Influence... it's a numbers game

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Andrew Smith tickled my fractal with his post yesterday “Where are the PR Numerati? ” (and here on MarCom Professional). Why? Because he’s right and I’m numerate and I’m in PR. His post was prompted by the August 2008 book “The Numerati ” by senior Business Week writer Stephen Baker.

Public relations had been boiled down to a very simple process by the end of the 1990s. Journalists write the papers and magazines the public reads. The PRs know the journalists. The clients retain the PR professionals.

That simple world is no more. I don’t mean that traditional media relations no longer exists, only that it is now just a sub-set of a far more complex map of exerting influence. The best PR professionals will:

Write-off reading and writing. The three R's are dead; long live the three M's

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the hammerings of educationalists, the so-called three R’s are far from sacrosanct: reading, writing and arithmetic. I’m talking specifically about the first two of these.

(OK, I’m not talking about them, I am actually writing and that irony isn’t lost on me. But then I am future gazing, and I could after all have podcast this post.)

Reading and writing have been bedrocks of civilisation, some would say the foundation, and it is only relatively recently that they have had competition as a media for non-synchronous communication. The 20th Century triumphs of broadcast radio, broadcast TV and semiotics compensated slightly for an individual’s illiteracy, but they were far from a perfect substitute and entirely useless when that individual wished to communicate back.

The 21st Century hasn’t taken long however to present a cornucopia of communication possibilities. Whilst applications of the Internet were dominated just a few years ago by text, and lots and lots of it, new applications pivot massively around the audio-visual. “Radio” and “TV” over IP / Narrowcasting / Podcasting / Moblogging / Vlogging / On Demand / Voice over IP / Video conferencing…

Mathematics on Philip Sheldrake

Influence... it's a numbers game

Write-off reading and writing. The three R's are dead; long live the three M's