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.

Digital public relations savvy agencies are making both traditional media relations, digital media relations and optimized news content work together as part of a Push Pull PR strategy. Public relations agencies work to partner with journalists to provide content via push delivery, but can also optimize (SEO) news content to make it easy for story researchers to find companies the public relations firms represent.

The trend in hard times is for companies to cut all marketing costs that are not tied to direct sales. Yet, some companies are shifting budgets to smart, creative online marketing and public relations efforts. When no one else is marketing, there’s even more opportunity to stand out to prospective buyers.

As companies decide where to invest their limited marketing resources, there is a distinct opportunity to focus on investing in relationships with their customers, prospects, employees and business partners.  

Companies that have been engaged in social Web participation long before the economy went into recession may already have an asset that new social media participants desire — better relationships with their customers. Digital public relations and social media efforts can facilitate the effectiveness of building those relationships — even for companies that are just now starting. The challenge is figuring out how to best use the resources available and what internal expertise or outside help will make best use of them.

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.

When I explained the competitive advantage as well as the efficiencies in using technology such as RSS and Del.icio.us along with the aggregation of content to make it easier for journalists to write stories, Bill came around to my hybrid pitching theory. Actually, it’s not a theory because it’s in practice with our online PR practitioners.

What do you think? Is pitching dead? Or will PR professionals need to change course and become direct participants in the various consumer generated media and social media communities to succeed?