RIDING SHOTGUN

RIDING SHOTGUN

In the Old West, if you were a passenger on a stagecoach, your chances of reaching your destination alive (or, at least, still in possession of your money) often depended on the rifleman sitting up front next to the driver – the man “riding shotgun.”

In the New Millenium, however, if you’re a public relations practitioner, you should know that the shotgun-approach so prevalent in our industry today is one of the primary reasons that “PR” has such a tarnished reputation.

Just throwing mud - boring, inappropriate, or lacking-news-value pitches - at the media, and hoping some of it sticks, is not a prescription for effective communication. Actually, it hasn’t been considered an effective means of public relations for some time – by evolved practitioners, anyway. And that's especially true these days, when each of us devotes only 3-5 seconds to deciding whether we’re going to continue to read or watch what we’ve started reading or watching.

I'm forever trying to educate clients that their "great" story is great only if it offers the readers or viewers (not the media itself…but the readers or viewers of the media!) actionable advice that can help make their personal or professional lives better. If there's not a real "news" value to what I'm asked to pitch...I won't pitch it. It's cost me a client here or there. But it's damned worth it.

We live (and work) in an era of fly-by attention spans, when we are bombarded with thousands of messages in a day. We are bombarded with so many messages, in fact, that most of us couldn’t name messages we heard or saw less than a minute ago. And - in the name of preserving our sanity - we end up tuning out most of these messages.

Doesn’t it occur to us that the people we’re trying to reach with our own messages are the same way? Doesn’t it occur to us that if we hit them anywhere but where it really counts – in their hearts – we’re wasting our time?

More than ever, coverage in the appropriate niche is worth much more than coverage in scattered media that are of no genuine value to your clients' businesses. You'd think clients, of all people, would be more open to understanding this. But it's not their fault.

The real fault lies with the agencies and the corporate PR practitioners who have a golden opportunity to educate their clients (or in-house clients), and don't do it. And as long as PR people practice the shotgun approach – generally in the hopes of achieving short-term “results” - clients will continue to think it's best.

I'm a twenty-year veteran in this business. And I'm still waiting for the day when the volume and width of media “pitches” matters less than the quality of the resulting media coverage...when the number of “hits’ matters less than the number of relevant hits.

What I’m waiting for, essentially, is the day when output matters less than results.

And when the “shotgun” approach is seen only on old westerns...and not in new public relations campaigns.

Steve Winston
President, WINSTON COMMUNICATIONS
(954) 575-4089
steve@winstoncommunications.com
www.winstoncommunications.com