OPEN

PR people worth their salt will know that they can’t leave coverage to its own devices any more.

Steve Rubel points to an article for the US PR Week (requires
subscription) he discusses
"meme-tracking" as a way of following conversations around a client
story or brand once its been published.  Memes are a social media term for ideas that spread, a piece of news or concept that spreads across blog networks.

I couldn’t agree more with the first sentence of his PR Week article
(all you can see for free, I’m afraid): "In the Internet age, news begins – not
ends – when a story is published."

A large part of the job of PR is content creation and content
distribution. at its simplest, we create press release content and
distribute to a universe of a few hundred journalists or fewer that we
know that content is appropriate for, reinforcing that distribution
with conversations with contacts in our personal network to give the
content the best chance of being heard and provide supplementary
content (stats, interviews, images).

In the old world, when one of those journalists published or broadcast
our story it was a "HIT" and a few days later the cutting would arrive,
we would put into a coverage folder and sent onto the client. A piece of coverage might find further life if it was scanned and emailed (depending on the terms of your infuriatingly old-tech NLA licence) and forwarded to people in the client marketing department. It might find some more use as decoration (coverage books and boards in reception) or in sales collateral. All good stuff.

Now the new skills of PR will be  about re-distribution and amplification. Let me give you an example.

I was quoted in an article not so long ago and it didn’t appear online
immediately. So I went and checked when it would be up. Once it was
it became about a thousand times more useful to me. I took that content
re-distributed it to contacts, colleagues, clients and new business
prospects that I knew would be interested, along with comments or reminders about the need for action or further discussion on the subjects in the post.

I sent it to the freelance
journalist who originally wrote it, to the other person who was quoted in the piece. They hadn’t seen it and they blogged about it on their blog (which has a far bigger readership).

Some of them re-distributed it to people they knew would be interested, some of them blogged about it, some continued conversations about the issues with me on email.

The coverage had real impact. Now I sit back and think about the ripple effects that those conversations that started around the piece, it was very significant indeed, in terms of a catalyst for action, a spark for conversations.

But it wouldn’t have had half as much if it had been left to chance, if the coverage had been left to speak for itself. 

PR people worth their salt will know that they can’t leave coverage to its own devices any more. In the social media environment, it is only the first yield of an effort and needs to be worked through formal and informal networks to make sure it becomes a "meme".