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.