An interesting comment was made to me last week by the section editor of a leading UK IT weekly. He was bemoaning the fact that their own readership survey showed that readers rarely looked at features. At the very least, they weren’t read when the magazine came out, but might be kept and consulted at a later date. The first few news pages, the back page, and the job sections were the ones that people looked at.
So – is getting feature coverage a waste of time? If it is, then a lot of IT PR work being carried out today would seem to be redundant. The point is how this coverage can be further exploited above and beyond its immediate publication. This comes back to how PR can be integrated into other areas of the marketing mix. Even if a feature is not read at the time, reference to it in other marketing materials or on a company’s web site can have value. Even if someone hasn’t read the original feature, they will still acknowledge the fact that a respected title has covered the vendor.
The days of PR in isolation are numbered.