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PR execs get lesson in digital Darwinism

Posted by dna 13 on Tue, Oct 27, 2009
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Visitors learned plenty by observing their fellow passengers on the long elevator ride up to the 50th floor of McGraw-Hill headquarters in Manhattan yesterday.

The few getting off at the offices of Business Week had a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, knowing not everyone would survive publication's transfer to its new owner, Bloomberg LP. Other staffers were downcast, avoiding eye contact with those of us wearing Visitor badges as we headed to the top floor of the power tower, where the vaunted media holding company's executive dining room is located.

The workers would have been even more bummed if they had listened to the brutally frank discussion about how deep-pocketed consumer and B2B marketers will be communicating with their customers and prospects in the years ahead. Media empires like McGraw-Hill, Time Warner and News Corporation just didn't figure into the equation. The aims of new PR and marketing campaigns will be trust and audience engagement, rather than column inches and product placements.

Paul Argenti set the stage for a panel discussion by citing recent Arthur W. Page Society research showing enterprises that want to be seen as authentic can no longer use a top-down approach to their communications. "Those days are over," warned the professor at Dartmouth's Tuck business school, whose new book Digital Strategies for Powerful Communications was the focus of the event.

Courtney Barnes, the PR News editor who co-authored the book with Argenti, was blunter still. She drew liberally on the event's "social Darwinism" theme, saying only the fittest communicators would survive. Anyone ignoring the power of social media and not utilizing digital tools to create content, conversation and engagement would become extinct.

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Photo credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0


 



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