How a PR Firm Can Provide Value Today
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Research - You could spend the time finding the best 100 bloggers who write about your specific niche, but having someone else do this for you can save time, especially if they do it for a living and have access to tools to make it easier and faster. Same things goes for researching conferences, events, speaking opportunities, awards, etc.
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Training - Few people are social media and blogging experts, and if you hire the right PR firm, they can help bring their expertise into your company. Don't let them do everything for you, make them train and educate your marketing team (not just marcom, product people too!) and executives about social media, blogging, how to comment on blogs, how to use Twitter and Facebook, etc. Inbound Marketing relies on using your entire company for marketing, and teaching people how to do it can be a great way for your PR firm to provide value.
Read: Is PR Dead? by Brian Halligan
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Create & Publish Content - PR folks are experts at writing, and increasingly audio and video too. Your PR firm can help you figure out how to take your boring company announcement and craft it into an interesting story, even if it is not for a news release, it can be just for your company blog. Your PR firm can also interview employees, customers and others and post videos on your blog or website, etc. They do this stuff all the time (if they're good) and might be able to do it better and faster than you can.
Read: 4 Reasons To Optimize Your Releases
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Pitching / Relationships - There are some times when a PR firm does have relationships you don't have, and times when that makes sense. A lot of these relationships might be "old media", but old media is still important to a lot of companies. For instance, Business Week, Inc Magazine, and others will probably only cover you twice in the next 5 years (if you're lucky), so does the writer really want a "relationship" with you. Probably not. But a PR firm brings lots of different clients to the table, and having a relationship with the PR pro might make sense for the writer. Our PR Firm is really completely responsible for our relationships with print media. We just don't interact with those folks much ourselves.
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Monitoring - Good PR folks will do a great job of monitoring all the right blogs, social networks and other conversations for relevant information. They then should email you and tell you to respond, comment, or react on your blog as necessary. Even if you have a ton of RSS feeds, alerts and more set up, you might miss some things.
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