the hopwood PR blog

By Duncan Hopwood

Among PR practitioners and clients, there’s confusion between technique and message. I want to explain. But rather than drain the life out of you like someone pontificating on the difference between a vision and a mission statement, I’m going to attempt (drum roll) to do it in a way that entertains and educates.

Look at a PR objective, message delivery.

Take a message like “Duncan’s a knowledgeable PR pro so, if you want to know about PR, you should read his blog”.

Think of that message as a piece of cargo. If you want to ship a piece of cargo somewhere, there are options. Which you choose depends on factors such as how soon you need it delivered, to whom, where they are, the cost of different transport, how personal you want the delivery to be and how important it is that this particular package gets there.

Thinking about options like those helps you to define the most effective and appropriate way (or ways) to deliver your PR message.

Consider packaging. You would wrap up something differently to send it via courier than you would to hand deliver it. So it is with packaging your message. You have to define how you’re going to get your message to your target audience before you choose whether to package it in a press release or some other form. And to do that, you have to define the target audience. In this case, it’s people with an interest in PR.

I could write a press release about how great a PR guy I am and urge people to read my blog, but I don’t think anyone would use it. But I could do with the kind of third party endorsement that the media gives to a message like mine. As I’m talking myself up here, people are more likely to believe what other people write about me than what I write myself.

So now I’m thinking social media, which means packaging the message in a form that people who have influence in the PR world can send on via SM. And I have to find a way to encourage them to do that. The ideal solution would be to package my message so beautifully (a hilarious viral tweet perhaps) so that those third party influencers blast it out without encouragement. But that’s not the only way. What we need to do is pay the postman.

So how about if I RT links to a few key people’s PR and marcoms blogs that I think deserve it, then politely ask if they’ll tell their Twitter followers, who are interested in PR, to read my latest blog? No cash changes hands. It’s a trade in mutual respect. That’s not rocket science but it might work.

So let’s recap.

The message is the cargo.

You select a delivery method that will get your message to the target audience.

You wrap the message in packaging appropriate to the way it’s travelling – in this case, a link to be retweeted (hopefully) by SM PR mavens.

Your packaging and transport network have to be compatible, which could mean editing a press release for example to suit different publications.

You should choose the most effective route, of course, but maybe it will be worth going other ways as well. With PR, you can send the same package to the target audience many times by different routes, and that’s often what it takes to really get it through.

All this highlights one of the big differences betweens social and conventional media. With SM, you almost always get direct feedback – not just a signed delivery note, as you would from an electronic pr blast. If you start an actual conversation via social media, your truck doesn’t come back empty anymore. Then you can say you really got through.