The belief that traditional media has become irrelevant is well particularly well summarized by David Meerman Scott’s recommendations to PR professionals in the popular The New Rules of Marketing and PR:

“Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars per month on a media relations program that tries to convince a handful of reporters at select magazines, newspapers, and TV stations to cover us, we should be targeting the plugged-in bloggers, online news sites, micro-publications, public speakers, analysts, and consultants that reach the targeted audiences that are looking for what we have to offer.”

This sounds like an exciting new way of doing PR, but the only evidence that is ever presented to support this perspective are case studies of wildly successful and serendipitous marketing campaigns– usually about a brand with a viral video on YouTube (think Mentos and Diet Coke).

For the vast majority of clients I work with, mainstream media is still well in control and by far the most “relevant” source of information. Influential blogs, forums, Twitter, even YouTube discussions around most types of brands (I admit, consumer tech might be an exception) all source most of their information from two very old-school forms of media: the press release and mainstream print and online publications (and I mean very old-school mainstream media, the sort that Murdoch owns). To help illustrate, I’ve shown a scrubbed version of a blog map for a month’s worth of discussions around one of our client’s brands below. The nodes indicate mainstream and social media sites. The arrows indicate on-topic inbound links, meaning that one site has sourced information about a brand from a second site. Sites that are solid gray are blogs and forums, while sites that only have an outline are mainstream media and press releases.

It’s a lot to take in but, basically, it shows that there are a handful of often-linked to and widely-read influential blogs and forums that usually source news from mainstream publications, such as NYTimes.com, WSJ.com, etc., as well as corporate press releases (in this month, the client’s press releases were the most often cited source online– something we see pretty regularly). These influential blogs are then linked to by much smaller, less well-read blogs and forums (what is usually called the “long tail”). To put it in a simplified graphic, the linking relationships usually follow this pattern:

While there are always exceptions, I estimate that 9 out of 10 times, this is what we see when we assess the relationship between mainstream and social media for our clients: mainstream media and press releases drive conversation in influential blogs, which are then linked to and re-purposed by the long tail. Mainstream media is hardly irrelevant. It still seems to instigate conversations in forums and blogs. Bloggers and forum members will certainly edit the content, and provide their own commentary on top of it. But the demise of mainstream and rise of social media isn’t nearly as black and white as many people seem to think.

Given what Context Analytics generally finds for its clients, I would caution PR professionals against throwing out their press releases and mainstream media contacts. Mainstream newspapers might be in financial trouble, and they are certainly reducing the ranks of journalists and the amount of content produced. But, this doesn’t mean that mainstream media is any less important. If you want to influence conversations that are happening in the long-tail, convincing newspapers and magazines to cover you is still going to be your best bet.