Yeah, yeah – we’re all 21st century practitioners of what used to be public relations.  We know our way around the etiquette of the blogosphere, the fine art of hashtagging, the power of embedded video – we’re cool.   But when push comes to shove, and we’re in the thick of a good old media relations push, do we really give social media their due?   If we don’t, we don’t at our peril.

I’ve been thinking about this recently as we work on the kickoff of the 25th year of the American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life.  It’s been an incredible learning experience for all of us at Brodeur Partners.  We’ve learned that Relay is nothing less than a social network against cancer with more than 3.5 million members in over 5,000 communities and 21 countries, including one in every 100 Americans.  Over the past quarter century, Relay For Life has raised more than $3 billion to fight cancer, making it the largest nonprofit fundraising effort in the world.

Needless to say, numbers like these give us good fodder for pitching, and we put together a gorgeous media list, color-coded, with tabs galore.  Of course, once you put all your ducks in a row, you start the real work of pitching.  And as we’ve done that, we’ve become acutely aware that the way into the national media we’re targeting is through the blogs.   It’s not rocket science – these are the parts of the publications that are looking for real-time stories, for extensions to their core content, for ways to link to their communities.  A great example of the blog traction we’ve gotten comes from Self Magazine, where the Relay story was a great fit in the niche of “doing well while doing something good for yourself.”

Whether it’s a “hit” or a “blit,” it’s great coverage for a great cause.