I’m back from the east coast and catching up on email and news feeds. I just had to post some links about a topic I first saw on “Church of the Customer.” It’s about following up on press releases with reporters. A subject near and dear to my heart. In fact, this was a topic in most of my meetings this week.

Basically, Ben McConnell gets the ball rolling on the subject and then you can just follow the links to “The Publicity Hound” here and here. Then on to The Bulldog Reporter’s Daily’ Dog.

All they say applies to agricultural reporters. Basically they make a point about how annoying and ineffective it is to have people call reporters to follow up a news release. It happens all the time though. What I don’t think these folks take into consideration though is that public relations agencies in particular are under pressure from their clients to justify the investment they make in having releases produced and distributed. I think the agencies are trying to obtain documentation of the value of the client’s investment and there really isn’t an easy way to do this. It would be nice to have a personal relationship with every reporter out there but that’s just not practical. Clipping services don’t clip every publication and you certainly can’t monitor hundreds of radio and tv stations.

So how do you justify news releases? Good question. Can anyone comment on how they do this?