Public Relations in Salt Lake City, Online PR, PR For Small Business

The news business is changing and that means so is the business of public relations. Newspaper readership has been on a slow, but steady downhill climb of about 1 to 2 percent a year according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. A recent Journalism.org survey shows local television viewership dropped from 14 percent during sweeps month in 2005 to a low 2 percent in 2006. That same survey has online news blog readership up 22 percent in the last two years.

Traditional media still has its place, but it’s losing people to a whole new world of online citizen journalism. A company survives in this new, more personal and interactive age only by having a PR team that knows how to adapt to these changes. And, truth be told, the new PR has a much better chance of getting the word out for your product or idea anyway.

How so, you ask? Well, let’s start with the old PR way of getting your company message out: sending promotional material to the press and hoping someone will pick it up. But we no longer have to simply fax out a press release and wait for some editor to take the time to sit down and read what it is we have to say only to decide it isn’t newsworthy enough for that day. New PR strategically places companies’ news in their own and other blogs, news sites, podcasts, niche discussion groups and other social media sites (like Facebook, Myspace, etc.). The companies themselves, the individual employees, the team promoting them — all become, in essence, the media.

da Vinci’s PR team has utilized these new tactics in many ways for our clients, and we recognize the power it has for our own business as well. One of the ways we’ve done this is by developing a company MySpace page (myspace.com/davinciadvertising) and inviting existing and potential clients to become our “friends” on the site. We not only create a social network, but we can update our existing and potential clients on what we’re up to at the agency. We do this by posting to the Myspace bulletin board. We don’t have to worry that our message will be buried somewhere in the business section of a paper that fewer people read these days and we don’t have to wait a couple weeks before something gets printed. We sent the message out ourselves, immediately. We controlled the message we sent out. And that message is now on the bulletin board of all our network associates — associates who also happen to be linked to other associates. The potential spread of the message is endless.

PR has changed, but for the better. It is much more flexible and personal. It is the new and bright shining star of online marketing. The only obstacle in its way is the PR team that doesn’t recognize the power it wields in the digital world.