Steve Rubel, director of insights for Edelman Digital, said at the 21st annual Kenneth Owler Smith Symposium that public relations professionals must understand the media "cloverleaf" comprised of traditional, "tradigital," owned and social media. Days when companies were happy with a newspaper clipping are long gone.
"We have to rain on people so much for them to know they have to buy an umbrella," he said. "It’s different now. You have to literally deluge people now and that’s hard, even though we have more (media) options."
You can watch a video of Rubel's keynote address here.
He outlined five steps for success in public relations:
- Elevate the experts. Identify a cadre of deep subject-matter experts — internal or external — who can cultivate new ideas and engage in meaningful conversations around them. Fan them out across the media cloverleaf.
- Curate to connect. This is the age of the digital curator: those who can separate art from junk. Now is your opportunity to own your zone. Identify an underserved niche and frame it up the way you want it to be seen.
- Dazzle with data. The Internet is rewiring our brains. We increasingly favor content that is fun and visual. Data visualizations and infographics not only captivate, they also convey expertise across the media ecosystem.
- Put pubs on hubs. Many businesses publish position papers, presentations, CSR reports and more. However, these often live solely on corporate websites. Syndicating these to document hubs also can build authority.
- Ask and answer. The media increasingly seeks out experts on social platforms, such as Twitter and dedicated Q-and-A sites. Consider making social media 1 percent of 100 people's job, not just 100% of one. Ask and answer questions.
He described the "three acts" of the digital-media play.
- Act 1: Commercialization (1994-2002) — During the Internet's early days, publishing is costly and inaccessible to the masses. Media conglomerates invest to extend their authority into the digital realm. The dot-com boom gives rise to a few new players.
- Act 2: Democratization (2002-2010) — The financial and technical barriers to publishing evaporate, democratizing content creation for millions — first in the United States and, later, globally. Simultaneously, we see dramatic shifts in trust.
- Act 3: Validation (2010-?) — Later, the accessibility of publishing technologies and the simultaneous rise of social networking creates overload issues: both of information and "friends." The public seek expertise across a diversity of sources.
"People want experts who are high quality and matter to them," he said. "Ultimately it’s going to be, ‘What are the most important authoritative sources that I want to follow?' And they better be valid."
Rubel, an acclaimed thought leader on trends and innovations in media, technology, and digital culture, also discussed the division between PR and Journalism as well as journalistic adherence to objectivity. A panel discussion featuring Geneva Overholser, Geoff Boucher, Joel Bellman, Rubel with Jerry Swerling as moderator followed.
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