The future of PR: making you feel special

Very few things are as difficult to control as public opinion and perceptions of something...anything. It sometimes seems as if once an opinion is forged, it is set on stone on people's minds, making it hard to change initial impressions--although not completely impossible, of course.

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With the advent of all new technologies, gadgets, etc. and the explosion of social media websites and pages, controlling perceptions and creating favorable impressions for the masses seems to be even trickier that when mere exposure to products and services in a TV or radio commercial, catalogs, pamphlets and other media in the non-digital world.

How do you reach everyone, everywhere and at all times when people insistently keep expanding and continuously push the boundaries of networking and presence in the digital world?

Well, as mentioned a few articles below in reference to the future of the music industry, PR firms are engaging in a new form of business--connecting with people instead of merely exposing them to the products. And the virtual world of digital media and online social networks can actually help with this.

In her 2012 article "Is There a Future for Traditional PR?," Emily Davis argues that "the role of PR is no longer about passive exposure. It's about the direct connection of brands with real people."

Indeed, as with music, experience and performance has become a new medium to get people into products via personalized, catered, specific advertising of brands. As people push boundaries, PR has caught up, putting content in people's consciousness by creating personal connections. It is all about relations between people and brands, facilitated by the information bubble and algorithms of search engines.

As with the future of journalism, music, social media and advertising, PR's future is uncertain as technology and innovations keep evolving, but, as the former, it will be premature to say that traditional PR is over.

The Future of Advertising

Forbe's article on the future of advertising is, in my view, a little too fantastic (yes, I noticed the contradiction in "a little too"). Indeed, the only idea that really seems viable to me is Mobile Medic, the smartphone diagnose system that has helped recruit medical students in Australia.

I do not like to leave my opinions unsubstantiated, and you may ask why someone who does not have a clue about advertising might dare to criticize ideas posed by professionals as unviable. Well, I may not be an advertising professional, but my common sense tells me that a t-shirt with a screen on it and distracting glasses are not going to prove very popular in the long run.

Why?

Although they may be a novelty at first, as every new ultra-technologic invention is, both Google Glass and tshirtOS defy real-life situations.

First, Google Glass have the potential to be dangerous, at least to me. If some people complain that cellphones, iPods and computers distract us so much that we do not pay attention to our surroundings, imagine having a screen in front of you for as long as you wear these glasses.

Second, the interactive, tshirtOS just does not seem feasible for several reasons:

-How would you wash it? This may sound odd and even stupid, but it's a reasonable concern. They mention it is 100 percent made of cotton. Well, cotton needs to be washed, as do all items of clothing (hopefully, many would agree with me on this).

-They are expensive, not only to produce--they would need thousands, if not millions, of people signing up for the tschirtOS for it to reach an acceptable price--but also because, in order to wash them, people may need to take them to dry cleaners and that costs money.

-They are too distracting. Imagine walking in the street and encountering dozens of screens in front of you, just that they are not screens, they are t-shirts.

Also, let's just think about it. What is the purpose, the goal, of having a t-shirt with a screen telling everyone what we are thinking or whatever we want to display? Of what use does it really is? In my opinion, it's a consumerist idea that is indeed sort of cool, but also cost inefficient and purposeless.

In contrast with Mobile Medic, neither tshirtOS nor GoogleGlass really seem to help society in any way. They do not advance any common, collective ideal, au contraire, both ideas seem to advance narcissism and individualism, even if they are advertised as the latest improvements to social media.

They are cool, they are attractive, but I believe advertising, as any other communication and media, needs to help people and society beyond merely entertaining it.

Music as an experience: reciprocity between performance and recording

I have been a Coldplay fan since I can recall. I have been glued to the TV every time a concert is broadcasted, to my computer checking release and concert dates, and to Amazon, waiting to get their latest CD. 

I part of the seeming minority who thinks that having the CD of your favorite band is way better than just downloading it from iTunes or listening to it online. Old fashioned, I know, but also very exciting.

It 2011 Coldplay started to release singles from their new album Mylo Xyloto and I’m sure all loyal fans enjoyed them as much as I did; however, not everybody knew about or could download them due to copyright restrictions, lack of advertisement, etc. A real shame, because Mylo Xyloto was beyond everything Coldplay had ever done before.

I was very excited to see that a stream of their performance at iTunes Festival in London was available for free downloads on iTunes Store. I was ecstatic and downloaded it right away, for me there couldn’t be better entertainment than that. That was the only purpose of the concert, entertainment. So, on a Friday night, seating with my Mac on my lap and a plate of Chinese food in the desk next to me I watched the concert as if I were there.

It was as expected, full of light effects, confetti and the band jumping all around while the music flowed enlivening the audience in London and around the world.

Retrieved from http://tediouswords.blogspot.com/2012/04/coldplay-calgary.html

At about minute five of the almost two hours long performance, Chris Martin, Coldplay’s front man, made a remark stating how the concert was free to the public, everyone could go for free, the only thing they had to do was “giving the band some volume”. 

I couldn’t understand it, why would a band such as Coldplay do an open-to-everybody, free concert? 

As minutes of delightful songs went by I got the answer: profit. Their songs hadn’t been adequately advertised, they needed to do a concert that everyone could attend or watch in iTunes so that people  buy the album.

It was purely commercial and, with that concert, they totally nailed it. Never in my years of almost stalking the band had I seen a concert so full of energy and vibe such as that one. It was an entire spectacle, a marvel. Even those oblivious to Coldplay wanted to pre-order the album online after they saw the performance, my sister in Venezuela included. In what they did, the band managed to engage us all, they made us crave for the album, mark the days until the release day.

