While the Internet has radically changed the way we communicate, one constant remains: no business can succeed until people know it exists. Being able to gain press and public exposure for your company, products or services can still make the difference between success and failure.

Today, people have a remarkable number of choices about where to get their news and information. For your message to be heard, you need to know what they are, where they are and how to influence them.

Online and traditional media still provide very important outlets for company news – but they’re no longer the only outlet, or necessarily the best one. And the traditional press release isn’t the way to reach them.

Communication free-for-all
In the past, editors were the gatekeepers between company news and the public, filtering news from innuendo and rumor. Now communication is a free-for-all where you can sail right past the gatekeeper and address your publics directly and seamlessly. Find the right strategy for your story and buzz will follow. Without the right approach, all the press releases, flossy press kits, press conferences and speeches in the world mean squat.

Getting your message heard through the noise online and off requires seeing PR from a new perspective. The new PR – which I call Reality PR TM -- means understanding how people use the Internet to gather and disseminate information about companies and their products.

Your communication objective in these new mediums is to establish credibility, create awareness of your existence, and make potential customers want to take a look at your site. Along the way, you’re likely to be picked up by traditional journalists’ radar.

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Broad reach through e-zines and newsletters
While magazines online and off are suffering a huge drop in advertising or closing their doors, scores of online newsletters are going strong, and many have circulations in the hundreds of thousands. Many take article submissions. Self-serving trumpetry will be summarily rejected by all publishers. However, your short bio at the end of an article that has value for readers allows you to promote your business.

Speaking as a newsletter publisher, I can tell you that the vast majority of submissions I get are on inappropriate topics, sent by people who clearly have never read my newsletter. As with any other type of promotion, you must do your homework and personalize your inquiries.

• Directories of e-zines and online newsletters include:
• http://ezine-universe.com/which lists nearly 8,000 e-zines and newsletters
• http://www.marketing-seek.com, which allows you to list your articles on their site so publishers can select them.

Blog, Baby, Blog
Web logs, known as blogs, sprang up in 1998 when several dozen people began journaling their daily impressions about everything ranging from growing tomatoes to marketing. Some blogs are digests of other blogs and almost all blogs are opportunities for promotion if what you are selling is of interest to the blogger. Just don’t sent a traditional press release because you will be ignored – or worse yet, ridiculed.

Today there are hundreds of thousands of blogs, some read by practically no one and some read by hundreds of thousands.

Bloggers delight in scooping traditional media outlets with news, rumors and opinions.

There are a growing number of influential blogs that have a huge number of readers (For example Boing Boing has in excess of 350,000 unique readers per month) and offer some opportunities in terms of promoting your client’s ideas or products.

UpToSpeed, is a digest of blogs about marketing, reported by bloggers in several countries. It is tied to a group of business discussion forums and is important to follow. I am the moderator of one of UpToSpeed’s forums, I-PR, which has 12,000+ members worldwide who are PR and marketing professionals.

Make sure you read and have a complete understanding of what a blogger writes about before approaching with a pitch. And don’t send a canned pitch. Make sure your pitch is personal, on target and not full of hot air and jargon. (Just the way it should be when you pitch a traditional journalist.)

Some articles on PR and blogging:

PR Week
http://www.prweek.com/thisweek/index.cfm?ID=181484&site=3

BtoBMagazine
http://www.btobonline.com/cgi-bin/article.pl?id=10831

MediaMap ­ Blogs ­ ignore them at your peril
http://www.mediamap.com/expertpr/expertpr_061302_feature1.htm

PRSA ­ Pitching blogs
http://www.prsa.org/_Publications/magazines/0802news1.asp

Here are some blog directories:
http://Blogdex.media.mit.edu/
http://www.daypop.com
http://www.Blogtreet.com
http://www.Blogarama.com/in.php?id=2080
http://www.Blogwise.com
http://www.linksmanager.com/webadvantage/links15.html

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More brave new outlets
Unique to the Internet are content-community hybrids where millions of people each day get together to learn from, educate, or help eachother through the exchange of information, gossip and news covering niche fields.

• These include:
• About.com, a network consisting of over 700 Guide sites neatly organized into 36 channels. The sites cover more than 50,000 subjects with over one million links to Internet resources and a huge archive of original content. Topics range from pregnancy to cars, palm pilots to painting, weight loss to video game strategies.
  
  Guides at about.com and other communities are in constant need of sources and are more likely to listen to you than, say, a reporter for Fortune. And since many about.com guides reach millions of people, your inclusion here can be far-reaching.
• smallbusiness.com is a knowledge-sharing community that helps small businesses make better decisions through the free exchange of advice on a wide range of issues and products. Members rate the quality of advice offered by other members and those who most actively help others are highlighted.
  
  You can upload articles you have written on a given category. Blatant self-promotion will be ignored or flamed. If you provide truly useful information and are willing to answer questions about it, you are quite likely to attract new customers.

Usenet newsgroups, around since the Web began, are another brave new outlet for publicity. If you are willing to forgo marketing prattle and provide helpful information you can become a respected member of a given community.

You can find a searchable directory of Usenet groups at Google.

• Among well-known online communities are:
• The Well a members-only international cluster of electronic villages on the Internet, which people join for a $10 - $15 a month fee. Subjects range from jazz to Java, and each “conference” has a distinct style and its own loyal participants. Membership includes unlimited participation in hundreds of conferences, with an optional WELL homepage.
• CIX a not-for-profit organization that provides a forum for the exchange of ideas, information, and experimental projects among suppliers of Internet services.
• Tabletalk discussion communities created when Salon was launched and now a subscription service, many of which focus on particular products or services.
  
  While they might not appreciate unsolicited announcements, responding to inquiries in a related group would certainly be permissible. Marketing rhetoric would be poorly received.

Formulaic releases are a waste of time with these non-traditional outlets. Tailor your participation to the highly segmented, but fiercely loyal audiences and you can reach the heart of new media opportunity. And you’ll find that traditional journalists troll these outlets for stories, so you will often cover traditional media by working with the brave new outlets of the Internet.

Read 33 other articles like this one. Forget fluff. Forget MBA speak. Forget charts and graphs. Internet PR STRATEGY: Everything You Need to Know to Get Free (or Really Cheap) Publicity Now is filled with practical, easy to understand information you can use now to get better PR results.