Years ago when I first started working at Ogilvy & Mather/PR, we wrote press releases and press materials and manually mailed them out to the media. Sometimes if it was a huge mailing, we would farm it out to a mail house for distribution but that didn’t happen often. More often than not, I would find myself folding, stapling and stuffing envelopes way into the wee hours of the night.When I first started my business, HJMT COMMUNICATIONS, LLC, nearly 18 years ago, I was still mailing press releases until one day, my media contacts insisted that I fax the materials over to their newsroom or their editorial offices. I never did get one of those fax machines that sent out multiple copies at once and again, I found myself standing by the machine feeding the paper in manually. It took hours and when I would follow up with the media, most of the time they would tell me they never received my fax. So there I would stand, back at the fax machine and feed paper in, in the hopes that someone would receive my materials.
Not too long after that, the media requested that we send our press releases and materials via email. That made things so easy. We would BCC (blind carbon copy) a slew of media people and in one shot, would send out a release to more than 100 contacts. When we followed up, it was the same story as the fax machine, “we never received….” So we would email again, but this was faster and easier than ever before.
Now, press release material distribution has shifted again. With the influx of new social media sites appearing every day, the media is now requesting a short 140-character pitch or microblog with a link. Most prefer Twitter, but others like Facebook and LinkedIn. If the reporters like the microblog pitch, they click on the link provided and are often directed to a newsroom where they can find more information about the product or service. Newsrooms are open to both media and consumers.
Posted on the Internet in a free standing site, newsrooms are becoming very popular among both Public Relations agencies and corporations. What’s also great about the newsroom is if a reporter is writing a story and needs background information from another site, the reporter can gather from any company’s newsroom. Sometimes I think we’ve come such a long way since I started and yet, we’re just beginning to explore new ways to target reporters and utilize technology to our advantage. Just think, if we started by sending out press releases via US mail and now we’re building newsrooms and targeting media on Twitter, where do we go from here?
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This article originally appeared in the New York Enterprise Report Blog on February 5, 2010. Hilary JM Topper, MPA is a contributing blogger for the New York Enterprise Report and BlogCritics.org.
