In the rush by many of us to embrace all things social media, sometimes we in public relations need to step back and ask- is this productive? Why should we pirsue the latest social media fad if only a fraction of the masses are using it? I have a few thoughts on why we don’t just drop the old media but yet must still pursue the unproven:

1) Existing audiences are most important. Simple. The Times et al may be shrinking but they’re still huge.

2) Clients- and PR people- can be unadventurous. Progress means the unadventurous now includes blogger outreach

3) Still- we must pursue some of the less "mainstream" social media channels, for two reasons:

- We need to be ready with the ones that do go mainstream

- New channels could happen to have the right audience- and many of them can be pushed to the better-performing ones (think – embedding YouTube videos on blogs and news sites)

What are your thoughts?