Newspaper… Not dead yet.

2009 Budget, Everything in order but something is missing… Newspaper!
As I reviewed our projected numbers for 2009 I was as sure as the consultant and CEO that we were wasting money on Newspaper Advertisements because I was told, "Newspaper is a dying media" by a very web savvy marketing consultant.

Over the past 2 or 3 weeks my organization has been faced with interesting situations that has had to win public opinion. We were faced with a media chess game with another company. Our focus became the newspaper. With Heralds and Telegrams being at the center of my mind I realized something. To us web savvy cats, with our fancy iPhones, blogs, & twitters the internet was it. I couldn't even tell you how much a paper would cost before all of this. Well I can now as I found myself buying it every morning for the last few weeks. Receiving a wakeup call from my boss at 7:30ish on a Saturday with, "Grab the paper and call me back- we need to plan" as a response to headlines I was amazed how quickly I was learning how important the local paper is in a small town community.

Now I realize when your target audience is the younger, text messaging, internet surfing crowd, yes I agree with the fact that "PR 2.0" is the way to go. For the rest of us… nope. Even though we created a website just for the subject we had people calling the number left and right asking us what was on the website because "they didn't use that internet stuff". Anyone with a mixed crowd of ages as your target audiences, especially in a small town, don't discount the power of the local newspaper.

Yes and as this conversation has continued to go on among "social media savvy marketers" on twitter and others I know from Social Media Club, yes the numbers are correct paper is falling off… the amount of profit and the overall amounts being sold is dropping however, I had more people talking to me about the article they read in the paper than what they saw on the 6:00 news the facebook groups were never even brought up. I feel like that is pretty powerful. So on ward Social Media "gurus" just don't forget to fax in a press release to your local paper. You'll be amazed by the response.