The role of a PR practitioner has changed significantly over the past several years, especially as the media industry continues to evolve, social media becomes more influential, and editorial teams continue to shrink.

While earned media placements and good old-fashioned story pitching remain foundational activities for PR agencies, many organizations are relying on their PR partners to serve as content development hubs for blog posts, contributed articles, marketing collateral and other materials.

Communiqué PR has worked with Dell EMC for the past year and a half and increasingly our focus has been on developing content for the company’s blogs (EMC Emerging Tech and EMC Pulse) that can also be repurposed for contributed articles, speaker proposals and award submissions.

In 2016, we worked with Dell EMC’s CTOs and other subject matter experts from the company’s vertical teams encompassing media and entertainment, life sciences, healthcare, analytics, EDA and video surveillance to develop 19 blog posts. Topics ranged from customer case studies, takeaways and highlights from industry trade shows, and perspective on industry trends and market drivers. Some blog posts that we developed with Dell EMC last year include the following:

• EMC & Lightstorm Entertainment Redefine the Film Industry for a Digital Future
• Is the Media & Entertainment industry in the middle of a major transformation?
• IABM Selects EMC as a Game Changer for Storage at NAB Show
• MLBAM Goes Over the Top: The Case for a DIY Approach to OTT
• Taking AIMS at the IP Transition
• As New Business Models Emerge, Enterprises Increasingly Seek to Leave the World of Silo-ed Data
• IBC 2016: Takeaways from the Year’s Biggest Broadcast Event
• Why Healthcare IT Should Abandon Data Storage Islands and Take the Plunge into Data Lakes
• Big Data Analysis for the Greater Good: Dell EMC & the 100,000 Genome Project
• Bullseye: NCC Media Helps Advertisers Score a Direct Hit with Their Audiences
• Data Security: Are You Taking It For Granted?
• When it Comes to Data, Isolation is the Enemy of Insights
• IACP: Body Cam Storage Success
• Solving the Video Vortex at the Secured Cities Conference

Communiqué also secured and developed 10 contributed articles in key trade publications for Dell EMC. With smaller editorial teams and limited resources to conduct briefings and write in-depth feature articles, many publications are turning to byline articles from industry thought leaders (provided they are vendor neutral and not sales pitches). In 2016, we secured the following bylines for Dell EMC’s executives:

• Post Magazine – Does the ‘film’ industry exist anymore?
• TV Technology – Why the M&E Technology Stack is Ripe for Disruption
• TV Technology – Looking Past 4K’s Resolution
• MESA “M and E Daily” – In China, it is Different…
• Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence (LPBI) Group – Recap of Bio-IT World 2016
• Health Data Management – How unstructured data will impact precision medicine
• Health Data Management – A framework to boost security at healthcare organizations

Are your PR teams helping to support your content development and owned-media programs? We’d love to hear what’s working and what some of your lessons learned might be – let us know!