Isn’t the World Wide Web so intergalactically wonderful?

Air, fire, earth and….web. How could we live without it? I shudder at the thought. It is the stuff of nightmares. Global warming? Hey, that’s like a bad day at the office compared to a web-less world.

And then in the midst of our cyber infatuation, the Google hits the fan. We wake up from our fantasy in the middle of the dark, dark night with a PR nightmare. All of the lightning fast finds any fact in a second, deliciousness of the web, turns to a kind of poison.

Okay, so what do I mean? Well, you have a wonderfully smart client with a great brain and a superb business model and all of the charm in the world….and, here’s where the Google in the fan strikes, a skeleton in the closet materializes. One you may not have known about at the outset. A mistake in the past. Anything from a once well-shrouded bankruptcy to a rather embarrassing scandal comes out in the wash.

In a nanno second, Google finds it and your story about the great brain, the superb business model and the global charm gets tainted by the past. Here’s where the web is a killer. There is no past. Everything is a click away from now.

So what to do? You know that the more exposure you gain for your client, for the good stuff that deserves to make news, the more you dredge up the gunk of history. Of yesterday.

What to do?

Well, there is no easy answer. You can’t hide. You can’t run. You can’t wait until it blows over because the web, thankfully, isn’t going away. What you have to do is attack back. Keep telling the story of now. Keep overwhelming the negative with the positive. Keep reminding critics that the old has an obligation to give way to the new. Stay on the offense.

The web doesn’t really kill. Only fear of it does.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Share This

Isaac Newton, a man of a million epiphanies, once said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants.” That was brilliant speak for “no one invents anything.” At the highest levels, it’s all a continuum of genius.

So Bill Gates comes out of nowhere in the 60’s and anoints himself the king of the yet to come Information Age. The Digital Age. He will give birth to it. And in a way, a powerful way, he does by creating software that gets easier to use every year. William III (and let us not forget Jobs I) stands on the shoulders of the obscure but ingenious nerds who created the graphical user interface before any normal person thought they could have a personal computer.

Anyway, tonight I watch a 1982 film, An Officer and A Gentleman and I decide to see where the stars Richard Gere and Debra Winger come from. So I go to Sergey’s place, Google, and discover in a nanno second that:

a. Gere is the descendant of Pilgrims, which may explain why he lives in my town, founded by Puritans.
b. Winger almost died serving in the Israeli Defense Forces before she ever made a movie.
c. Sergey was born in Russia.

And I discover it all on Wikipedia, in about 40 seconds. So who invented the Information Age? Isaac, William or Sergey? It matters of course, but more importantly is that all stood on the shoulders of those who came before them. And we, as PR people, have many take-aways from this. Few more powerful than Wikipedia, with which we can tell our clients’ stories to the world.

Even if they start the night watching old films. Yes, we can make news. But we can also make history.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Share This