Hilary talks about the push and pull technology applied in mobile phones, which reminds me that these two words “push” and “pull” could also be used to describe public relations media strategy.
According to Wiki,
the business terms push and pull originated in the marketing and advertising world. The push/pull relationship is that between a product or piece of information and who is moving it. A customer 'pulls' things towards themselves, while a producer 'pushes' things toward customers.
When these two terms are applied in PR world, they are used to describe two ways that practitioners get their messages across. Practitioners use push media strategy by sending emails and making calls to media organisations or more directly the journalists, to get their message publicized. The pull media strategy owes its creation to the rapid development of organisational websites with 'press room' section, which provides an alternative way to appeal to journalists and draw public attention.
As per the discussion on Thursday regarding “the online press centre”, it was argued that journalists would not be spending a great deal of time searching for news since they could get loads of information by receiving calls and emails. In other words, traditional (push) media strategy dominates till date. Therefore, the main purposes for journalists visiting organisations’ online press room still remains for searching basic information like fact sheets, backgrounds of chief executive, contact number of PR office.
It seems that pull media strategy still has a long way to go.
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Good presentation on online news rooms last Thursday Sherry!
I believe that journalists more frequently pull information online from different sources when researching, or trying to find, stories. So I don’t think pull Media strategy towards journalists is irrelevant in any way. Maybe we as PR practitioners need to use a combination, however, of both push and pull to get their attention. As I suggested in a post last week (http://stirlingpr.blogspot.com/2008/03/push-and-pull-media.html) we may have to develop the news releases into both pushing some information but include links to other sources of information which could be relevant to writing a good story, making it as easy as possible for the journalist to pull the necessary information needed to write about the subject matter.
I think that things are changing fast and that many consumer- as well as business-stakeholder groups are becoming more of information-pullers, which we as (future) PR practitioners must take into consideration and adapt to. Online news rooms are perhaps one step in that adaptation process.
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