This week we bring you a special three-part post co-written with Tim Gray, content strategist at online marketing/web design firm Blue Fountain Media. Tim believes that brand journalism is indeed the future of PR–and that the best way to promote a brand is to create that crucial content yourself and promote it via social media.

The first step on the way to making brand journalism work: abandon the self-centered approach to messaging that formed the basis of the traditional PR playbook.

1. Move beyond the standard PR mindset

For decades, brands bombarded customers with me-first messages pushing “my product, my service, my plan…that you the customer now have the pleasure to purchase at my command”. This approach worked because customers didn’t have too many options when searching for information. It doesn’t work any longer, because most web surfers will quickly abandon your page unless you present them with compelling, easily accessible stories that truly engage, entertain and inform.

The “if you write it, they will come” maxim feels a little too simple though, doesn’t it?

Read more

Entertainment PR pros: you’ve been warned. If you give scoops to other online publications, Variety won’t run your story in print.

Via the LA Times‘ Patrick Goldstein:

My sources at a number of different studios say that Variety Editor Tim Gray and various entertainment reporters at the trade have been telling publicity execs that if they give casting scoops to any of Variety’s online competition, the paper won’t run their big announcement stories in print, relegating them to online posts only.

Variety Editor Tim Gray also confirmed the new policy to Goldstein. It’s just the latest example of how heated the war for scoops is getting, with relatively new competition like Nikki Finke‘s Deadline Hollywood Daily and Sharon Waxman‘s The Wrap that routinely break news.

PR executives are not impressed. “It’s a terribly analog way of thinking in a digital world,” one studio PR chief told Goldstein.