
While traditional PR teaches us that it is wise to focus our efforts on reaching journalists, editors and producers (members of the media), effective online PR make us focus on reaching the "public" directly. If you provide a specialized product or service, web users may not know you exist if you don't appear in the search engines. If your search engine optimizer can't get a number one listing for the hot keyword for your site, don't worry, you literally have thousands of other keyword and key phrase options to choose from to generate publicity.
As a PR person, you probably have hundreds of articles, reviews or press releases about your company's specific products or services. The best thing you can do with them is to identify which audience is best suited to that content and be as specific as possible. This is typically called a "segmentation strategy." While the media should continue to be one of these "segments" don't eliminate the larger "segment" of general web users. These are prospects for your products and services and are searching with innumerable variations of keywords, many of which should be contained within your PR materials like press releases.
By actively segmenting your users into groups, the users you are attempting to attract are actively seeking information about products and services, which is exactly what you are providing with articles, newsletters, reviews and white papers. These readers will eventually be ready to buy from your site if you are selling what they are looking for!