Escape the trap of your public relations job being evaluated only on your “earned media” results by sharing with your boss wisdom from venture capital notable Om Malik on his post “How to Tell Your Story: A Simple Framework for Startups.”
What Malik says is simple: to tell your story, you need both external media and your own media.
His post even includes a compelling presentation to give your boss:
You need to make this argument to destroy or ahem, update an outdated theory which was all the rage in technology marketing circles a few years back.
There was “earned” media, the theory went, and there was “paid” media.
Earned media was what PR people did, and paid media is what advertising folks did.
The arrival of social media threw this neat organization of marketing labor into disarray.
There were some attempts to call social media “shared” media, which did not catch. As Microsoft’s Comms VP Frank Shaw once said, “the fastest way to start a fight in marketing is to discuss who owns social media.”
And you don’t want to fight!
What you want is the ability to tell your company story in a compelling way.
As Malik’s presentation explains, that sometimes means partnering with a reporter and other times means making sure the company blog, or website, or email marketing campaign tells the story.
As a public relations person, you will often be in the best position to determine if the story needs a lift on a different medium.
You have listened to the spokesperson tell the story to a reporter, or at a press event.
Then you have analyzed the coverage.
You know the gaps where the story got stuck.
Perhaps the spokesperson failed to connect, or the reporter did not understand.
Newsrooms have less reporters covering an expanding range of technology topics.
But you get it.
Posting the full story to the company blog, and promoting it to the right audience, is a natural part of your portfolio.
Don’t renounce it!
You earned that too.
With our new subscription plan, you can get Verb Company’s newsroom to take care of your blog posts, press releases, and every editorial product you need. Let our team of writers and editors who come from the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, CNN and other news organizations, handle that. Let us help you and your organization achieve its goals.
Count on Verb. We are writers.