Relationships

It is a longstanding belief that a PR person is only as good as his/her contacts. The rationale is that PR is a relationship-based business that operates primarily person-to-person or in the traditional example flak to media. So, it stands to reason that if one has a strong relationship with a reporter, it goes a long way to gaining coverage.

Seems sound as a pound.

But what does this mean in an environment in which media outlets are proliferating rapidly, and the source of influence is becoming more diffuse?  How are relationships valued differently when so much of the communication is not face-to-face?

In my experience every PR person accumulates let’s say 10 close, truly personal contacts at any one time, but when they hire an agency, clients mistakenly believe that they are hiring the contacts of the agency, when in reality they get the contacts of the account team. Agencies are mostly siloed structures after all. So, relationships are a little overvalued in that analysis.

But to the broader points, relationships are based on interactions, and real interactions happen online. The whole system of online PR is predicated on sharing compelling content (yours and others) and information. If you do this on a repeated basis, well, then good things will happen to that relationship. But somehow the equation has changed, and your influence is more equivalent to the value of the information you provide, especially given the speed and volume of conversations. The salient point may be that this was always the case.

The Internet is a mass medium full of lots and lots of niches, and within each niche are 5, 10, 100 people more responsible for validating what their community pays attention to. So invariably, if relationships still reign in PR, we will become more and more specialized in our online word-of-mouth campaigns in the same way that PR agencies specialize. It will become less about learning the horizontal lingua franca of bloggers and social networkers and more about one’s knowledge of the niche. But with so many niches, it will force us all to partner frequently and openly to achieve authenticity across the many niches that comprise a community that are based on a simple keyword.

I hope that this makes our relationship closer.