Part 14 in a series introducing my new book, The End of Business as Usual…this series serves as the book’s prequel.
When you think about social media, what do you envision? Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Foursquare? If you’re like me, blogs would have made the top of the list. But how can blogs survive in a time when the attention of connected consumers is not only precious, it’s elusive. After all, people can read no more than 140 characters at a time right? With the surplus of networks and a river of social activity that washes away personal information levees, how can we be anything but distracted?
The role of influence is changing and diversifying and with it, the rules and responsibilities of engagement are also reshaping. While PR, analyst, and investor relations were clear yesterday, the rise of new influencers, tastemakers and authoritative users and customers becomes both pervasive and uncertain. As such, new opportunities for engagement emerge; creating new opportunities for cultivating distributed relationships. However, each new connection requires management, a support infrastructure, including a dedicated host.
Each year at Blogworld Expo, Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra presents The State of the Blogosphere as one of the event’s prestigious keynotes. For those who are unfamiliar with Technorati, it serves as a directory and search engine for the blogosphere as well as a benchmark for the ranking of blogs worldwide.
While there has been much discussion about the relevance and even demise of blogs as the statusphere and micro updates gained traction in addition to earning prominence in the mainstream spotlight, the reality is that blogs are a vital ingredient to the media ecosystem.
In media and blogger relations, PR typically wields two powerful tools to help boost the effectiveness of pitching and potential placement of news: the embargo and the exclusive.
Each year, PRNews hosts an awards gala where they salute the winners and honorable mentions of the PR People Awards, the Hall of Fame Inductees & PR News 15-to-Watch.
I am honored to be nominated in the PR Blogger of the Year category along with Tim Haran of Usana Health Sciences and David Westcott of APCO Worldwide. I’d also like to take this opportunity to spotlight all of the nominees across all categories for the PRNews PR People 2009 awards.
In May, I reviewed the proposed Federal Trade Commission guidelines that would ultimately affect and change how brands employ endorsements into their marketing, advertising, and communications programs.
Today, the Federal Trade Commission made good on its threat promise by releasing its final revisions to the guidance it gives advertisers on how to keep their endorsement and testimonial ads in line with the FTC Act. This amendment marks 29 years since The Guides were last updated in 1980.
Sometimes we are quick to judge with or without due cause. Even if we believe our views to be right, many times our perception is merely right within our world and not necessarily the worlds of others. Perhaps we’re caught up in the real-time aspects of having access to information and the power to publish on-demand. Maybe we need to seek justification for our unwillingness to step outside of our comfort zones. Or perchance, we’re simply repressing animosity towards those who seem to envision and/or accomplish things we haven’t yet found the energy, passion or cause to pursue ourselves.
Successful businesses are always making choices and sacrifices, strategically looking as to how they are going to prioritize their resources, including human capital, budgets, and, of course, time. As the world around them adapts, so too do they need to make changes internally to respond, or to predict where trends are going – and if they guess right, the business could catapult ahead of less-agile competition.
One of the more interesting, albeit not necessarily press-stopping, stories making the rounds in the blogosphere and Twitterverse currently is sure to make you scratch your head or raise your eyebrow in bewilderment.
Twitter officially applied to trademark “Tweet” on April 16, 2009 according to Robin Wauters at TechCrunch.
The confusion erupted when developers received the following email (h/t to Andy Beal)
Traditional influence has followed a systematic top-down process of developing and pushing “controlled” messages to audiences for decades, rooted in one-to-many, faceless broadcast campaigns.
Personality wasn’t absent in certain mediums, it was missing from day-to-day communications.
For the most part, this pattern seemingly served its purposes, fueling the belief that brands were in control of their messages, from delivery to dissemination, among the demographics to which they were targeted.
It scaled very well over the years, until it didn’t…
Brian Solis is principal at Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm. Solis is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, Solis has studied and influenced the effects of emerging media on business, marketing, publishing, and culture. His current book, Engage, is regarded as the industry reference guide for businesses to build and measure success in the social web.
Recent Comments:
May 23, 2012
May 23, 2012
May 23, 2012
May 23, 2012
May 23, 2012