speaking opportunity or sales promotion. Even at small startups, it’s interesting how many of those activities are kept in separate in a silo. But you can generate much more traction if you leverage all the sales and marketing efforts your undertaking. And, if you’re not investing in all these tactics yet, that’s okay; just keep them in mind for when you do.

5.      When focusing on social media, keep in mind: clients don’t like to be marketed to. So make sure only one in 10 posts is a true marketing post – the rest can be about your industry, your region, but especially about your clients pain points as well as about your company’s personality and values. More than ever, people want to do business with companies they like, and social media is a great way to create and enhance your company’s personality.

Spray-and-Pray as Media Relations Tactic Does Not Work; Four lessons from reading David Segal's column

Most Sundays in the New York Times business section, David Segal writes a consumer column called "The Haggler" in which he helps a reader deal with a particularly difficult problem with a company.  Some times it's a problem with an airline or hotel. Or a situation with an appliance company or ecommerce site that has failed to repair or replace or refund a purchase. Or mortgage or foreclosure issues. And then, as The Haggler, Segal helps solve that week's question.

 In his latest column, Segal takes aim at a problem affecting him:  "unsolicited public relations pitch(es) — P.R. spam...(which) hogs space in his benighted in-box."

Segal then cites a number of subject lines from email pitches that are just way off target.  Pitches like 

• “New! First Self-Chilling Iceless Drinking Glass — Editorial Sample?”  
• Christmas Cookie Treat Boxes
• A document previewer called Igloo
• A liquor called Pura Vida Tequila, which “will be in the house this season at Qualcomm Stadium.” 

As a long-time reader of the "The Haggler"column, it deals only with consumer complaints. It is not a column clients should aspire to.

Yet, as Segal writes, "some company hired a public relations firm to send the Haggler, and presumably countless other reporters, the same information. This seemed like a waste of energy and money, so the Haggler decided to find out what was behind this antiquated attempt to win media attention — who was paying for it, and why?"

Segal then talked to the managing director of the self-chilling drinking glass company. According to Segal, "It was news to him (the managing director that his company’s public relations firm...was spending any part of Soireehome’s $1,500-a-month retainer on spam email. And it was news he didn’t like." In fact, the managing director said, "“I’m happy to get this call,” he told Segal. “We don’t know what (the agency, which I don't think needs to be named here) does on a day-to-day basis. They just send us a bimonthly report, detailing what they have been able to do for our company.” 

By the way, the PR agency working for the drinking glass company did not respond to questions from Segal -- who takes them to task for not even responding.

Segal then provides other journalists with a tool to reduce the PR spam -- the email addresses for those responsible at Vocus and other databases to remove reporters' email and contact information.

Segal's complaints are valid and instructive. Basically the article makes three valid points for the rest of us:

1. Spray-and-pray is not sustainable nor strategic media tactic.It takes much more time to qualify a list to make sure the reporters might actually care about the product or service. While it's true that some clients are impressed that the media lists their agencies have created have tons of names, targeting a broad list means what you're pitching will be PR spam to some (if not many) reporters. The solution: Use media databases to help research and refine your targets.
2. It's always important to know who you're pitching and why they might be interested. This is clearly a challenge as the media has become more fragmented than ever and when reporters might write about one topic and blog about a slightly different topic (or differently). But it is more effective to target a focused list of reporters than to waste time following up with reporters who were never going to be interested.
3. Agencies need to do a better job in explaining what they're doing, how they develop and maintain their media lists and in reporting what they do each month to earn their clients' fees. Clearly the agency cited by Segal leaves open questions for the client.
4. PR agencies need to police themselves to avoid being called out by the media. (Segal is hardly the only journalist to complain about the situation.) And in so doing, we can improve relationships with reporters and bloggers and the reputation of the PR industry among clients and others we're trying to influence.

Let me know if you think there are other lessons we can learn from reporters' complaints about spray-and-pray.

By the way, one suggestion from Robert Scoble (via an interview in PRWeek): "Make lists of tech journalists and influencers on social networks. 'I've created a list of every tech journalist I need to find. I have been watching them for years and know what they care about so I know how to approach them.'" Doing so helps you figure out what reporters and influencers are interested in and writing about.

The Future of Advertising, Social Media & PR

Earlier this week, Alex Poulos at LaunchPad Media, wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe that discussed the future of advertising, "‘Mad Men’ of the future: The world of advertising — consumer, beware."  In the piece,
Poulos makes a few points about what the future of advertising holds, which, because of new technologies, will bring about new levels of:

• Intrusiveness.
• Invasiveness.
• Interactivity.
• Integration.

