“Baltimore PR execs wonder who’s going to catch their latest pitch”

Baltimore PR execs wonder who’s going to catch their latest pitch as local dailies cut back, marketers seek space on blogs, Twitter

Baltimore Business Journal – by Julekha Dash Staff, Friday, May 8, 2009

There was a time when Michael Schwartzberg would update his list of media contacts a few times a month.

But these days, the public relations manager at Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson is striking out names as often as several times a week as staffers disappear from the Baltimore Sun and other publications.

Following massive job cuts at the Baltimore Sun last month and the closure of the Baltimore Examiner in February, public relations professionals in Greater Baltimore are rethinking how to promote their company or client. Many are turning to local Web sites, blogs, and social networking sites Twitter and Facebook to get the word out.

The transition from old media to new is not easy, they say. You need to convince your client or company that the transition will result in the same payoff as a newspaper story. But the change is inevitable.

“We cannot rely on a traditional PR strategy anymore,” said Courtney R. Dunevant, a vice president at Bonnie Heneson Communications in Owings Mills.

Many PR strategists were scurrying to update their Rolodex after the Baltimore Sun laid off 61, or nearly one-third of its newsroom staff, last month. The cuts included Editorial Page Editor Ann LoLordo, Op-ed Editor Larry Williams, and Deputy Managing Editor Paul Moore.

“It’s getting increasingly harder to get the stories where we want them to be,” Dunevant said.

The Examiner’s closure was an especially tough blow, said Amy Mannarino, public relations manager at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

“They did a lot of arts coverage,” she said. “There’s less space for arts stories.”

So now the museum is looking to local arts and entertainment Web sites like 600Block.com, Localist.com and BaltimoreFunGuide.com.

Like many of her cohorts, Mannarino is turning to social networking site Twitter, in which users shout out “tweets” that have to be 140 characters or fewer.

But since new media is, well, new, figuring out how to use it effectively is still an unknown to many PR folks. So the Baltimore PR Council, a local networking group of 110 communications professionals, just launched a Web site this month on which members can share strategies for getting the word out through blogs, social networking sites and word-of-mouth marketing.

And since you cannot tear pages out of a blog and frame them, it can be challenging to convince your boss that it is just as effective as a newspaper article.

“Getting all the stakeholders to understand just takes some time,” Mannarino said. “This is all really new.”

But one way you can convince them is through results. MGH Inc. in Owings Mills used Twitter to promote the National Aquarium in Baltimore’s Dolphin Show last month. It identified 60 people who have a strong local following on Twitter or Facebook with at least 500 friends or followers.

And the result was “hundreds” of tweets promoting the show and online photos that received 600 to 700 page views, said Ryan Goff, word of mouth and social media strategy marketing director at the Owings Mills marketing firm.

“These are reviews from people that they trust,” he said.
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