PR pros resting on their laurels

Lately I’ve been hearing too many media pitching success stories.

Don’t get me wrong – I love sharing in the excitement that comes with winning placements. But I’m concerned that too many media relations pros are still putting all their eggs into the pitching basket.

No, media pitching isn’t dead, nor is it dying. Yes, select PR pros who know what they are doing are earning far more than their share of media coverage.

But forces outside their control continue to disrupt what those media placements mean.

Here’s the scenario I’m talking about:

A hard-working PR pro (or team) is welcomed into an organization, shown their workspace, and then expected to fill up a media hit stat sheet. They work hard and smart, using those special techniques I alluded to above. Then, after they’ve done exactly what they were told to do, some exec comes down from above and asks disapprovingly, “Well, what did all this coverage do for us?” (And that’s after he grumbles about not being in the Wall Street Journal.)

Third-party media placements are still vital to brands’ success. They’re especially important for reversing the waves of distrust that are afflicting today’s organizations. But we in PR need to innovate the way we integrate that hard-earned coverage with our other forms of communication. And we need to either master additional skills related to owned, shared and paid content, or be more collaborative with our colleagues who manage those types of outreach.

Because no matter how many placements you’re getting, not enough of the right people are seeing them – yet.

I want to help you get this right, so I’m doing a free webinar in a couple weeks that will walk you through it. I only do a couple free webinars a year, and this one is entirely new. Unless you’re in my Inner Circle program, you’ve never heard me talk about any of this before.

These are the changes you MUST make to survive and thrive in the 2020s:
– Acknowledge the inherent limitations of proactive media relations and how to adapt
– The justification most PR pros give for their work that is actually already obsolete (the emperor has no clothes, and I’m going to tell him)
– The skills beyond pitching that you’ll need to survive in the coming years
– The types of outreach and pitching you must get better at to stay ahead of the trends
– How to better integrate your expertise in earned media with content marketing, social media, and even paid advertising to add more value to your employer

Please register now to join me Wednesday, May 29th, at 12 p.m. Eastern / 9 a.m. Pacific.