It’s time to wean yourself away from using the words and practices associated with pitching messages to your target audience and users. These commonly used marketing terms no longer fill the theaters, stadiums, auditoriums, and stores, and aren’t appropriate in online communities. The thought of not being able to say these words again, when you refer to groups on the Web, might seem entirely impossible at this point in your career. However, keep an open mind and you will see how PR 2.0 and New Media change the way you need to approach people through your marketing terms, concepts, and overall workflow.

Deirdre has been writing about Internet vocabulary since her first book in 2001, when she advised communications professionals to get up to speed with new terms (at the time), including broadband, hits, cookies, firewall, and FTP. Years later, after Deirdre published PR 2.0, communications professionals have even more unfamiliar terms to learn, including micromedia, Really Simple Sydication (RSS), wikis, podcasts, mashups, and so on. But in Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, this is the first time we’re saying to “lose” certain words, even though they will still exist in their traditional realms.

Four words—pitch, message, audience, and user—have been a part of your traditional PR strategy and planning. You think about these words at the onset of every campaign. Brands speak in messages as they position themselves in the market, and these messages carry over into every touch point, whether it’s a news release, direct-mail piece, corporate video, interview, or keynote speech. You have been targeting those messages for years, directing them at your target audience and users. However, audiences as you knew and referred to them traditionally no longer exist. They’re immune to general, mass-targeted, impersonal messages. Web communities evolve and thrive based on those individuals who congregate to share their thoughts and opinions, and receive insight and feedback from others. The new world of Public Relations will focus on developing unique stories for the various groups it hopes to reach and inspire.

Let’s explore this idea a bit further. Brian has been in tech PR since 1991, and Deirdre has been practicing PR as a general counsel since 1988. We’re both guilty of using the now “forbidden” terminology for a very long time. In Brian’s early career, users really were users in the tech business, and when he was researching who they were, they would ultimately become the audience for marketing initiatives. Not everyone (a.k.a. potential customers) was tech savvy at the time, so referring to “people” just didn’t cut it. And it was never intended to be naïve or derogatory; it was just a specific and effective category. However, look back at the early 1990s. If you consider the number of groups on the Internet and the way in which people preferred to receive their information, the Web was not the most traveled channel—that didn’t happen until the mid-1990s.

Fast-forward to 2008, and now the Internet reaches more than 80 percent of the U.S. population. And users are a series of collective groups of people across different walks of life. It’s no longer about tech. Users are now the “users” of all products, from home and beauty products, to consumer electronics, to everything imaginable. But please, let’s try something different in the era of Social Media. Let’s try looking at the people who could benefit from our story, who are all different in their likes, dislikes, and behaviors.

As we introduced earlier, there are numerous conversations on the Internet about these people who are “formerly known as the audience.” Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, discusses this topic in his article “The People Formerly Known as the Audience” on his journalism blog PressThink.

Rosen makes several excellent points to support why the people who frequent Web communities today can’t be referred to as the audience of your marketing pasts. Today people are in control as they drive their own communication. Audiences, as you typically knew them, were lumped into general categories. However, with choices so vast, PR in the Long Tail has the ability to reach individuals and influence their behavior—whether it’s an opinion, a referral, or a purchase. In addition, the audiences of the past did not typically have access to the power of the press. Now people in Web communities are listening and learning, yet at any given time, they are ready to influence their peers by publishing their own interpretation, insight, opinions, and meaningful information. And finally, the audiences of the past might have craved messages. However, the people formerly known as the audience now control the information they want to consume—when, how, and with whom they want to speak, sans the media broadcast mechanism.

Josh Bernoff of Forrester crafted another great post to support the proper use of terminology. He declared, “I’m sick of users.... The more I write and read about social media, the more frustrated I get with the term ‘users.’”

The Web sparked a revolution in PR, which set the stage for an overdue shift in how PR pros approach marketing and talk about it, too. Now, in the dawn of Social Media, PR has no choice but to embrace something it resisted for far too long: transparency and participation, with the full understanding of a New Media approach.

It’s not just about consumers. It’s also about improving how we reach out to the press and bloggers. More than ever, we must reach them through a more aware and meaningful story that’s specific to the people who rely on them for information. Media and citizen journalists are demanding that the impersonal or irrelevant pitches cease. Quite honestly, it’s been a long time coming, but now they’ve even escalated their disdain for bad PR by publicly creating blacklists and publishing the names of PR people who refuse to change their ways. For example, just after Wired’s editor, Chris Anderson, made his blacklist of PR people, Gina Trapani of Lifehacker took similar action. According to PRWeek’s article on May 14, 2008, Trapani felt several PR pros violated her rules for pitching stories by sending e-mails to her personal e-mail address. When she published her list of PR spammers on a wiki, prspammers.pbwiki.com, Trapani created a firestorm of conversations regarding her public approach.

