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I have been lucky enough to spend these last three days in San Diego at the Public Relations Society of America’s annual conference. This year the conference drew 3,000 attendees - 1,000 of which are students - and featured provocative observations from Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post and Bob Garfield, columnist at Advertising Age and host of National Public Radio’s “On the Media.” The content and commentary of this year’s conference was summed up by a classic quip from Arianna: ”Promiscuity may not be good for relationships, but it is a great asset online.” She was not suggesting we turn ourselves into whores, she was reiterating the expontial impact of social media, of techniques like crowdsourcing and how citizen journalism has forever altered the exclusive control by journalists. She also made a case for the higher moral ground PR needs to maintain. There has been lively discussion of PR’s continued evolution from controlling the discussion to encouraging it and how we, as practitioners, need to move from conversation “monitoring” to conversation “mining.” Bob Garfield ranted on stage about the demise of advertising and mass media as we know it and promoted his latest book, The Chaos Scenario. As I sit here and read about the closure of another once popular magazine - Metropolitan Home - Garfield’s comments ring true. Our own value as PR professionals will be successful to the extent we can continue to morph and adapt to the massive changes caused by social media. If we expect to advise the C-Suite, it had better include strategies for joining, not controlling, the conversation.
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November 11th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Exactly. The era of “controlling the conversation” is over. Our job as communicators is to make sure the C-Suite completely understands that reality. If they are unwilling to accept it, the results will be disastrous.
December 2nd, 2009 at 9:53 am
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December 12th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Thank you for the post. I will want to read more from you.