PR’s Top Pros Talk… Evolution of Public Relations – Amy Rosenberg

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HOST: DOUG SIMON

GUEST: AMY ROSENBERG

DOUG: Amy, you’ve literally written the book, ‘A Modern Guide to Public Relations.’ So, can you explain and share some of the differences between traditional public relations and what you call modern public relations?

AMY: Sure. So, there’s a lot to it. So, modern, I would say, would be looking at everything rather than… So, let me just take a step back. And what we like to do and what this book talks about is using traditional ways of working in PR, which I can explain what those are, in a modern way. So, what that means is that we’re not just going after traditional media. We’re, of course, going after blogs and websites. And sometimes depending on our clients’ goals, we’re going after those harder than traditional media.

And then, of course, we’re doing podcasts and whatnot. And so, then we’re also infusing other disciplines in, which can be a little harder because we’re not supposed to be a jack of all trades. But if you can kind of either infuse disciplines and or learn how to leverage other disciplines or other teams and kind of forget some of the old ways of the past and work kind of in a newer way, possibly using blog posts rather than press releases. But the traditional way of doing media relations, kind of the standards will never change. So, that’s ethics, that’s customizing, we’re not ever doing blast emails. We’re looking at the medium, whether it’s a podcast or a traditional newspaper before we pitch, so that we know we have the right contact and we think about things first always.

DOUG: Yeah. And you talk about these changes that are going on. Obviously, the pandemic has changed so much, especially in the world of communications. What are some of the new trends that you’re seeing that you think will be sticking around after the pandemic is behind us, hopefully sooner rather than later.

AMY: So, I mean, there’s a lot to that as well. So, if you’re just looking at the media landscape, unfortunately, newsrooms are shrinking. And we’ve known that for a while, but I think the pandemic has kind of forced its hand. And so, what we have also noticed along with that, is that more and more it’s becoming important for media members to get views back to their stories. So, they are now saddled with not only doing their own journalism, whether it’s online or wherever, but they are also needing to get clicks back to their stories. And if they’re not, there might be kind of an issue with that management wise. And so, because this world is moving so digitally, we think that the PR person’s role is to kind of think about, you know, who we’re pitching so that it helps the journalists even more than just the story idea but like build a following and that kind of thing.

DOUG: One of the things about your business and in the book is you really focus on a lot of advice for small businesses. And we hear so much about how small businesses drive the economy. So many of them have struggled and suffered during the pandemic. What are your some advice pieces for small business owners that they can do to start having a positive effect with public relations when they may not have a significant budget?

AMY: Good question. And that’s almost why I wrote the book, because it really is for PR people. But a small business owner can take that and look at the concepts and kind of get a little bit of a road map at least to get going. And my main tip is just to get going. Rather than just kind of get worried about, you know, oh, I have to have the perfect press release, or the perfect story, or the perfect this or that, we just need to put one foot in front of the other and get going. And you might be confused as to wondering, well, what is newsworthy? Because you still want to pitch what is newsworthy. So how you do that? There’s two ways. The first way is to just ask yourself what is new with you, because that is the news possibly. And then what you can do is you can vet your ideas against the newspaper or whatever you might consume. Maybe not you personally, but what your contacts or your audience might consume and then start paying attention to those and then your ideas will come. And no idea is necessarily wrong. It’s more about the way you go about it, and we just want to be thoughtful.

DOUG: Amy, given all the work that you put into the book. That’s probably, given you some great ideas about what areas of public relations are going to continue to be even more important in the future?

AMY: Yeah, so the main thing that we’re hearing about, especially from SEO people, which is search engine marketing, they are telling us that their budgets are moving towards PR, and that is because the landscape of Google is such that it’s very competitive. Google is very thoughtful as well, and it’s hard to get on the top of Google. And so, PR can help do that by grabbing high authority links from newspapers and more credible sites. And so, that’s the main thing. So, as an evolved PR firm, we or a PR person, we must be thinking about how we can either bring in some digital tactics into our work or leverage the digital teams that we already have at our disposal.

DOUG: That’s great advice, and I really appreciate you giving us some practical, thoughtful advice. One of our goals is to share ideas that people can implement right away, and you’ve really done a great job of sharing that, so thanks so much for being part of the show.

AMY: Thanks for having me. It was an honor.