Three Trends for the Future of PR and Marketing
Posted on 21. Oct, 2009 by Cat in Marketing
Steve Rubel has a great blog called Micro Persuasion (it’s well worth sticking on your reading list for his interesting and insightful comments). He works for a firm called Edelman and they along with PR Week hosted the New Media Academic Summit 2008.
Even though it was a year ago, these trends show no sign of waning.
From the Summit, he sumed up what he sees as the Trends That Will Help Define the Future of PR and Marketing and identifies three main trends:
The Attention Crash
People have access to increasing amounts of information with only a finite amounts of time – not even including any increases in work and stress levels, it’s clear to see that Attention is a commodity that will only become more precious. Time is not free. Marketing needs to be able to
“break through the clutter and ’stick’… keep things short, simple and visual.”
A secondary industry that is already developing due to information overload is that of discerning gatekeepers whom Rubel calls “curators”. They sort the wheat from the chaff (i.e., like services like Digg). There’s another level of curators who go further and deliver it to us as bread (i.e., the NY Times or Wikipedia – they summarise all the information into something easy to consume and digest).
Social Networks Become “Like Air”
Basically, online social networking is not as new as many marketers would have us believe:
It’s simply a digital, global and scalable manifestation of our desire to communicate with other humans. The technology makes it easy for like-minded individuals to connect and collaborate around the topics they care about. This can range from personal to professional interests. A lot of it revolves around social causes…
Social networking software facilitates things that people want to do in areas they care about.
Brand marketers that may be tempted to build their own social networks need to consider that there may not be room in people’s lives for more than one or two. They will need to plug into the social “air” supply that the large networks are building across the Web so that consumers can stay connected to their existing networks.
Remember that the Attention Crash will mean that a whole lot of noise also comes from social networks and people are likely to ignore or abandon those networks that aren’t fulfilling their needs as they just add to the Information Clutter.
Google: The Reputation Engine
We should already be aware of the importance of search (and Google’s importance in search). Well that’s only going to grow as the Attention deficit increases (why take the time to do more than a Google search if you get good results?). Search is no longer search, it’s media (and indeed, Google is already a leading publisher of media with its acquisitions of YouTube and Blogger)
The search engine algorithms are only going to get better at determining what is quality content and this will reinforce the trust people already have in search engines.
Communicators will need to know how to create and earn content that is not only findable, but worthy of discussion so that it earns and maintains visibility in Google – which often makes judgments based on quality.
No arguments here! Often in internet marketing, there’s a lot of talk about how to game the system, how to easily acquire higher rankings quickly. While I’m all for optimisation and marketing strategies – in the end, your website needs to have real value on it or you’re working on borrowed time. Google will catch up and deliver its dreaded Google slap. Your content needs to contribute to the conversation.
What can you do?
It’s often said that the only thing you can predict is change, but Charlene Li (Rubel’s co-panellist at the Summit) has a few tips in her post The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air:
So what is a social network, marketer, or developer to do? Here are my recommendations:
- Create linkages between services based on individually-controlled identity federation
- Compete on creating the most compelling social experience, not social graph lock-in
- Develop social applications that have meaning
- Integrate social networks into existing activities
- Design business models that reflect the value created by people’s social network
I’m amazed at the number of social networking services that have popped up that appear merely to try and get a particular demographic into a (their) social network without offering that demographic anything that’s really useful. Determine your target audience’s needs and mindset – look at what they are currently doing and see how you can create a service that can facilitate them doing it better. Don’t expect them to suddenly want to do something new because it’s got the “social networking” label attached to it.
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