Print Media Dying a Slow Death. Get Social and Get Online.

Erica Morris from PR Week wrote an article about a 2010 Media Survey they worked with CA Walker to conduct. Data is based on completed surveys from 268 media professionals and 285 PR professionals during January 11-19. Results were tested at a confidence level of 90%.

The article can be accessed here (need to purchase or be a subscriber to PR Week).

The findings were very very interesting. A few findings stood out for me:
  1. Growing importance (and acceptance) of pitching to journalists through social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.
  2. Half of surveyed journalists say that only 0-25% of pitches they receive are related to what they cover.
  3. Nearly 40% of journalists say pitches incorporating multimedia and high res photos help them better understand a story.
  4. 84% of journalists consider email the best way to receive pitches.
  5. Nearly 60% of journalists expect a further decline in print circulation and growing importance on the Web and other online channels. A blog post I made yesterday discussed how the S.F. Chronicle circulation dropped 22 percent in last year! While there are exceptions we are seeing a definite trend of dropping circulations amongst print media and our own HR Marketing Trend surveys confirm the fact that fewer HR decision makers read print media.
My reaction to these points:
Our HR Content Library has lots of free articles and e-books on these subjects that I encourage you to read. I have included a few at the end of this post..

The bottom line is that print media is dying a slow death as online visibility grows in importance. More and more data is confirming this fact. As a result, companies targeting human resource departments must aggressively invest in social media, SEO, SEM and other tactics that result in online visibility, web site traffic and sales leads.

Some useful human resource marketing resources:

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