PR has a Long Tail too
Earlier this week Chris Andersen wrote in his blog a post on the Long Tail of PR which I feel every PR consultant (and their clients) should read.
The part that really struck me was when he ponders…
I wonder whether the solution to this is to evolve the role of PR from external relations to internal relations, from communications to coaching employees on how to effectively do the outreach themselves.
I mean, who else would you like to hear from but the experts themselves. I think the Official Google Blog does a good job of this.
But being in a PR agency, I believe there’s more to the long tail than an inside-out approach. A while back (on a different blog) I wrote about the Long Tail of the media where I observed the effects of the online media vs. the traditional print media. I’d argue that the media outreach, especially to the online media, will be as effective (if not more) than getting the company to blog simply because the online media would probably have a fatter long tail.
And if hyperlinks are the currency of the web, there is no less opportunity to trade (link) an article on ZDnet Asia than it is on jeffooi.com.
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Interesting post on the long tail of PR. As a senior PR practitioner from the client side, I agree that we can’t just depend on the “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” approach to PR. PR in this day and age is also about longevity, sustainability and resonance (see Echo Chamber effect in Naked Conversations).
A cover story in ST Life! or coverage in Channel News Asia will only reside in the memory this much. On the other hand, a progressive word-of-mouth approach (like what we did for yesterday.sg) has a much stronger knock-on effect that can be felt for months (and hopefully years) to come.
BTW, I have also blogged about Chris post, although offering a different perspective.
http://coolinsights.blogspot.com/2007/01/death-of-press-release.html
Check it out and let me know your thoughts.