PRWatch: What Happens When PR People Have More Traffic Than The Reporters

By Tom Foremski - October 7, 2009

A lot of PR people have jumped into the world of blogging, Facebook and now Twitter, with a lot of enthusiasm and they have been doing it for years and now have very healthy traffic numbers and very large numbers of Twitter followers.

For example, Brian Solis: His blog BrianSolis.com has about 77,000 unique visitors every month and he has a Twitter following of more than 33,000.

Todd Defren from Shift Communications, his pr-squared.com has blog traffic of more than 30,000 unique visitors and he has a Twitter following of over 13,000.

Steve Rubel at Edelman has recently shifted to a Posterous blog but he has more than 56,000 unique visitors and more than 31,000 Twitter followers.

In contrast, journalists and their employers have been slow to make use of the "new media." Few journalists blog and few are on Twitter or Facebook, and generally, most are very timid when it comes to promoting their own stories and building up their Twitter/Facebook followers and friends.

Yet it is this type of active, always-on social media presence that is required these days, as a journalist, to gain attention to your stories. I do it -- not because I like or dislike doing it -- it's simply that's what the current rules of the game are.

But, it's going to be a while before other journalists figure out these rules of self-promotion and become comfortable with self-promotion. (Self-promotion is fine as long as you can walk your walk -- self-promotion is bad only when you are promoting poor content.)

Since PR people are much more comfortable with self-promotion, many have acquired large traffic to their blogs and also amassed large numbers on their Twitter and Facebook accounts.

This brings up an interesting scenario because in the majority of cases, PR people such as Brian Solis, are pitching stories to journalists who have very much smaller pageviews on the stories they write, and far smaller Twitter/Facebook communities to which to distribute their stories, than the PR people.

The PR people could post the stories themselves and pitch them to their already large communities and get a far higher readership!

But, the problem they face is that this would be a "pay per post" type scenario and they would lose credibility very quickly.

Also, having someone else write a story about your client, on a third-party site, where there has been no exchange of money, conveys far higher value to the story.

That's the paradox of PR peoples' large, personal media footprint -- they can't use their own access to large numbers of people to promote their clients.

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Comments (11)

Todd Defren:

The phrase "consider the source" comes to mind, i.e., the media has far more "credibility" across a broader spectrum of users; after all, it's not just about website visits, it's about the sharing via re-tweets, etc. Also, obviously, to your points, if I flog clients' stories too much, I simply lose credibility. And btw this problem ALSO affects me, in that I also can't often blog about our own kick-ass successes for these clients. Lastly - Solis gets double the uniques? Damn. I gotta write a book. ;) Interesting post, sir.

Posted: October 7, 2009 1:11 PM

Jeremy Toeman:

Not sure I completely get the point here, are you assuming there's just "one audience" out there? When a fine lad like Brian Solis writes a blog post on his blog, it gets read by other PR people, marketing folks, and folks in the tech/new media community. In this audience, he has a strong presence and reach. But it's not quite the same as reaching mainstream consumers, or people interested in food, etc... To me, the analogy is the audience size of PRWeek magazine versus ESPN magazine - it's utterly irrelevant to both publications AND their audiences as to how large the subscriber base is. The real "paradox" (if there even is one) is the dilemma between the value of personal branding versus time spent on client work. I have yet to see a PR influencer be able to show a direct translation of their personal brand to client results. Note - this isn't a knock to those efforts, but I do believe its a concern all of us have...

Posted: October 8, 2009 9:38 AM

Tom Foremski

Jeremy, Yes, there are many audiences, but increasingly, especially with a lot of the web 2.0 stuff that is being pushed at journalists, the audience can be virtually any audience because the products/services have general appeal. So the things that Brian's clients are selling could equally be used by Brian's community of PR followers. So his audience is far larger than the individual audience of many reporters and those audiences, in many instances, are equally targetable by the messaging. In other cases where the products/services are more specialized, then clearly there is no "paradox."

Posted: October 8, 2009 9:50 AM

Meredith L. Eaton:

Hi Tom, nice post... I came across an article a while back that addresses Jeremy's comment of, "I have yet to see a PR influencer be able to show a direct translation of their personal brand to client results." The article in the NYT (http://bit.ly/trsZJ) talks about Brooke Hammerling's influence and how she's achieved such a high level personally, that journalists are calling her for the story and all she has to do is mention a client for the story to get picked up. The rest of us can only dream! :) But yes, it is for a specific audience, I doubt ESPN is calling Brooke.

Posted: October 8, 2009 1:21 PM

Excellent point Meredith.

Posted: October 8, 2009 8:42 PM

@AlexGorbokon:

Alright, I'm a PR person...but one benefit to PR professionals blogging ,is that we're getting pitched for the first time. I've had a supervisor who is a "healthy-numbers" blogger share examples of bad and good pitches and improve himself and his colleagues.

Posted: October 9, 2009 7:09 AM

Alex, yes, it's true, PR bloggers are considered "media" and are invited to events in the same way journalists are-- I see them all the time. And they can write about the events but also, they can pitch their PR services too -- which journalists cannot do at these events.

Posted: October 9, 2009 12:17 PM

Marshall Clark:

Great point Tom, and something I've been thinking about recently as well. In many ways it feels like we're at a dwell point between the old way of surfacing reputable information (via Search and PageRank/Link Authority) and whatever new real-time weighting system replaces it. This will be particularly important to journalism, since few journalists are online PR expert, nor should our web filtering systems require them to be. Personally I think journalists should stick to what they do best and continue to act as the reputable, authoritative voices we've come to expect. The web will eventually surface new ways to properly promote and value their work over that of PR flacks and other non-trusted information sources. Old-school media outlets may be failing, but as Clay Shirky said, in their place we have an opportunity to "let a thousand flowers bloom". New reputation systems will emerge to highlight these flowers amidst the current weed-strewn backlots of PR and promotional content.

Posted: December 28, 2009 12:42 PM

Marshall, yes I agree. PR people have an axe to grind and cannot use their follower count to promote clients. Journalists aren't influenced by payment but by interesting stories and people know this is an important distinction.

Posted: December 28, 2009 10:44 PM

Frank Strong:

Though I often admire your writing, I disagree with your premise here, Tom, that PR people are comfortable with self-promotion. One of the first lessons I learned in PR was "don't be the story." That said, in my humble opinion, I don't see anything wrong with a smart person blogging about their expertise – and subsequently developing a following the way Brian and Todd have. They are smart. They write smart things. I like to read their stuff – and yours too. If anyone develops a following and then uses it for self-promotion, then an efficient market will treat them as such. Audiences cannot be taken for granted – and that applies to anyone – a PR blogger, a journalist or a columnist.

Posted: February 11, 2010 12:12 PM

Thanks Frank.I don't think there is anything wrong with self-promotion as long as you can back it up with real value, as Brian and Todd do. Self-promotion without value is not tolerated for long, as you point out.

Posted: February 11, 2010 12:56 PM

PRWatch: What Happens When PR People Have More Traffic Than The Reporters

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