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The Perfect Pitch In PR – Not So Different Than Baseball?

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With headquarters in Boston, the PerkettPR team is naturally composed of many sports fans. As we gear up to watch the Bruins win the Stanley Cup, keep an eye on the Red Sox and their unique manner of winning, and listen to the controversy over the New England Patriots‘ most recent player acquisition, we can’t help but think about how PR is often a lot like sports. It takes a team to win, but each player must be at their best and support each other. You’ve got to keep an eye on the ball, practice a lot, and analyze your plays in order to stay ahead of the competition. If your pitches aren’t quite right, you’ve got to recalibrate or sometimes pull the player. You’ve also got to deal with tough management decisions and sometimes you have to rebuild after a bad season where things didn’t quite work out the way you had planned.

In particular, we liken PR to baseball – how could we not with all those PR “pitches” – in the graphic below. What do you think – did we score?

ppr_pitch_tips_graphic

Another Reason to Hire a Social Media-Savvy PR Firm

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Earlier today, Cision and Don Bates of The George Washington University’s Master’s Degree Program in Strategic Public Relations released results of a national survey on how journalists rely on and use both social media and public relations resources for story research. While the headline, which reads “Majority of Journalists Now Depend on Social Media for Story Research” may have “social media experts” jumping to all sorts of conclusions and claims, reading further offers more validation that hiring a social-media savvy PR firm (or internal manager) is the best bet for your business.

Why? The study says that journalists “still turn to public relations professionals for assistance in their primary research” and that “most journalists turn to public relations professionals for assistance in their primary research.”

The bottom line is that PR experts who understand effective messaging and savvy story telling to the right audience will continue to be important – but more effective if they know how to reach key audiences where they already are – “fishing where the fish are,” as Coca Cola recently stated (slide 6). And for now, it looks like at least one of those audiences – source-seeking reporters – are on social media networks and using them strategically.

That leaves one question for you: Is your PR firm?

You can read the full news release and download the study’s results, here.