A Guardian article, “The art of successful flyering at the Edinburgh Festival,” proffers some wisdom on how to capture attention and build an audience. Aside from fancy or dramatic stunts, success boils down to a simple concept: building rapport with your potential audience members.

Funnily enough, the art of flyering has something in common with the art of influencer relations.

In almost every PRSA editorial panel session or Sam Whitmore Media Survey call, at least one journalist or blogger will acknowledge that establishing a relationship with him is often the key to getting his attention and getting your company, or client’s company, covered.

Here’s the other trick: having interesting and relevant content. No matter how much you schmooze with your potential audience member, if he hates magic and you’re promoting a three-hour magic show, it probably ain’t gonna happen.

Unlike performance…uh…”flyer-ers,” in public relations we have the advantage of being able to read an influencer’s posts, articles, tweets, comments and status updates in advance, so we can usually get a pretty good sense of what that person’s interested in and whether or not our company’s industry, news or pitch will fit the bill.

In today’s post on the blog Strategic Public Relations, Kevin Dugan insightfully rants about the constant debate over the “correct” format of the press release and whether releases should die altogether.

As he notes:

“At the end of the day, if it’s newsworthy, it doesn’t matter what format it’s in. Serve it up on toast…there are more than enough creative options.”

…

“The public relations industry needs to spend as much time on critical thinking, where we provide more value, as it does on the nitty gritty of the tactics. Maybe this rant is telling me the industry needs to spend more time on critical thinking. Perhaps it’s the challenge of a discipline that must scale between thoughtful strategy and detail-oriented execution. But that’s more of an opportunity than anything else.”

With some creativity, strategic thinking and old-fashioned common sense, it’s an opportunity that we should be more than capable of tackling.

Remember, it’s not the glossiness or vivid color of your flyer, it’s what’s printed on it and how you get the message across that will win your audience. That, and giving them a great show once you get them through the door.