I’m in the afternoon sessions at Media Relations 2008, for a presentation by Dr. Georg Kolb (formerly of Text 100) and Frank Shaw from Waggener Edstrom Worldwide.
Update: Here is Georg’s presentation from Slideshare.net:
Georg sees three major trends contributing to creation of what he calls “New Publics.”
- Individualism – on the societal level, we today don’t believe as much in institutions as our ancestors did. Instead of the stability of family and extended families, he says, “we’re a mess.” Living all over the place. Patchwork families. Today we build trust by talking to people like ourselves. Instead of just taking the word of our personal physician as our grandparents would, we may also get second and third opinions, and also opinions of other patients.
- P2P Networks – Peer-to-peer networks exist now through technology to make it practical for us to find and connect with people like us.
- Niche Markets – A super-fragmented marketplace of groups of peer networks.
Georg talked about how much discussion is happening outside the mainstream media dialogue. For example, you may have an employee group organized within Facebook. This is a sphere of influence you need to learn to navigate. Georg says four basic principles should help:
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