Rubel is an A-list bloger and he works on analysing trends for Edelman’s clients. I had breakfast with him in NYC in April, he’s a cluey guy. Today, he gave a speech on the ethics of PR in this new world we’re creating. It’s stuff worth pondering:
Over the last few years we have all watched the remarkable rise of Google. It’s such a force in our lives. I have family members who aren’t Internet addicts like us and whenever I start talking about Google they remark how they could never live without it. It’s quite amazing for a site that was hardly on people’s radar even just five years ago.
We live in a world of die-hard Googlers. And what we’ve seen over the last five years or so is that search engines increasingly favor what some call socially-connected, high-quality content. The great rewards of visibility go to those who create quality content that legitimately earns links – and do so daily.
There are three categories of high quality content producers: brands, media and ordinary citizens. What’s interesting is that if you were to analyze all this information, a lot of it in some way can be linked to public relations professionals, just like the newspaper clippings of old. PR pros help content producers tell stories and sometimes even advise brands on how to go direct to audience to do the same.
This is incredibly exciting but it’s also fraught with ethical considerations – especially as PR people recognize that they must actually become public participants themselves if they hope to build lasting relationships that are meaningful. So there’s a clear watch-out here.
In other words, what happens when the PR professionals generate the content and own the audience, just like the media always has, does that mean spin takes over everything or can PR people learn to be responsible?
PR people have exercised power, to the extent that they (we) do, through a capacity to influence the content generated by independent, third parties aka journalists. What happens if that power can be exercised directly through social media and because the notion of independent, third parties has been severely eroded?
