Adapt or Die, Says Advertising Age Columnist, Author

Changes in the way news is collected and reported isn’t just going through a phase, says Advertising Age columnist and author Bob Garfield, it’s changing the media and public relations industry in irreversible ways.

“It’s an actual revolution yielding revolutionary changes including, but not limited to, the disintegration of the media and marketing infrastructures that have worked in perfect symbiosis for almost four centuries.”

Garfield is author of “The Chaos Scenario,” which chronicles the disintegration of old media and offers ideas for what to do next.

Garfield’s remarks were reported in Public Relations TACTICS  following a Nov. 11 luncheon. Garfield cautioned PR professionals that they better “shut up and listen” or the industry would be doomed. He refers to the business of listening as “Listenomics.”

“Every institution that has formerly dictated from the top down must begin treating its constituencies not as the anonymous hoi polloi, but as genuine stakeholders and partners,” Garfield said. The fundamental change in corporate culture and business practice is to LISTEN.

I think the TACTICS write-up shows PR professionals are recognizing the value of social media  and will increasingly use it to improve relationships with stakeholders. And this will distinguish online public relations from online sales in 2010. 

PR professionals will use social media to enhance and build authentic relationships and support all business-related functions, not just sales.

The opportunity for PR pros, therefore, is to showcase the value in ‘relationship-centered’ campaigns, which will increasingly define the the future of online PR campaigns. Since the core of each sales transaction is based on trust and credibility,  PR pros will need to support a growing number of diverse relationships for their company’s brand — relationships that will help support the company’s sales, investor, employee and business development goals.

Garfield pointed to Lego Mindstorms as an example of an online community that volunteered to work with company executives and helped turn the product into the most profitable product lines in Lego history. It wasn’t because the company reached out to the group with the intention of making more transaction-based sales, but because Lego reached out to the group for their advice in developing a better product. The volunteers reinvented the brand, and the entire company benefited.