Your PR Architect

This week, I received a message alerting me that the digital sky is falling. It read, in part: The entire digital ecosystem is in crisis — a crisis of trust.  Ecosystem Backyard, by Cedrick May from Wikimedia Commons From issues of brand safety, to growing cries of "fake news," to a slew of personal data breaches across the web, it's clear that trust in the digital industry has eroded considerably, affecting every marketer at brands, agencies, social platforms and beyond.  Do you feel prepared to combat the challenges of trust facing the digital industry? If you're unsure, let's talk about ...  You get the idea. The research sales rep who sent this dire warning is promoting his "insights, forecasts and data they can trust on digital marketing, media and commerce." And perhaps there's value in such an offering. Truth is, I'm disenchanted at the assumption that there's a digital ecosystem.  It's one of those biological phras...

It's hard to know what last week's Facebook announcements will mean to consumers of news. But, that's largely because Facebook isn't entirely clear where news content will emerge on users' news feeds. (Which now must be called something else.) For a few years, I've asked undergraduates where they get their news. The top response: from social media. (For a while, many said they got their news from Jon Stewart until he departed from The Daily Show faux news desk.) Now that's changing. Last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told consumers that the social medium's algorithm would now serve up "friends and family"-generated content ahead of news stories from publishers. The goal, he suggested, is more meaningful interactions -- and, by omission, fewer firestorms erupting from fake news generated by purveyors of pretend news. Why change? Zuckerberg wants no more to do with a cascade of political propagandists. The angry disputes they gen...

By Greg Rakozy (www.instagram.com/grakozy), via unsplash.com More than one friend of mine likes to post photos to Facebook. Photos of their travels. Snapshots from their parties. Lots of photos. Every. single. photo. Like a sky full of stars, that's too much to absorb. What's worse? Often, they're near-identical images -- group shots of three or four people, taken moment by moment, with little change of gesture or expression. Or the dreaded BOH (backs of heads). Not action photos, which might call for a rapid-fire sequence of images. Just group photos. People grinning for the camera. Do we need to see four, five, or six iterations of the same snapshot? No. That's unfair to everyone who follows you. Sure, social media is a visual medium. Visual communications, from infographics to vlogs, are the common currency of the internet. And, one outcome of citizen journalism and the proliferation of smartphone cameras is that people take countless photos. This isn...