So Googleplex is the headquarters of world’s coolest company. The central command of the digital world.

But a googolplex is also a gigantic number: one too big and complex for anyone who didn’t surf through MIT to understand. I mean it may be bigger than the universe and faster than the speed of light-both of which statements are technically impossible. But point made.

So what does all of this rambling have to do with digital PR? Well, actually a great deal. There are more sites and blogs and forums in the digital universe than the commanders at the Googleplex can count. Maybe more than a googolplex. Forget about visiting them all. Forget about knowing anything about anything but an infinitesimal number of these cyber bodies. Instead, find a few stars in the making. A Facebook the day before it became Facebook. An Engadget a week before it became Engadget. And know them better than anyone else. Meet with management. Ask what they need and provide it before anyone else will give them the time of day. Become part of the family.

I met with a digital PR queen today who is cyber royalty because she courted the shooting stars before they could be seen by the Hubble telescope. And she kept them at the center of the universe and allowed herself to orbit on the periphery. Always digging deeper into what they wanted. The stories. The ideas. The features. The news.

You see, it’s like standing there at the Big Bang the day every newspaper and broadcast station was starting up. If you honed in on the Sacramento Bee and befriended the reporters and the editors and learned their every journalistic need and stayed with them 24/7, you would own them.

Where is the next cyber Bee? Wall Street Journal? People? Oprah?
The googolplex of the Googleplex gives you the opportunity to find these nascent gems. To be the experts on them. To be their go-to people. Their primary sources.

This is the playground you can play in. This is the joy of digital PR. Are you in the game?

Mark Stevens
CEO

Back in the day, like about ten minutes ago, Nike used to spend the majority of its $600 million plus advertising budget on the big networks, like NBC, and other relics of the media past.

Now, they attract less than a third of the budget and the number is trending down. Free falling actually. And with an attitude that is decidedly anti-network, anti-old school.

“We’re not in the business of keeping media companies alive,” says Nike’s corporate VP for global brand, Trevor Edwards.

What Nike is now in the business of, more than ever before, and accelerating by the minute, is using digital communications to get intimate with its customers. Runners use a tracking device in their shoes and download their information gathered on a run on a Nike website. And presto, the company has a community of enthusiasts who visit the site repeatedly, without Nike having to pay network ad guys to get them there.

One by one, the former heavyweights of the dinosaur media are switching gears and opting for the highly targeted messaging digital PR, as well as advertising, can and must provide.

You must ask yourself:

• Where does my target market go online?
• Where would they go if we created a new space that would drive them there? As did Nike with its runners site.
• How can we demonstrate relevance to them?
• How can we do anything and everything that the stuffed shirts at the shotgun media can’t do?

The fact is money and opportunities are moving in a new direction. Are you ready to seize it? Six months from now will be too late. Ask P&G, they’re crunching CBS.

Mark Stevens

CEO

It isn’t really your space. No cozy digital digs here. And it isn’t really a social network. It is thousands of networks under one umbrella.

There are people (by the way, they spend far too much time flitting around in this make believe world) who claim they can speak with great authority on the dynamics of MySpace. How it works. Why it works. How you can use it for business or personal reasons.

But they are pretenders. You can’t really understand MySpace because it changes every day. That is its power. That is its mystery. Like everything else in life, the rules spelled out by others for success in MySpace are really a ruse.

As a PR professional incorporating MySpace into your arsenal of communications tools, I suggest you consider the following:

*View MySpace as thousands of communities, thousands of social networks, under a single roof. Some of the networks are there to date, some to sell real estate, others to build their chain of multi-level marketers.

*Identify the communities, the networks you want to reach and pursue them with targeted messaging. If you view MySpace as one giant mass of lovely-dovey, like-minded “friends,” you squander its greatest power.

*Experiment. People tell me all the time this or that or the other thing won’t work. Experts all. Sure! They haven’t tried it so how do they know.

They would have told MySpace’s founders not to launch the site. That wouldn’t work either. The beauty of these fluid, cyber networks is that they are virtually rule-less.

What captures their attention one day (Paris Hilton) is history as a new fascination (Britney) sweeps across millions of screens. And minds.

Therefore, dream of what you want to accomplish and make your own rules for doing so.
And a word to the wise: Now I’ve become one of those “experts.” Delete this blog as soon as you read it.

Mark Stevens
CEO

I am giving a speech this October in a Frank Gehry designed venue in the center of Berlin. The place is spectacular, featuring a glass roof and a rainbow of giant abstract fish swimming from the ceiling. Once you experience the place, it is forever embedded in your mind.

Now for a major segue. How often do you visit a website that blows you away?
That is so compelling in language and design that it is unforgettable? If you are like most of us (I have conducted surveys on this that any self-respecting scientist would reject as anecdotal evidence….and they would be right) the answer is hardly ever…..maybe never.

Which brings us comfortably (or uncomfortably, depending on the site) to the subject at hand: digital PR. Virtually every time we engage in this form of PR, we drive visitors to client sites or our own. And virtually every time, the sites disappoint. And virtually every time, we say nothing to the client, because the site is under the prevue of the IT department or a subdivision of marketing that doesn’t talk to or recognize PR.

So in the typical case, the PR pros know they are doing their magic and then driving media, prospects and customers to the website from hell. But because the divisions of duty and power are so balkanized (ever try to tell a CIO that a website needs an overhaul), PR views a battle on this field as too tough to win and simply thinks “it’s not my problem.”

Well, we may not have caused it but it is our problem. Should we drive visitors to a website from hell when we know we can hire the right people to create a cyber version of the Gehry venue? When we can fight the good fight to have the client create a website from Heaven?

Absolutely yes. Many senior managers don’t hold PR in high regard because we don’t make a stink enough. We don’t rock the boat. We don’t make a scene.

Well let me tell you, if the same company that puts a mediocre website on the Internet wants to sign a sucker’s deal with a bank, the CFO is going to make the kind of scene a drama queen would be embarrassed of. And well he should. The CFO is a guardian of the company’s interests. So are you.

The thing is you have to start seeing yourself that way. Not as a PR professional but as a guardian. And in that role you won’t accept a website from hell. You will, you should, make it impossible for that site to stay up there in its current position. Yes, CIO, PR demands it. And you are in the fight of your life.

Mark Stevens
CEO