This experience was all I could think about when I read the article "So What Can The Music Industry Do Now?," especially the section dedicated to explaining how, in order to profit, the industry has turned music back from being a recording on a cassette or CD, to becoming an experience. 

As I believe the anecdote above exemplifies, in this world of music as an experience, there is a reciprocal relationship of benefits between recordings and performances. In this world, as the article argues, "Recordings often function as more as ads for concerts than as money-makers themselves," but  I would dare to add that performances can also function as ads for the recordings (both in CDs and on iTunes, etc.). Be them legitimate or not, as the article suggests, recordings could incite people to go to concerts, but concerts also incite people to find songs, exclusive singles, or just feel a need for having the legitimate, original copy of the songs they heard at the performance.

Expanding platforms...and skills!

From the person who needed three days to create an avatar...

Ladies and gentlemen...

[drums]

HTML!

It also has a link right back to this blog!

Hi, my name is Esther and I'm a bookaholic

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I am a book-a-holic. I was raised listening and reading the great classics of literature. My sister and I would read at least a book per month and comment on it endlessly.

Personally, I like paperbacks. I like touching the dead wood version, flipping through the pages, feeling them, smelling them...

Yes, I am a book-a-holic, deconstructing every book that I can get a hold of.

Since I have been living on my own I seem to have undertaken an addiction for not collecting, but, literally, hoarding books--which is a problem when you have to move out of a place every 9 months.

But times have changed and we no longer have the space, or the time, or the space in our minds, to go to a bookstore and spend hours going through the shelves, as one of the panelists mentioned; or remember to take the book we are reading with us when we go out. Sometimes even our bags are too full or too heavy, and our minds too cluttered, to take books in.

Times have changed.

I have developed a thing for ordering books online and, when they come in in the mail, I experience firsthand what one of the panelists said, that part of what makes books books is the limitation of their form, that they leave readers to work.

Work in what way, you may ask.

Well, not only do we have to be more diligent with the book, seeing it sit in our shelves, but also, as was discussed in the video, we are pushed to be more attentive and mindful of what we are reading if we want to understand it and be able to picture scenes in our minds. With print books we don't have the aid of pictures or diagrams to help us analyze what is being said in text. We are on our owns.

But, precisely because of this, and although print books are awesome and leave more work to the imagination, they also have the potential to isolate readers, outside of reading communities, of society as reading becomes a more individual enterprise.

I found interesting what Tim Oreilly mentioned about the new possibilities of social interaction that come out with ebooks. Indeed, as ebooks are more available, as there is more access to texts of all kinds because, aside from the initial investment of buying an ereader, ebooks in general tend to be cheaper, sharing  becomes easier.

My sister and I did it the old way, exchanging print versions of books and our own perceptions of them, but I cannot help but think that ebooks open up possibilities of interaction and sharing because they are there, they are available.

In this time when availability and convenience is crucial, I think ebooks are a solution for readers who cannot take paperbacks everywhere or have large libraries at home. In this time when the culture of "culture" has been displaced with new forms, I appreciate the fact that the technology has taken one of the most fundamental factors in the transmission of knowledge and democratize it so that the experience of immersing reading won't go away.

An idealist's perpective on the future of newspapers

This is the second post I start like this, but seldom do I feel more like an idealist than when I say that newspapers are not on their way to extinction. Not because I do not believe it, but because of everyone's condescending reaction when I make that statement.

I become even more enraged when people link the "end of newspapers" with "the end of journalism." Well, unless societies stop needing to be informed, to get the facts they need to make informed decisions; unless societies stop needing watchdogs in government, from the presidency to community and union organizers, no, journalism is not ending.

Granted, we are in a period of transition, and the business of newspapering has become tight, exclusive, more competitive. As the authors of Wikipedia's page on the "Future of Newspapers" write, nearly one third of print publications have ceased publishing due to financial circumstances. Some of them, at not finding buyers for even the most popular and distinctive newspapers, have had to file for bankruptcy. Some have had to stop printing and began to publish only online (Newsweek is a good example). But that is the business aspect, and journalists are not businessmen and women, we are writers, we are researchers, we are interviewers. As Howard Reich, the renowned jazz critic and author from the Chicago Tribune once said, journalists need to let businesses take care of business and focus on producing content that is worth reading.

We have a duty to our readers. We have a duty to society.

Skimming through Wikipedia's page can be depressing for those of us who have spent years of our lives dreaming to land a job in a good print publication. Yes, from everyone in our journalism classes to the web, to one after another pundit in TV and radio, we have heard that the job market is tight and print journalism is not as smart a choice as broadcast or digital.

If I'd get a dollar for every time I've been told "You could work writing memos" or "Why didn't you choose (insert any other job, mostly related to business, here)," I would have the money that journalism is, according to them, never going to make me.

Yes, reading through that Wikipedia page can be depressing. Indeed, phrases such as "shuttered or drastically pruned" have a powerful effect on those who love and expect to live from this profession. But as many act as prophets of doom for this industry, I cannot help but think of how much this so-called "end" is actually a transition, a transformation. After all, newspapers and their staffs are still the sources for all the news out there. As the Wikipedia article mentions, TV doesn't have the time and blogs don't have the resources to produce content. 

If we talk about fact-checking and whistleblowing, newspapers have been pioneers. Our main constraints--the news cycle and the time we need to get everything in print--actually work, in some way, for our advantage, as they allow us to fact-check and be more picky with what we put on paper.

Bottom line: TV needs us. Bloggers need us. Society needs us. We set the standard.

Perhaps this is the greatest news of our times: Newspapers are not going anywhere.

Retrieved from matthew.wordpress.com

Is fact-checking dead?

http://www.findagrave.com/

Read the response of an aspiring journalist and join the conversation!

http://digitalethics.org/essays/is-fact-checking-dead/