Stage Two's blog

Once upon a time there was an easy world where the word “media” had less than a few dozen definitions. We consumed our news in the mornings from our papers, in the evenings from local and national outlets, and on the weekends in the pages of magazines. Then the Internet reared its ugly head and virtually every established industry was disrupted. But I’d dare say virtually no sector was impacted by the Internet as much as the various content industries were (or should I say are?).

Huge publishers now do battle with individual bloggers to create compelling content and attract wide audiences. News outlets today lag behind Twitter for reporting on-the-scene events. As the costs of publishing dropped to near-zero, the control has shifted from producer to consumer, and the quantity of “reporters” has increased into uncountable numbers. If you have a cell phone you can make news.

But that’s only the first piece of the problem. Rising up along side the increase in quantity of news sources is the quantity of mechanisms to consume the news. Content aggregators such as TechMeme combined with feed readers and customized home pages have further empowered the individual to get what they want, how they want, and when they want it.

And thanks to “Internet time” we want it all, and we want it now. And there’s no going back.

So in a world where the quantity of “target publications” is virtually unlimited, and they are all fighting with each other to find “scoops” that are legitimately interesting to their readership, is there any real surprise that the job of delivering news content to news makers is more challenging than ever before? Believe it or not, I can compound the problem further by pointing out that publications (which I’ll use generically to include blogs, news outlets, etc) face a problem where their readership is less loyal than ever before. But wait, I’m not done, we also have the fact that with no barriers to entry, building new companies, technologies, services, and products is so inexpensive that there are more new “things” adding to the mix at all times (and as Robert Scoble blogged, not enough good ones).

Marshall Kirkpatrick today posed the question “Does Good Tech Need PR?” It’s a good question (and a good post), but I don’t think it’s exactly the right question. The question we need to answer is, in today’s world where “if it didn’t happen in the past 3 hours, it’s old news,” what exactly is PR?

I believe that PR is the process of communicating a message from a company to the public. For some companies this is about press releases, embargoes, expensive dinners, tightly controlled messaging, and other well-detailed, perfectly executed plans. To others, this is about purchasing media lists and blanketing them with messages, hoping for a certain hit rate. Still others consider this through vaguely defined terms such as community, transparency, and social tools.

The real answer is it’s all of the above, strategically designed to meet the specific needs of the particular company and product. PR firms who aren’t adapting will fade out. Buzzword merchants who sell empty promises will flare out. This is a very fun time to be in marketing. There’s more opportunity to try new approaches to “PR” than ever before. Build your strategy, review the tools at your disposal, try a few things, observe, learn, react, repeat.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.