Why You’ll Never Get on Oprah… and Why That’s Okay
Read more about: Featured, Press Releases
|
Stumble it! |
Delicious | 
Kirtsy | 
Digg
2
Comments
I recently wrote this blog post for a client of mine, That’s Great PR. It bears reposting here.
A lot of businesses focus on “making it big” in the media. While it’s great to be interviewed in Entrepreneur Magazine or be a guest on Oprah, the average business owner will not have this success. And you know what? That’s okay.
Take a look at the diagram above. Say you have a press release and you have two options. You can send it to the Oprah show and pray every day that they choose you to be on the show OR you can distribute your search engine optimized press release using a distribution service, knowing it will definitely reach a wide variety of channels online, including Yahoo!, Google, RSS feeds, blogs, journalists and others who may want to interview you further or write about your release on their websites.
Now, each of those channels has anywhere from dozens to thousands of readers who will see your press release. Many will click on the link to your website to see what you’re all about. Some of those will even buy from you.
So rather than putting all your eggs in one basket with the Oprah show (or major media channel of your choice), you do better to diversify and let larger numbers of people in smaller, under served niches find you.
As David Meerman Scott says in his book The New Rules of Marketing & PR, the market for press release is changing:
- Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of under served audiences via the Web.
- PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It’s about your buyers seeing your company on the Web.
Susan Payton is the Marketing Eggspert, and owner of 
I agree and disagree with this. While getting on Oprah is a fairy tale for many entrepreneurs, it’s stretching it to say that putting out a press release online is just as good. Yes, millions of online users may eventually see it, but the power of Oprah is not the reach, it’s the endorsement of the most powerful businesswoman in America. A press release, no matter how nicely it’s written, can compete with that.
If you can’t score Oprah, go for a local morning news program, then move up the food chain. Eventually you might reach an Oprah-like endorsement/placement.
Jonathan–
Thanks for the comment. I’m not by any means denying the power of Oprah. I’m just saying that the percentage of people with something interesting to say will not end on her show. If they do (or The Big Idea, or event the local news), it’s a huge boon. And you’re right,a press release alone won’t do that. It takes a lot of research and work to get something like that to happen!
Thanks!