It's this last point that interests me the most. Poulos says that "advertising, marketing and PR will be indistinguishable. Yet words used now to hasten that day -- 'integrated,' 'synergy' and 'holistics' -- will seem silly in the future."

I agree with that -- just as we predicted in the 1990s that so-called "new media" would just be called "media." Until, of course, we got to a new "new media," also known as social media. 

I think there's a chance we'll stop referring to social media even as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and others are integrated more closely into our smarterphones and are embedded in all sorts of devices, including cars.  (For example: you'll be able to enter your friend's location from your contact database to program the address into your GPS.) That convergence will just be the way we live.

And I think the current wave of new media will just be called media by the middle of the decade.

Of course, it will be supplanted by even newer media.  But that's grist for another blog article.

Charlie Sheen Makes the Case for Strong PR Support. Inadvertently.

If you've been living on Mars, you may have overlooked the media blitz of your fellow Martian now living on Earth. Perhaps you've been focusing instead on news of lesser importance, like figuring the correct spelling of Libyan dictator Moammer or Muammar Gadhafi, Gaddafi, Qaddafi, Khadafy, or Khadafi; frankly, I prefer to call him Colonel Mo.)

For the rest of us, it's been hard to avoid the real-time train wreck that is Charlie Sheen.  (You've seen or read about them so I'm not going to include the ton of links here.)

I've been talking about the role of public relations in the age of social media quite a bit since a panel I moderated in Oct., including with a reporter and with students at a local university, where I guest lectured earlier this week. And the reason I broke the Charlie Sheen-free-zone I had tried to establish is because I
think Sheen's rants support the case that publicists still play an important role in the lives of their clients, whether an actor or an organization.

Here are three things that Sheen's meltdown can teach us:

1. You may not notice a publicist's behind-the-scenes work when things are going well, but you certainly can see the impact when there's no guidance from a PR professional. A strong publicist is important to provide objective counsel on the types of program on which to appear and the tenor and nature of the comments one should consider making during those appearances.  Clearly, that's not been happening here, leading to Sheen's publicist quitting, saying he was "unable to work effectively” with Sheen -- something of an understatement.  Lest you think it's only an issue with Sheen, remember what Tom Cruise's appearances were like after he replaced his publicist with his sister.
2. You can lose good will and reputation quickly.  For nearly a decade, Sheen has been the lead actor in TV's top-rated comedy, but in a matter of a week, Sheen has gone from delivering punch lines to being the punch line.
3. It can take a long time to repair your reputation.  Just ask Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise.  At this point, Cruise has taken steps to rebuild his reputation, but he had been the top box office star for years, but that changed after he performed his own stunts on Oprah's couch.  Meanwhile, as for Gibson, last night Letterman ran a segment that inter cut lines from Gibson's taped phone calls with Sheen's off-the-wall recent interviews.
4. You can never underestimate the public's interest in a celebrity meltdown. Sheen's story is ubiquitous; it takes more effort to avoid it than to read, see, hear, talk or tweet about it. You might not realize it but there's actually a lot of other news -- some of it actually important with significant implications for us as a country -- being crowded out by Sheen's meltdown. For example, the state of the Arab world and their push against dictators; just because Mubarak has stepped down doesn't mean story's over.  But it's now harder to find news about Egypt. There's the possible budget showdown that, not surprisingly, has been postponed, along with the protests in Wisconsin. But Sheen, followed today by the news of the firing of Dior designer John Galliano, seem to fascinate people. You can't ask why do people care; they just do.
5. You can't just wing it, you need a good story to tell, even if you've got a movie to plug. This lesson comes from an appearance last night of actress Amanda Seyfried on the Late Show with David Letterman.  Letterman's never been a great interviewer but last night, Seyfried's appearance came off as flat and unfunny. The lines she kept expecting to pay off with laughs never hit.  What's perhaps interesting is that she had previously appeared on the Late Show just a few weeks earlier, and had done a much better job.  (In searching for Seyfried & Letterman, her prior appearance showed up first; the brief segment, below, was the comic highlight but doesn't do much for her image.).  Last night, they didn't have much to talk about, not even her upcoming movie.  The lesson this teaches is that you always need a plan and key messages for what you want to say. Even stars need to think ahead for their goal for any media appearance, and shaping that story is something a good publicist should do.

I know that entertainment PR is a specialized niche, but the lessons of Sheen's meltdown are relevant to other parts of the PR world. And it helps make the case for getting good PR support ahead of time. Cleaning up after a disaster is always more complicated slogging than addressing issues before they turn into a crisis.

