Friday, May 2, 2008

Have we forgotten strategy?

Credit for launching this thought today goes completely to Geoff Livingston and his post.
Have we, as PR practitioners and communicators, become too focused on all the cool new tools available to us and forgotten the original mission? Perhaps, but I'll give us a little credit here. There is a sea of tools available out there, and very little public understanding of what they are or why they exist. The digital divide also weighs very heavily into this problem. I'd suspect that you could convince a senior citizen to pick up a Wii controller much easier than opening a Facebook account, for example. I hear the "that stuff is just not for my age group" comment more than I would like. The ugly secret is that "they" would love this stuff if they could get over the initial hump of adoption.
Secondly, I had a friend in my band in high school that used to joke about any topic that came up, "Hey, why don't we write a song about that?" In PR, sometimes we use the same thinking related to writing press releases or mailing newsletters, for instance. In a later post, I'll mention why we need to get in touch with our inner four-year-old and ask "why" more. Why a newsletter? Why a press release? Why a blog? Why? Why? Why?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is an interesting concept for PR people. Sometimes we get so caught up in the "how" of getting messages out, that we forget to answer "why?" first. I like where this is going.