The Numbers DO Lie

In the old days (read: three years ago), we judged the pull and timbre of a given media outlet based on subscribers. The magic number? 100,000. Any publication with over 100,000 readers was obviously doing something right, and clients clambered to get their voices heard in these brand name outlets. What do those numbers mean in the here and now? Not much, if anything.

Blogs, Twitter and other social mediums have essentially made subscriber counts (as we used to think of them) worthless, except when it comes to purely judging the size of a geographic outlet, like Business Journals or local broadcasters. The obvious replacement number is unique Web views – using a service like Compete, you can check out rough estimates of unique hits a site has received over a given year. That should mean something, right? Wrong. Compete only factors in traffic to that given site – it doesn’t effectively track links or content shared via Digg, Twitter, Facebook or any other medium – and it doesn’t give you any sense as to whether or not a new site will explode in traffic next month nor does it factor in digital influence.

With this in mind, you’re faced with a clientele that still thinks along the lines of subscribers. How do you respond?

1. Everything matters. If a blogger or journalist wants to talk to your client, even if they’re low on your client’s list of important folks, make them do the interview. The more articles your client generates online, the more buzz they’ll receive in general, and pretty soon those big media names will come calling. At worst, it’s twenty minutes out of your CEO’s day. At best, they’re exposing hundreds or thousands of consumers to their product with almost no effort.
   
   
2. In on the ground floor. Maybe Bob’s Super Tech Blog isn’t driving a lot of traffic right now, but what’s the situation going to be like six months from now? Perhaps Bob is poised to join CNET’s blog ring or maybe he is working on a big time syndication deal with the GigaOM Network. Who’s going to get blamed if the blog’s traffic blows up in a month and your client missed their window? You. Take the interview.
   
   
3. Citizen journalists. Quite a few columnists and product reviewers, especially in the consumer technology space, keep low profiles online. Just because your client doesn’t recognize the reviewer’s name doesn’t mean that they aren’t important – maybe they’re a part-time reviewer for Engadget or have a syndicated column that runs in a few dozen mid-market papers across the US. It’s up to you to do your homework to find out who they really are and whom they might be working for.

Public relations shouldn’t be about subscribers any more – it’s about facilitating conversations with the right people to make sure you client gets heard. Pushing the mute button just because an outlet doesn’t APPEAR to have the right number of readers just doesn’t make sense.

--John Terrill

(Photo credit: Stewf)