The Biggest Hurdle for Public Relations

One word: Attention.

Basic economic theory states that when you create a wealth of one thing, it creates scarcity of another. In the case of modern day media it’s a wealth of channels and a scarcity of attention. For the most part today, we “snack” on media. We consume when we’ve set aside our attention to watch a movie or a whole TV show or listen to a full broadcast of a radio show.

On the Web we mostly snack. The most effective bloggers have posts no more than 300 words.

Public Relations practitioners have always fought for our attention. But today that’s harder than ever. So many channels. And consumption changes by channel. Twitter is “grazing” while Blogs are a quick bag of crisps and Facebook is a cup of coffee and a cookie.

If the “story” starts as a press release and media advisory, backed by the press kit or background kit, then it will need to break into many little pieces as it goes out into all of the various media channels. Each snippet hopefully getting the right readers attention.

It might follow then that the second biggest hurdle is then getting your audience to act on the information they’ve received.