The Think Room

There’s a terrific story in this week’s Ad Age about how PR specialists are increasingly targeting journalists with large Twitter followings in outreach efforts (and I’m not just saying that because the article mentions Olson).

Journalists, after all, are disproportionately followed by other journalists and (to the chagrin of their bosses) are also far more likely to encounter breaking news on Twitter—as opposed to an individual news organization’s site. So how better to inject a story into the media’s bloodstream than by having it first emerge in an influential journalist’s Twitter feed?

This trend is a nice reminder that, these days, it matters less where a given story starts, and more how it travels. Who passes a story along is just as important as who originally reports it, in many cases. And that’s a major change for an industry where some clients still define success as getting into a given publication’s edition.

I first became cognizant of how thoroughly the landscape had shifted two years ago, toward the end of my own reporting days.

A colleague and I discovered that a famous and sophisticated brand marketer was planning a major new-product launch. Once we had the requisite two independent sources needed to report this news, we called the company for a comment.

The company, which badly wanted to spring the development during an upcoming investor presentation, offered a series of deals to get us to hold off on reporting the news. These included behind-the-scenes access, exclusive CEO interviews, and so on. We declined.

They sweetened the offer again, telling us we could report our story immediately and get all the same goodies, if only we didn’t post the story online.

That was an eye-opener: For a significant global marketer, having a story only in print was not much different from it not existing at all. The reasoning was clear: If it’s not shareable, it might as well not exist.

In this new Information Age, those are increasingly words to live by.