Mastering the New Media Landscape: Embrace the Micromedia Mindset - Softcover

Henricks, Barbara Cave; Shelton, Rusty

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1626565805 ISBN 13: 9781626565807

Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

The New Way to Get Noticed


The giant brands that once dominated the media landscape—Oprah, the New York Times, NPR, CNN—have seen their monopoly on public attention smashed by the Internet and now find themselves competing with individuals and brands in a sea of micromedia: websites, social media, blogs, podcasts, and more. Ace publicists and marketers Barbara Cave Henricks and Rusty Shelton show that to navigate through this modern terrain, you need to think more like a media executive than a marketer. The key lies in mastering three crucial categories of media—earned, owned, and rented—and knowing how to integrate each for maximum success. By using this proven strategy, you can create a positive feedback loop that will generate massive momentum and grow a large, loyal audience for your message.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Barbara Cave Henricks, founder and president of Cave Henricks Communications, has spearheaded campaigns for some of the biggest names in business today, including Jack Welch, Tom Rath, Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, John Bogle, Maria Bartiromo, and Marcus Buckingham.

Rusty Shelton, cofounder and chairman of Zilker Media, is an active keynote speaker, entrepreneur, and author of several books.

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1 WELCOME TO THE AGE OF MICROMEDIA
DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES to master the new media landscape?

Few are aware that they do have what it takes, and, in truth, we didn’t either until we embraced a new approach that took us out of our comfort zone and into a brand new approach—a micromedia mindset.

In the coming pages, we’re going to explore how we arrived at this new media landscape and what we can learn from lessons of the past as we plan for a future media environment none of us can possibly predict.

What’s ironic is that we’re not that far removed from a PR environment that, against the backdrop of Periscope and Instagram, feels like the stone age of communications.

We entered our careers in public relations a couple of decades apart. Rusty’s first job out of college was with a book publicity agency in Austin, Texas, while Barbara left her editor’s desk at NBC Radio in Washington to join Workman Publishing in Manhattan. Although the years we began our careers were 2004 and 1989, respectively, when we crossed paths in 2009, we quickly decided that our viewpoints, skill sets, and even the age gap contributed to making us ideal collaborators. We both had a solid foundation in public relations, but Rusty, a digital native, brought social media expertise and a skill for helping others understand it, while Barbara brought years of New York publishing experience and a journalist’s eye for shaping content suitable for both traditional media and micromedia. Since joining forces, we have teamed up on scores of projects, from working with leading brands like IBM, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Campbell Soup Company to grow their audiences, to launching bestsellers like Strengths-Finder 2.0, The Confidence Code, and The One Thing. We can confidently report that rather than sticking to our core capabilities, we’ve each created a company of professional communicators who can work across disciplines in today’s complex media world.

We began like thousands of other publicists charged with setting up events and getting lots of earned media for every author on our list. We were each handed what was then considered the industry bible, Bacon’s Media Directories, a set of dark green encyclopedic directories that housed “up-to-date” listings of the media, organized in volumes—one for newspapers, one for magazines, and a third for broadcast outlets. Three categories. That was it. They arrived annually via standard U.S. postal delivery in a bulky package and were the center of heated exchanges between publicists, as we raced to copy pages needed for each project before relinquishing them to the next person in line. Updates? We used Wite-Out to change contact info when producers, editors, or hosts changed jobs.

It was clearly not just a different era but a different lifetime in almost every way possible for those with a story to tell (and the marketers who help them tell it). In short, everything about the way promotion and marketing are handled has changed.

There have been many causes for these changes, but the chief disruptor has been the Internet, followed by social media, which have made us much more connected to one another (at least in a technological sense) and less connected to media conglomerates that used to dominate the airwaves.

If we look back at the media world of even ten years ago, major media outlets could be described as boulders, encircling the public. These boulders made decisions to let in whatever information they deemed worthy of consumption; and if a book, product, or message wasn’t covered by “traditional” media, it was very difficult for us, the general public, to hear about.

Word of mouth existed, but it took a lot longer to take hold because it happened in physical proximity—dinner parties, places of worship, and the like—instead of via social networks that transcend physical connections.

Then came the Internet, followed closely by social media, which took a collective sledgehammer to those boulders, spreading pebbles across the ground and leaving those major media outlets casting a much smaller shadow over the public. As those pebbles scattered, so did our attention, fragmenting the way we consume media.

Thanks to our newfound access to high-quality, niche information, many of us now prefer to pay attention to the more specialized pebbles, which, while small, give us exactly what we want, as opposed to the “traditional” or “legacy” media outlets that often aren’t able to—because of less local coverage and an increased reliance on wire services due to shrunken newsrooms.

Stone age analogies aside, the pebbles are still scattering, and they are forming a brand-new media environment.

Welcome to the age of micromedia.

HOW CAN YOU SUCCEED IN THIS ENVIRONMENT?
Success in this new age is largely about embracing a micromedia mindset. If you are open to a new way of thinking about the media environment, you have made the first step toward participating in it. The influence economy has truly arrived, but the main problem is that most are approaching promotion as if boulders of big media and its gatekeepers still ruled the day.

The new media landscape has three types of media—earned media, rented media, and owned media—and you must effectively leverage all three to be successful.

Earned media used to be the only game in town when it came to telling a story or marketing a product. We define earned media as any exposure you get by earning your way onto someone else’s platform or stage. This could range from an NPR interview to an op-ed in the New York Times to an interview on Dave Ramsey’s EntreLeadership podcast to a tweet from Guy Kawasaki. To obtain earned media, you need permission from whoever owns that platform to give you access to their stage, so to speak. When they do so, it’s powerful because not only are you reaching that audience, but you have the implied endorsement of that media outlet as well. The challenge with earned media is that it is extremely difficult to get. You must go through whoever controls the outlet, and you are at the mercy of their decision. Your fate rests in the hands of the gatekeepers who control access to earned media, and it is hard work to capture their attention and ultimately gain access to their stage.

Rented media emerged as a sizeable space with the growth of social media. We define it as a presence and content that you control but that lives on someone else’s platform or stage. Rented media includes your Facebook page, your Twitter account, your LinkedIn profile, your Instagram feed, and so forth. We overloaded that sentence with italics because you don’t ultimately “own” those channels—you’re creating and posting content on a little sliver of real estate owned by someone else. At any time, Facebook can tweak their algorithm, Twitter can shut down your account, LinkedIn can change its rules, and access to your audience on that platform can change forever. This doesn’t mean rented media isn’t incredibly important—we’ll talk plenty about why it is crucial to your success—but it means that to master the new media landscape you can’t be content leaving your audience on someone else’s real estate.

The final category of media is owned media. Understanding and growing owned media is, in our minds, the crux of embracing the micromedia mindset and the key to mastering the new media landscape. We define owned media as any channel where you fully own the connection to your audience, including your website (assuming it lives on a domain you own), your blog (again, assuming it lives on a domain you own) and your email...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1626565805
• ISBN 13: 9781626565807
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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