Anyone who has worked in PR has heard it: "We put out the release and nothing happened." Usually the cause is that the PR was designed as a one-time event. BOATship designs PR as a voyage — not a single firework, but a route that moves between several media and accumulates relationships along the way.

The PESO model — four media on one map

Gini Dietrich's PESO model organizes the media available to PR into four types: Paid (advertising), Earned (press coverage), Shared (social and word of mouth), and Owned (your own media). What matters is designing these four not as separate initiatives but as a circulation. A story told on Owned leads to Earned coverage, spreads through Shared, and gets amplified with Paid only where needed. The starting point of that circulation is owned media — media like this one.

There is evidence that story moves people

Green and Brock's 2000 study demonstrated experimentally that the more a person is transported into a narrative, the more persuasive the messages inside that narrative become. A story with specific names and scenes changes attitudes more than a list of facts. This is why PR material should be prepared in two layers: a fact sheet and a story.

Frequency of contact is the currency of trust

As Zajonc's mere exposure research shows, people tend to develop preference for what they encounter repeatedly. Rather than aiming to capture awareness in one shot, it is more rational to design small, continuous contact. One small transmission per week beats one large release per month. An automated publishing rhythm for owned media exists precisely to sustain that frequency.

Design who does the talking

What the Edelman Trust Barometer shows year after year is that "someone like me" and "a technical expert" are trusted more than official company statements. So a PR plan should prepare material that people other than the CEO can speak — frontline members, partners. This is where internal branding and PR turn out to be the same continuous surface. An organization whose people speak about it with pride is itself the strongest PR channel you have.

The BOATship PR planning checklist

Finally, the questions we use when planning. (1) Where in PESO does this start, and where does it circulate to? (2) Is there a story, not only facts? (3) Is it designed as a sequence of contacts rather than a single hit? (4) Is there a speaker other than the official account? (5) By what metric will we measure effect, and how will it feed the next plan? To answer that fifth question, this media has measurement and tuning built into it.