Why you should care more about PR than publicity
Adrian McDermott
March 10th, 2009
Once again, Seth Godin has hit the nail on the head, this time making an intelligent and important distinction between publicity and PR. I’ll just give the essence in these two quotes:
Publicity is getting unpaid media to pay attention, write you up, point to you, run a picture, make a commotion.
PR is the strategic crafting of your story. It’s the focused examination of your interactions and tactics and products and pricing that, when combined, determine what and how people talk about you.
In a funny way, this post, and its implicit criticism of the kind of follow-my-leader thinking that befalls many companies, reminded me of an interesting recent Slashdot post, The Formula That Killed Wall Street. Slashdot criticized the over-reliance on computer models that produced a single number to characterize risk, which led to investment decisions way beyond brokers’ financial and professional depth.
At Extendance, we often get asked about how we monitor results. It’s a legitimate question, but often I get the feeling that what the client would love is a magic formula or tool that will be the key to measuring PR success. However, the secret of PR is, as Godin says, not numbers of mentions or hits, but the creation of identity, something that just has to be understood and worked at. In reality, it’s much more important to work from the story, and set more store by the relationships and leads that build week on week than quick indications of impact.