Old School Vs New School

As with all thoughts and practices, the evolution of ideas has always been a necessary and required evil as time passes. It is no different for public relations and marketing. There are traditional ways of thinking like mass marketing to the target audience and the life or death determining press release.

Typically, companies would write a press release which provides details on events or products. From the release, the hope is that media houses would become interested and send representatives to cover the story then further feel compelled to create an article/story on it. Back in the day, this was generally a successful approach. Similarly, sending out mass communications was also effective when most persons relied on the papers, radio and television as their main source of information.

The present-day landscape, however, has changed which impacts on the effectiveness of these approaches. Persons are now getting information from social media, the internet, bloggers, friends, podcast, etc. The channels through which information is now being consumed has increased significantly. Press releases no longer attract the same level of interest from media houses. Currently, if you want to attract the media, simply put out information on who the personality, socialite or important official attending your event will be, whether they support/oppose your point or if you're presenting an argument that you need them to respond to. Additionally, with the advent of knowing your audiences on social media platform and the ability to narrow down the audience by specifying demographic criteria, wasted coverage is now being significantly reduced if not eliminated altogether. So the focus is on creating profiles for audiences and engaging them on the platforms that they are on as well as using the media that they consume instead of trying a cookie cutter approach knowing that one size does not fit all.

The new school of thought sees more effective media campaigns, increased engagement and cost savings assuming that you have a well-versed architect behind your campaigns. Interactivity and reaching out to your audiences and allowing them to learn about the philosophy of your company or causes you support might also encourage more follows and support from them as a result of it. So keep evolving or you won’t be as effective as you can be in this new era of PR and marketing.

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