I've been impressed recently by the contact I've had from PR companies in response to my blog postings. They have: taken the time to find my work, read my words, find my email address and craft an email to me.
Usually the email contains further information about their client's products (which are mostly relevant to my articles), links to additonal supporting work and in some cases an offer of a product demonstration or contact with someone at the company should I want to get some more detailed and personal insight.
This is the long tail of PR working in the way it should.
The long tail of PR, first highlighted to me in David Meerman Scott's book The New Rules of Marketing & PR, shows how PR companies are increasingly realising that they don't need to spend huge amounts of money 'blanket bombing' the top media (newspapers, magazines, etc.) and can raise a lot of interest by re-focusing their attention further down the 'tail' at much smaller & niche players such as myself.
There's a lot more thought about this topic on Chris Anderson's site (who is actually Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine).
I wonder, as blogging and social media continues to grow, how PR companies will decide to segment the long tail of their audience, media and influencers. The different methods of identifying, contacting and dealing with the niche players will potentially be the difference between a good and a great Web2.0 PR company.
2 comments:
Do you think that in all these PR agencies there is a board akin to Top Gear's "Star in a Reasonably Priced Car" with your name on it and your "relative speed"? :-)
Elliefy
Oh no, the thought of a PR company having a league table like that of bloggers scares me more than the ones who still think that "relations with the public" means "lunches with journos".
For starters, how would you start to quantify the single value of a particular blogger?
Surely its a combination of different factors that leads to your particular influence as a blogger?:
Reach
Comments
Readership
Links
etc.
Having a picture of all of this would give the PR company the best view of what each of their clients' "Corporate Social Graph" was.
That's the board on their wall I'd like to see
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