While marketing budgets are being cut or shifted, many companies are holding on to public relations — especially B2B companies.  A recent story in BtoB Magazine, “Marketers stay in the conversation with PR,” tells the story of a company that relies on case studies as part of their public relations efforts. Since many of their customers conduct research as part of the sales process, the case studies promoted via public relations efforts are an instrumental part of their ability to attract new customers.

Public relations is more than press releases and media relations efforts to pitch journalists stories about companies. Public relations also involves building thought leadership, social media engagement, content development, internal company communications and many more aspects of corporate communications that affect marketing.

Due to the shift of advertising and publications online, newsrooms have been dealing with limited resources due to job loss and budget cuts for several years. The recession has not improved that situation and creates even more pressure for journalists to produce more content with fewer resources. Public relations and media relations efforts help meet that need for content by delivering story ideas, research, subject matter experts and resources.

By Lee Odden

In a recent post by Steve Rubel, he points out the decline of traditional pitching and the upswing of social community participation. I sent this to Bill Arnovich in our PR office, who as a FT media relations guy, took somewhat of an issue with the notion that traditional pitching is dead. Bill conducts traditional pitching every day, 9-5 and he’s good at it. There’s no sign of a decline in his eyes (or mine from his pickup reports). He also continues to get positive feedback from the journalists he’s helped to find great ideas and companies (our clients) to write about.

I tend to hit the middle of the road when it comes to “this tactic is dead” types of posts. The “pitching is dead, long live participation” idea was no different, so I did a post at our Online Marketing Blog, “The Future of Online PR and Reputation Management” to dig a bit deeper into the continued need for traditional pitching in combination with the use of technology and social community/blogosphere involvement.