Never forget what got you there…

In recent days I’ve had a chance to look back at our body of work at THP.  It’s our seventh anniversary (it was actually in June, but we tend to over-celebrate things) and I bought the tickets for our annual baseball outing.  This year, we’re going to DC again and will see my beloved Mets play the Nats.  Some will argue that we will not actually be witnessing baseball but that is a discussion for another time.

As has been chronicled over the last seven months on this blog, we as a group have learned a great deal about social media and have started to do that line of work on behalf of our clients.  But day in and day out that is not what pays the bills.

While we do everything a “full-service” public relations firm does, our core discipline is and for a foreseeable time will be, national, regional and local media relations.  It is what gets us most excited, what we have been most successful at, and what we will continue to strive for and be known for until the media as we know it ceases to exist (again an argument for another time).

Too many times have we seen companies or organizations make their name in one area and then try to do something different only to fail miserably.  It is very tempting to think that you have done all you can in one arena and coast while adding something new to your arsenal.  More times than not, you do both things poorly and your staff and clients take note and in some cases leave.

For our part, we will continue to focus on the media relations end and add new tools and new people to keep our “media relations chops” sharp.  We will also continue to learn more about social media because the lines between social media and media relations are getting more blurry every day.

Ten years ago the sexy new media relations toy was email.  Who is to say that the social media platforms of today will not quickly turn into the media relations tools of tomorrow and that the definition of media relations itself will not be influenced by social media platforms and practices. 

That is where we want to be, because it is anticipating the next move in media relations and maintaining those critical media relationship that has gotten us here in the first place.

Does your organization remember what made it successful, or do you find it straying from that path.  Would love to hear.