Digital Public Relations: No Journalist? No Problem.

It’s a safe bet to say, if you come from a traditional public relations background, you’re probably used to dealing with a journalist or a member of the media. That’s fine because sometimes you will be met with the same people when practicing digital PR – but very rarely. In our experience, when practicing digital…


It’s a safe bet to say, if you come from a traditional public relations background, you’re probably used to dealing with a journalist or a member of the media. That’s fine because sometimes you will be met with the same people when practicing digital PR – but very rarely.

In our experience, when practicing digital PR, you’re more than likely going to be dealing with professionals from other fields such as:

Webmasters/Web developers
The person responsible for maintaining a website and web applications.
Digital Marketing Professionals
The people responsible for the digital marketing efforts for the business.


Because you’re going to be associating with different professionals, your key message and delivery is going to be vastly different than the standard media release and follow up phone call. To these people, like all of us (lol), time is money and you have about two minutes on average to pitch your online resource. You need to make sure you make the best first impression possible, otherwise, you will just get ignored and gain no attention for your business. To simplify this, we recommend the following process:

1.Try and have a conversation via telephone with the web developer or digital        marketing professional. This gives you the opportunity to quickly and succinctly outline what your resource is, how they can use it and where it can live on their site. This allows the person you’re calling to know you are a real person, and they’re not just getting sent a spammy email that they’re not likely to open.
2. At the same time, have the email pitching your online resource ready to press send once the person is on the phone with you. Because the person has already had a conversation with you, they will be more familiar with your name. This means the email won’t be unsolicited, and they will be more likely to open and read it right after having a conversation with you.
3. If you cannot contact the person by phone, schedule the email to be sent on Tuesday morning. This is the best time to send emails, as you’re most likely to have your email opened and responded to. You’ll more than likely get a positive response via email as the email from the weekend is gone and their inbox has ~settled~. You want to send it in the morning so your email is one of the first to appear in their inbox. You want to avoid sending emails when people are busier in the afternoon, as it will be more likely to be ignored.
4. Ask when they can make that resource live. Knowing when the item will be going live will help you to schedule your promotional efforts.
5. Once your resource has gone live, assess your efforts after that date. You’ll need to assess a few factors, including:

Whether the resourced was changed or altered in any way
Whether you have secured a quality backlink to your domain
Whether there are any future opportunities that can be gained from collaborating with this source.
ACHTUNG! Bolded needs dot points

Following this procedure will allow you to have a far more professional relationship with web developers and digital marketing professionals. Once you build these connections, you’ll find you will have far more success with promoting your business.