PRCA Pulse by Alex Malouf, PRCA MENA Board Member, Corporate Communications Director MEA at Schneider Electric

When the media is gone, what’s your plan B?

Whoever is in charge of bringing more media investments to Dubai, may luck be on their side. It’s drier out there than a summer spent in the Sahara. The media is suffering. I’ve had some brilliant journalists approach me recently asking about a move to public relations (and even cynical old me has been taken aback by these asks), as they’re under so much pressure from others, be it sales or management, that they feel they can’t do their jobs. And then there’s the difficulty in getting a good story published; more and more, if you’re not advertising, you’re not getting coverage (unless you’re the government).

I truly get this; media outlets need to make money and I have countless conversations with marketing teams as to why this matters and why they should put money into local publications (often the response is, we’re paying the PR agency and so we should get coverage – this drives me nuts and reflects one of the many misunderstandings of how PR and media works).

Let’s be straight. The number of media outlets reporting straight news is dropping. And those working in communications for brands need to have a Plan B. So, what’s your Plan B? How are you getting out your message?

We all know about social media, and there’s always the option to boost messaging using advertising (especially on social media sites). But I’m still surprised by how few organizations here, especially local brands, are using their owned media to get out their messaging.

I’m not going to go into too much detail, but there are so many audio choices – think podcasts and audio chat rooms like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces – and there’s the “traditional” option of a blog page. Blogs like this one can be done for next to no costs and technical expertise, and they can be used to build up a long-term audience through email signups and social media. If you want to, you can start off by posting articles to LinkedIn (though I’d always recommend your own site for SEO purposes). And there’s also vlogs, video blogs, which is how many “social media influencers” started out.

And then there are your own influencers, namely your employees. I’ve often found them to be brilliant at pushing out your company’s news on their own social media feeds. There are tools to push out content to them, such as LinkedIn Pulse or Sprinklr. But you don’t need an app – you could even push to the content via email and incentivize their posting.

Technology is making it much, much easier for organizations to create their own channels to push out content. Yes, the media matters a great deal. But smart communicators need to think about what they can do to create new channels for pushing out good messaging and content. What I’ve listed above is just a sampling of what you can do with the owned media element of the PESO model. And I can’t wait to see what you come up with. As always, please do share ideas. The more we share, the better we all get.