An introduction from Steve Rubel, VP, Micro Persuasion Practice at CooperKatz
On October 6, 2005 I issued a call to action on my blog for the PR community to go the distance. Specifically, I believe that as an industry we are way behind where we need to be in our understanding of how to apply …
Context & Ripple Effects
This byline extends the campaign Steve Rubel began on his Micro Persuasion blog on October 6, 2005, when he issued a call to action telling the PR industry it was 'way behind' on applying new media. Weeks earlier he had taken the same message to a live audience, keynoting at The Blogging Enterprise in Austin, where he held a mock moment of silence for old media while spotlighting blogging's disruption of traditional PR.
First-order effects
- The piece spreads beyond Rubel's own blog into wider circulation — picked up the same day by his Micro Persuasion feed and by B.L. Ochman's weblog — putting CooperKatz's Micro Persuasion practice at the center of the debate over whether large PR agencies are equipped for blogs.
- Fellow PR bloggers like Ochman respond critically, framing Rubel's 'erudite call' as aimed at big PR agencies only — a direct challenge to the reach of his argument within his own community.
Second-order effects
- Big agencies face pressure to stand up dedicated blogging and new-media capabilities rather than treat blogs as another distribution channel, since one of their own VPs is publicly arguing the industry is behind.
- The public split between Rubel and skeptics like Ochman hands independent practitioners a positioning opening: if big-agency adoption is questioned from inside the community, boutique and solo consultants can claim greater credibility on conversational media.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, PR's core unit of work shifts from issuing press materials to engaging individual bloggers, forcing agencies to rebuild practices around monitoring and participation rather than broadcast — though how fast large firms close the gap Rubel describes is unresolved.
The trend: Mid-2000s PR is being pulled from press-release broadcast toward blog-era engagement, with practitioner-evangelists like Rubel setting the agenda and fellow bloggers policing who the message actually serves.