Traditional PR vs Digital PR

January 4, 2016 Chris Huppertz
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At the Digital Growth Summit, Bob moderated a panel discussing topics all about traditional PR and digital PR and how to tackle each of these PR worlds. See what Janette Rizk of Phelps Agency, Kathleen Dunleavy of Sprint and Victoria Green of Business Wire have to say about the differences between traditional PR and digital PR below. Find more topics covered by the panel in the full post on MediaLeaders.

What are your tips on any of the topics discussed?

Traditional PR vs digital PR

What is the difference between the two PR worlds?

“Bite-sized” news and animated GIF will make your news more appealing and accessible via social media. – @KateDunl

The idea of whether or not to kill the press release is a common discussion amongst PR specialists. There are people on both sides of the debate and there isn’t one definitive answer. At Sprint, we started making our news “bite-sized” so that our news pieces are more appealing and accessible via social media platforms such as Twitter. Journalists are out there constantly patrolling the Internet and social media looking for news and we want our content to be digestible. For example, we recently announced our earnings and to help avoid the confusion over the finer details in our financial report, we presented our earnings as a fun, animated GIF. It’s probably about seven or eight slides and it talks to viewers about what Sprint did this quarter. It’s quick, bite-sized news and more accessible. We add our full-length detailed press release to the GIF so that journalists who want to research specific questions can do so. – Kathleen Dunleavy

Follow-Up: Where do you post your bite-sized news GIF? What is your most popular social media channel?

We post the GIF on our site as well as social media channels. Our most popular social media channel is Twitter. We love Twitter. Our CEO is on Twitter all of the time. We also use Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook. – Kathleen Dunleavy

Difference between traditional PR and digital is that now we have more ways to reach people. – @JRizk

The 24-hour news cycle changes things. There used to be rules that PR people lived by such as “Don’t send out a press release on Friday” or “Wait until the beginning of the day to send out the press release.” Now we time things much differently. For example, Whole Foods Market opened a store in downtown LA on Wednesday. Instead of sending out a release on Tuesday, the day before, we sent out a release last Thursday. Then we did a press event, closer to the opening, where we announced exciting news including that we were opening a restaurant with a celebrity chef in the store. At this press event, all of the journalists were present. We then set out a final push the night before to get the traditional media to show up for the opening the next day. We tried to use snackable news bites and a tiered approach to ensure that we would reach journalists and influencers, such as bloggers and instagram stars. I think the biggest difference between traditional PR and digital media is that we now have all of these ways to reach people and we can time things differently. You can break news differently. – Janette Rizk

Watch and read more here.

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