SCHWARTZ CROSSROADS

PRSA Boston Takeaways

Attending any conference or meeting with other PR people is always entertaining, regardless of the advertised topic. At the very least, you know everyone there is addicted to the news and wants to talk about it.

I wasn't sure what to expect from last night's Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Boston session on the military's program for embedding reporters with troops in Iraq, but was optimistic that it would be interesting. It's far afield from what we do here, of course, but from what I can tell from the people I've had the opportunity to meet with or hear speak, the military has more than a few public affairs/PR people who are on top of their game.

The panel included:

• Vic Beck, a Navy captain who's serving as chief of media operations in Iraq. Before he was called up, he was a VP with Peter Arnold Associates. Captain Beck dialed in during the middle of his night.
• Guy Shields, senior manager of public relations for Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems. Mr. Shields helped design the embedded program in 2003 when he was an Army colonel.
• Steven Komarow, senior deputy international editor of the Associated Press. He worked for USA Today when he was embedded with the Army during the invasion of Iraq.

The three covered a range of topics and took many questions. I have to say that it was the most worthwhile PR industry program I've attended in some time.

One of the things I noted was the total focus of the embedded program on the traditional media. Not that it's surprising--it's that this was a great reminder for me (if one was really needed) of the power of the mainstream media.

Schwartzers delight in finding new blogs that drive website traffic and are as happy as anyone to do the Twitter play-by-play. But what we find more often than not when we're able to do a head-to-head comparison of, for example, how many people were reached by similar stories on a website covering tech industry news and a popular blog devoted to the same is that coverage in the traditional media has bigger impact.

(My colleague Jason Morris is our resident expert in these analyses. Maybe he'll give us some of his data at some point.)

Captain Beck explained that last month there were 68 embedded reporters. His team could track to those journalists, in that month alone, 4,924 stories in western media.

What I took out of this was a reinforced belief that as enamored as we get with social media, it's important not to pursue it at the expense of the traditional. I think about the "either/or" topic because sometimes companies are so smitten that they go off the deep end and tell us they don't want to work with reporters--they just want to pursue blogs, online forums, etc.

I'm sure it's human nature to be entertained by the new, especially when the old can be tough to work with some days. Blogs and YouTube videos produced by tech companies--these types of things are integral to more and more PR programs. But you can't argue with 4,924 stories in what appeared to be every major and mid-sized U.S. market.

Clearly we're not the Army, but to me, last night's program was an outstanding reminder to keep it balanced.

Posted by Laura Kempke on March 26, 2008 at 10:53 AM
Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)