Rubel Rocking at Blogging Enterprise
Steve Rubel is delivering the keynote here at The Blogging Enterprise in Austin. He's rocking. He spotlights the impact of blogging on PR and the traditional media. He held a moment of silence im memory of the old media, then swung into the key aspects …
Context & Ripple Effects
Steve Rubel — the CooperKatz VP whose Micro Persuasion blog had just called out Forbes' 'lynch mobs' cover story on bloggers — keynoted The Blogging Enterprise conference in Austin, framing blogging as a disruptive force in PR and traditional media. The keynote lands mid-flap: days earlier Forbes had attacked the blogosphere, and ABC's Silicon Insider was about to pile on with a rebuttal. Rubel's mock moment of silence for old media is the theatrical version of an argument already running through the week's coverage, echoing conference-culture moments like the BloggerCon-style gatherings where practitioners debate the medium in public.
First-order effects
- Conference audiences of marketers and PR professionals get a direct briefing that blogging is reshaping media relations now — shifting the practical playbook from press releases toward blogger engagement.
- Rubel's high-profile keynote cements his role as a leading voice for PR's adaptation, raising pressure on agencies like CooperKatz to operationalize what he preaches.
Second-order effects
- Traditional PR firms face client expectations to demonstrate blogger-relations competence or risk losing accounts to early-mover rivals.
- Mainstream outlets, still smarting from the Forbes backlash, must decide whether to treat bloggers as threats to attack or channels to engage — the keynote pushes them toward the latter.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, PR evolves from gatekeeping one-way messages to participating in distributed conversations, and conferences like this become the training ground where the profession rewrites its norms.
- The old-media-versus-blog conflict points toward a hybrid ecosystem where influence is measured by network reach rather than masthead authority — though how fast that settles remains genuinely uncertain.
The trend: This keynote is one data point in the mid-2000s mainstreaming of blogging, as PR and corporate communications shift from controlling messages to engaging decentralized voices.