According to Time, the best single guarantee of sales success—of any sort—is to get yourself booked on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Communicators will tend to agree, as they’ve spent years building relationships with their own Oprahs: journalists, industry experts, you name it. This approach made total sense in the old world of communication.   But I’m increasingly convinced that it’s not that cut and dry in today’s communication environment. Here’s why:

We live in a highly networked information environment—audiences can now seek out multiple opinions at the touch of a button before they make their own mind up, and they’re increasingly likely to believe “someone like them.”  Both trends we’ve seen for a few years in the Edelman Trust data.

In the past, our job has been to make sure the top of the communication hierarchy gets the right information.  In a network you can’t stop there—it’s all about enabling information “flows”—and that appears to have a whole different set of rules. Read More »

It may say something about me (the voyeur/research geek) that I’ve been eagerly awaiting the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer results to see how the recession has impacted trust in business. I have to admit, I was surprised at how quickly trust seems to be bouncing back from the gutter that was 2009 (caveat: 70% of respondents think companies will go back to “business as usual” once conditions improve). For Comms, the most important finding may be the last one, focused on how companies can really earn that trust.  Long story short: engage with everyone, all the time.

This conclusion would probably bring even the most superhuman communicators to their knees. Something has got to give. In my humble opinion, Comms needs to stop trying to push more messages into more channels in an outdated hub-and-spoke model.  Instead, Comms needs to motivate stakeholders to share information about the company with their peers. This not only makes universal, 24/7 engagement more physically possible; it also happens to be a more effective way to generate trust and support for your organization. Read More »

Around this time every year, I get a bit obsessed about one thing: what is the biggest challenge that communicators are wrestling with right now? As Ev mentioned last week, our members have a lot of interest in new media, and they’re especially keen to discuss its impact on traditional PR. There’s one big question underlying these conversations: Is this just an adjustment period or a fundamental shift? There’s definitely evidence on both sides, but I’m currently inclined to think (to paraphrase REM), it could well be the end of the world as we know it.

In this blog, I’ll be looking to share some of the more interesting material we’re discovering in our research process. On that note, I saw some analogous lessons for PR in this HBR blog post about the eroding value of traditional networking (vs. social networking). Here are two important points: Read More »