What is PR in the Age of Social Media?

One of the challenges facing the public relations industry is that the general public does not seem to have a clear idea of what we do.

They might think PR is just about throwing events or parties -- like The Spin Crowd or Samantha on "Sex and the City."

Or they might think it's about trying to "spin" the facts, as was the case with several major crises last year (such as BP's oil spill).

But based on anecdotal experience from many years in the business, while the general public understands what advertising is all about, they don't have a strong grasp of PR.

That's why, I think, people seem to think they don't need PR in the age of social media.  Interestingly, at a panel I moderated late last year, several journalists thought PR could be on its death throes.  They seemed a bit gleeful about it, too.  As if traditional journalism isn't go through the same challenges.

Dave Folkens at CommUnity Business wrote a blog post last year, "Five Ideas to Repair the Credibility of PR," that contains some good ideas about what the PR industry should do.  (Interestingly, more than 15 years ago, the industry made similar points about its failure to communicate the value of PR; I guess we have not made any progress.)

I think it's more important than ever to make the case for PR because we can help organizations engage with key public via social media channels. 

So, to get back to the headline for this post.  Social media can be used to announce news (instead of press releases) and to engage with reporters and customers.  But PR can help organizations to communicate via social media and a range of other channels.

A lot of companies now use social media as a customer service function -- without eliminating their call centers or email support.  The same should be true for PR.

And then the PR industry needs to do a better job of communicating the value we bring and do a better job of engaging with our key audiences.

Six Reasons PR is Not Dead...Yet

There are a lot of people who like to predict the death of things.

Long after TV was supposed to kill off radio (as depicted in "Video Killed the Radio Star," the first video aired by MTV), pundits have been declaring the deaths of LPs (that's what came before CDs for those born after 1982), VHS and VCRs (replaced by DVDs), DVDs (replaced by blu-ray), landlines (replaced by cellphones), incandescent light bulbs (to be replaced by compact fluorescent to be replaced by LEDs).

I know I left off fax machines, but most people seem to have forgotten about faxes.

What's interesting is that not all those technologies have died as predicted. But that hasn't stopped people from continuing to make similar predictions about other things.

Like PR, for example.

At a panel on PR and social media that I moderated for the New England Venture Network (which we cosponsored) as part of BREW Boston (Boston Regional Entrepreneurs Week), the question of PR's death came up right away.

In fact, the question came up earlier that day on Twitter as people discussed that night's panel.

Half the panel -- comprised of blogger Paul Gillin, Xconomy's Greg Huang, BBJ/Mass High Tech's Galen Moore, and Fortune.com's Dan Primack -- came prepared to say that PR is dead.

I think that PR as it was conducted in "The Sweet Smell of Success" circa 1957 is dead. And PR the way it was conducted 15 years ago or even 10 years ago, is, if not dead, certainly not doing well.

But PR as it can be practiced today is not dead. It has evolved, however, just as advertising and journalism have evolved.

In fact, I think that PR, advertising and journalism are all in the boat, and that we all need to figure out new ways of operating.

Here are some reasons why PR is not dead:

1. Despite the hype, a lot of companies still are not fully engaged on social media. For those companies, especially, PR is still an effective way to communicate their story.
   
2. The media is certainly evolving, but it's still important to work with them. PR still handles this best.
   
3. The press release continues to be a useful tool, the panel declared. Even if it is no longer the most important component for making announcements, it's still part of the announcement process.
4. Advertising can still be very expensive, and not just for startups. Public relations can be a much more cost-effective way to market a company. Paul Alexander at Liberty Mutual recently told the Ad Club of Boston that PR is great, cost-effective resource to handle social media.
   
5. Advertising functions and agencies can position a company and find key differentiators, but they don't necessarily know how to work with editorial, reporters, etc. (For that matter, we wouldn't know how to create and place ads.)
6. As this year saw, thanks to BP, Toyota, H-P, poor communications can make crisis communications worse. PR can be best positioned to plan for and execute communications during a crisis.

On the other hand, the sole reason that PR is dead is because of the rise of social media.

Let me know if you think I left out a reason why PR is not dead. Or if there are more reasons why PR is dead.

Here are some other articles that discuss whether or not PR is dead:

• Is PR Dead? and The Role of PR Firms in Social Media and Inbound Marketing by HubSpot
• Is PR Relevant? by InkSpot
• How to Bootstrap Your Public Relations by Inc. Magazine