The goal of many PR efforts is to reach as many people as possible through placement of a message. It’s far better to get a company representative onto Good Morning America than it is to get him onto some obscure cable channel that’s one step above public access.

To those of us working in the social media space, broadcasting is assuming less importance. At the same time, establishing relationships with the right people has always been a better approach to PR than the shotgun blast of a poorly-written press release. Greater focus on niches and individuals pays bigger dividends. If only most practitioners put in the hard work required to build those relationships. It is human nature, alas, that so many people opt for the quick and easy over the long and difficult.

I’ve recently read three items that address, each in their own way, the importance of thinking small in public relations.

First was the obituary for Warren Cowan, co-founder of the legendary entertainment PR firm, Rogers & Cowan. The tribute I read made the point that Cowan “created the celebrity campaign that, rather than aiming at the masses, targeted the 400 people who could hire a thesp. It’s a lesson that’s especially relevant today to publicists who are all too eager to let their clients share space in the weekly glossies alongside the reality star du jour.”

That notion of creating buzz that would reach a small group of people in a position to hire an actor re-emerged as I read a BusinessWeek piece about a Best Buy marketing initiative. Store managers can identify micro-consumer groups and alter merchandise layouts and even order special product to appeal to that group. In Baytown, Texas, seamen from Eastern European cargo ships and oil tankers make a beeline for Best Buy when they get into port, since gadgets are cheaper in the States than at home. They’re short on time, so iPods were moved to the front of the store and displayed alongside international power converters. The changes, according to the BW piece, resulted in a 67% increase in sales to these sailors.

Another store, this one in Savannah, Georgia, is close to two Army bases set to receive more than 10,000 soldiers returning from overseas duty. The manager increased stock on items like Nintendo Wiis and flat-panel TVs in anticipation of their return. And in Mooresville, North Carolina, members of a local retiree club got a special invitation to come to the store 2 hours ahead of opening time. “Eighty-five members showed up for a hand-holding session on switching to digital television. They bought $350,000 worth of TVs and equipment that morning.” The investment required to pull in those sales: “Just $99 in labor, plus coffee and doughnuts.”

Getting small means something entirely different to Brian Solis and Stowe Boyd, who are working together to identify “new and helpful ways of using micromedia, starting with Twitter, to connect journalists, bloggers, analysts and PR/marketing together in an efficient, unobtrusive, and productive way,” Brian writes on his always-insightful blog. They call the initiative “MicroPR,” which is also the name of a Twitter account you can follow. The account is a channel for PR people and marketers to “twitpitch” to anybody who chooses to follow the account. It’s kind of like ProfNet in reverse, with pitches limited to 140 characters or less. (Stowe has also weighed in on the subject.)

These three items—Warren Cowan’s laser-like precision in reaching the right people, Best Buy’s enthusiasm for identifying and appealing to micro-consumer groups, and Solis and Boyd’s deployment of the MicroPR concept—have been rattling around in my mind all day. As Solis notes in his post, the underling principles of MicroPR are nothing new: “This is the practice of matching our stories with the preferences of those we wish to reach. Yes, it’s what PR should have been all along, but it’s not.”

I know a lot of PR people who do, in fact, work hard to build the right relationships and get the right stories into the hands of people who are really interested in them. I’m sure Brian knows people like that, too, but he’s right that, for the most part, it doesn’t characterize the way most PR is practiced.

Social media makes it easy to build relationships. It also makes it easy for people to block those who abuse the channels. Stowe points out that he (and anyone else) can easily block anybody who sends him a bad pitch over Twitter. Knowing the right way to reach out to individuals through these new channels will become a requirement in any communication effort, and the same principles will apply to offline communication.

Smallball needs to become a routine approach to communication. After all, some of the best baseball teams are the ones that play smallball, routinely hammering out singles and driving in runs rather than going after the three-run homer. Coverage of the best communication efforts these days are almost all examples of smallball PR:

• The recruiter for Ernst & Young who responds to individual student questions on the wall at the company’s Facebook recruiting page
• Comcast employee Frank Eliason, who finds people complaining about the company on Twitter, then responds and frequently resolves the problem
• Republican presidential candidate and sure-thing nominee John McCain inviting a select group of liberal bloggers to an every-other-week conference call
• GM’s relationship with mommy bloggers

There’s nothing little about smallball. It’s a mindset that focuses on relationships over broadcast. Of course, smallball won’t replace other communication channels. As Mitch Joel is fond of saying, it’s “along with, not instead of.” In general, though, thinking small can produce better results all the way around.