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.

By Mike Yanke, Account Manager

I’ve just returned from my first major conference and business trip, and luckily, it was a great one.

I wanted to share an early lesson inspired by the session “Pitching and Working with Bloggers: Advice From the Top”, a panel featuring Josh Hallett, Phil Gomes & Patrick Hynes.

To communicate our client’s stories today, PR pros will have to rely not only on building professional relationships with the press, but friendships with industry bloggers.

Luckily, if this is done right, everything else will come naturally. After all, it’s easy to tell your friend a story because you know who they are, what they’re interested in, and most importantly, what they love.

So, for my introductory post, let me tell you what I love. I love everything about marketing and public relations. I love getting to know people in the industry, following the trends and seeing the rules of the game change daily, and trying to anticipate these changes.

What is it you love about what you do?

Today starts the 2007 Media Relations Summit in Washington D.C. and it should be a great event. Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations Summit is the largest media relations event in the world and Mike Yanke from our public relations firm is there today attending sessions and doing some inaugural blogging.

I will be flying in tonight and will be speaking on Monday afternoon in a session about integrating search engine optimization and social media to extend public relations efforts. My co-panelists will be Jamie O’Donnell from SEO PR and Sally Falkow from Expansion Plus. SEO and social media in the context of online PR is hot right now and I expect the session to be well attended.

I’ve written an outline of what I’ll be presenting on over at Online Marketing Blog in a post called, “Leveraging Social Media and SEO for Public Relations“.