Corporate Solutions

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

This was one of my mother’s favorite sayings when I was growing up. She would often tell me and my siblings—and now her granddaughters—that if we wanted to be successful, we would need the right connections.

For public relations professionals, finding and making connections is and has always been the key to success. In the past, managing those contacts was fairly cut and dry: you grabbed your Rolodex, hit the phones and blasted your press release out on a wire to secure coverage. We’re talking basic blocking and tackling kind of stuff.

Mother Radner could never have foreseen the tools that would be created to facilitate making connections in the Internet age. Facilitating professional connections is one of the primary applications for sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. With over 500 million Facebook users and over 100 million Twitter users, these are the new mass media Rolodexes.

But it’s not just about using tools to reach the masses—it’s about mining the information we know about someone to more effectively and efficiently conduct our media outreach efforts. The real-time nature of the news environment requires not just expert knowledge of your product or service, but the ability to target and tailor your message to the key influencers that matter most.

Birthday e-mails are an example of this concept in action. Companies often collect birth date information from customers and use this information to trigger an automatic e-mail offering a birthday discount or free offer of some kind. These e-mails leverage something we know about the customer—their birthday—and turn it into a targeted communication and as a result, tend to yield higher response rates.

For PR professionals, Web-based services can also assist in identifying who you should know by leveraging what we know about a blogger or journalist—what they write about, how many readers they have, and how often people share their content.

Today’s influencer targeting models leverage proprietary algorithms to identify the most influential publishers around specific issues, industries, or brands. These algorithms are then used to create a target list based on the reach, relevance, and resonance of these individuals’ online activity. Companies can also measure the impact of their outreach to this list with direct access to their coverage and online posts.

These models are designed to improve the effectiveness of PR media outreach efforts. In addition, they are not static but instead are constantly evolving as the data behind them changes.

For PR pros today, it’s not about reaching as many people as you can anymore—it’s about reaching the few who matter most. That’s true ROI. Mother Radner would approve.