Richard Edelman addressed the IPR about the future of PR earlier this month. I just wanted to share his summary of the way we can categorise media channels, and ultimately help us understand how to use them more effectively.
You can download the full transcript should you wish to here.
It includes great little quotes (which may or may not be his?) like:
Content is infinite but attention is finite.
He reveals four principles. The one I want to share with you distils and clarifies the increasingly fragmented and confusing world of media into four groups. Read it and your understanding of media will immediately be brought into sharp focus. And that can only be a good thing!?
Here goes:
Principle Three: Take Full Advantage of Democratized Media
In the digital era, news is everywhere. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly half of Americans say they get news from as many as six media platforms on a typical day.
Content is infinite … but attention is finite. More than ever before, stories need to be repeated … available where people are spending their time reading, watching and participating.
Our greatest challenge today is deciding where to begin telling a story.
There are four distinct, but related, types of media today:
- mainstream
- hybrid
- social, and
- owned
Imagine them as a four-leaf clover.
In the first leaf, mainstream, we have the traditional delivery vehicles of print or broadcast.
In the second leaf, hybrid, are the dot.com versions of traditional media and media that is born digital like the Huffington Post.
The third leaf, social, includes Facebook, Twitter feeds and YouTube channels.
The fourth leaf, owned, includes a brand or company’s websites and apps—vitally important because every company should be a media company.Sitting in the middle of the clover is search, the new on-ramp to all forms of media, as well as content which fuels ―search rank.
And there are also new influencers, such as the 25,000 people who provide half the world’s tweets. They’re passionate, fast, and prolific, which makes their expertise and personal experience resonate globally.
Two quick examples of the media clover in action:
Xbox Kinect engaged with tech bloggers six months before launch, received strong feedback that prompted product improvements, and then went to mainstream and social media to promote launch events across the globe.
Ben and Jerry’s ice cream relied on a Facebook app to crowd-source a new flavor, and only then promoted it to blogs and mainstream media.
Richard concludes this section with my favourite focus on storytelling. Liberating times for PR practitioners smart enough to bin the bad old days of churn and blast out.
We must work to stimulate storytelling that creates motion across all of the different types of media. We must ensure that personal stories and ideas are part of our output and that high-quality content … infographics and short-form video … can be easily found and shared to enhance search results.
Just to show the book will be worth waiting for 