For many years, this shift has represented a significant challenge to the PR industry. PR professionals have been behind the scenes focusing on strategy and planning, while pushing junior people into the trenches, lobbing “pitches” at target “audiences” and hoping for big hits. Today most daily outreach relies on blasting targets based on lists generated through services such as Cision, formerly MediaMap, among others. It’s a game of percentages based on mass e-mail pitches using a customizable form letter so that each e-mail appears to be personalized; and, for the most part, it has satisfied PR’s quest for coverage until recently. With a list of 300 targets based on keywords, PR could expect to see 10–20 responses, with a decent conversion to coverage. If reporters didn’t want to receive e-mails in the future, they would reply with something as simple as “unsubscribe.”

However, PR has slipped into complacency. It has relied on blasting news releases and impersonal pitches to share news and information, when a less-is-more, human, and direct approach is more effective. The pitch as you know it is essentially dead in the Web world. It is intrusive. It is impersonal. It is perilous. To many people, the pitch has become synonymous with spam.

Even when discussing marketing in terms of audiences and users, such terminology implies a one-to-many approach. When you focus on people, it begets a one-to-one communications strategy—as we’ve emphasized before, shifting from monologue to dialogue. However, it’s more powerful than just focusing on individuals. We can expand our focus to reach different groups of people and those gatekeepers who also reach them, linked by common interests.

When you look at groups of people respectively, you’re forced to change your migration path to them. Each group is influenced, inspired, and driven by unique channels and communities. Figuring out who you want to reach, why they matter to you, and why you matter to them is the minimum ante required to buy into this game. The next step is to reverse-engineer this process of where they go for their information and discussions to learn how to reach them. And although several horizontal media might overlap, the vertical avenues are dedicated. This is the difference between broadcast PR and a focus on the hubs of influence that directly reach your customers—at a peer-to-peer level.

So while you’re deleting words such as users and audience from your vocabulary, let’s also go ahead and eradicate messages when discussing customers and people. People are not motivated by messages. They want to hear how you can help them do something better than how they do it today or how this is something that they couldn’t do before, taking into specific account their daily regime.

Although participation is marketing and conversations are markets, messages are not conversations and no market exists for them. Furthermore, no audience exists for your message, either. Here’s an example of what you shouldn’t say when you are looking to engage in dialogue:

Ugh. The people who speak this way are not the ones you want to engage in communication, and certainly not the ones who will provide valuable information. So when you are approached with this type of communication, move on—quickly. The bottom line is that after you take the time to listen and read, you’re ready to move past the cultural or Social Media voyeurism. A traditional marketing approach is not in your best interest. For instance, when you begin to build your personality profile or brand in different social networking communities, it’s highly doubtful that you would say, “What should I write in my profile so that I can convey the right messages to my audience or users?” On the contrary, your profile is an expression of the real you or your “real” brand—the voice of the person or company who reveals a very human side through conversations.

At the end of the day, PR is about people. Yes, it’s about Public Relations and not about spam, mass marketing, and impersonal and blind pitches that only dig the entire industry into a deeper hole. As you become a part of a community, you’ll quickly realize that there’s much to learn about each of the conversations, the information, and the communities you want to reach. You’ll often find that you’ll change your story based on the insight garnered from simply observing. Clearly, this is the difference between speaking in messages and making your story relevant. When you are truly engaged in dialogue with other community members or speaking with media influencers, you are not thinking about messages that you want to convey; instead, you are more focused on what information you can provide to help someone else.

The forbidden words will appear from time to time, but you now know that you don’t have to rely on pitching messages to target audiences and users. Your thinking has evolved beyond these vocabulary words to accommodate your new approach to engaging people on the Web. This entire process is invaluable to the new world of marketing—traditional and Social Media alike. It forces PR to think like a peer or a customer and less like a marketer or a competitor.

As a consumer, you don’t make decisions based on messages. You consider information that relates to you as a person and as a customer.

The notion that one message compels one audience is also antiquated and dangerous. Again, you don’t make decisions based on one source.

Markets are composed of people, and people differ. Although some mainstream channels do reach them, there are also other, more direct avenues of influence and communities where you can engage your customers in conversations (many of which are thriving, courtesy of Social Media and the socialization of information). Research (as mentioned earlier, legwork) can only help.

There is no one tool, one release, or one story that will motivate your customers to take action. It all starts with becoming the person (and different people) you’re trying to reach and then reverse-engineering the process. Listen. Read. Learn.

Stop thinking like a “PR” person and start approaching marketing as both a consumer (whether it’s B2B or B2C) and a market expert. This is how you demonstrate that what you represent matters to the people and why they should engage in conversations with you. Doing so will change how you see things. It will change how you approach people. It will change how you write news releases. It will change how you distribute and share information. Most important, it will give you the means to engage transparently and genuinely.

The process shift from pitching to conversation-based interaction cultivates relationships, strengthens customer service, and increases brand resonance and loyalty. It’s important to humanize the story and become a part of the conversation instead of just trying to sell your way into it.