Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Great overview and some good reminders on how to be a good storyteller to the media. My only issue is that I think there`s more opportunity for businesses in expanding their PR to be more than just "influencing the influencers," meaning media channels (journalists). An "influencer" these days can be a neighbor, a blogger, an educator, etc. - it`s not limited to people who work at media channels. In addition, search engines are one of the biggest influencers around! Yahoo News and  Google News are now as big a mouthpiece as NYTimes (bigger, actually, by a large margin of traffic).

I would humbly suggest that companies do a separate track of storytelling directly to readers of news. The value of a PR team can and should extend to content strategy, not just media relations (content strategy = "How can I influence public opinion through one or more stories?"). Companies have all sorts of options for directly reaching end readers, from traditional or online newswires, to paid placement syndication and advertorials, to blogposting. In terms of reaching search engines, companies need to learn to tell their stories using the terms that people search for (keywords), and do more frequent updates via the news release channels. Our company Newsforce has a tool that helps speed up the SEO process and tracks search ranking for press releases, or you can do it on your own.

Since there are fewer and fewer traditional media people/journalists with jobs, it behooves companies to make sure they`re covering the lost opportunities with new opportunities in news storytelling.

Dana Todd, CMO
Newsforce, Inc.