No More Silver Bullet. Now what?

A few days ago, I co-presented a webinar (thank you CommPRO.biz!) on #KickAssContent marketing with two of my favorite people, Brandon Andersen and Heidi Sullivan.

#KickAssContent marketing

The three of us designed this webinar like so:

• Brandon: why content audits are so critical
• Heidi: amplification through influencers (often paid)
• Me: how Social PR takes it to a whole other level

This was one of Heidi’s slides:

There is no more silver bullet.

Back in the day, you could engage in a massive link-building game, and have your content rank higher in search and have more people come looking for you.

Not so much any more (though people still try).

Time was, you could issue a news release over “the wire” and assume it would get decent-enough pick-up to actually generate inquiries, leads, etc. (whatever you were looking for).

Not so much any more (though people still try).

And it wasn’t that long ago you could sell “PR” to clients based on the impressions you’d generate, and they’d be ok with it.

Not so much any more (though people still try).

So if there is no more silver bullet, does that mean (the PR) vampires and werewolves run amok?

You know who I’m talking about. They’re the folks who suck the life blood out of our work, and industry, by going on and on about impressions, AVEs, yada yada yada. They’re still around … but I think their days are numbered. I’ve noticed more and more organizations getting increasingly savvy about what PR should aim to accomplish.

And they know it’s got to be more than “impressions.”

Because while “impressions” aren’t completely to be discounted – especially in the early days of a program or campaign – they are no longer the silver bullet of PR … if they ever were.

Which is where Social PR comes in.

It’s still not a silver bullet. Nothing is.

But it’s the single-most effective way for you to seed your story among multiple communities of influence… so that they start to encourage their communities to take action.

The kinds of action that makes sense to them, their communities and to you. And that is when the magic starts to happen. Win-win-win. Pretty amazing, no?