PR Week's NEXT Conference
One thing that defines Capstrat is that we always try to be a step ahead in what’s next in the communications industry. Our expertise in public affairs defined us early on. Today, as power in the financial sector shifts from Wall Street to Washington, D.C., our clients can benefit from those political insights.
We explored the power of the Internet early on. Instead of going out and acquiring a digital firm, we built our group from the ground up, and today organizations ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies look to Capstrat to help them navigate the online world.
Now Capstrat is one of seven agencies sponsoring the NEXT Conference, presented in conjunction with PR Week magazine’s 10th anniversary. On November 19 at New York’s New World Stages, we’ll look into the future with a day-long seminar about what’s next in public relations.
I’m scheduled to lead a roundtable discussion on the future of digital public affairs. Leaders from agencies such as Ogilvy Worldwide, Edelman, Porter Novelli, Ketchum, Weber Shandwick and Waggner Edstrom will lead discussions during the day.
Here’s why this is important. Think about just three years ago – 2005. Capstrat didn’t have a User Experience Designer. We didn’t have an Engagement Marketing Group. In fact, we had about half as many employees as we have today.
I submit that the reason we’ve doubled in size in the past three to four years is that we’re unwilling to serve clients today the same way we did in 2005. If we were, we’d be left behind.
We always want to be a step ahead. Not 10 steps ahead; that can be frustrating for clients, most of whom just need our help for today’s nettlesome problems.
We always want to be focused in on our clients’ “today” needs. But we also have to be mindful of what tomorrow is going to look like, too. I’m looking forward to catching at glimpse of it at PR Week’s NEXT conference on November 19.
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To borrow the concept from Kevin Kelly's presentation on Ted.com[1], the web as we know it is only 5,000 days old. 5,000 days, people. That's a 13 year old kid.
That 13 year old kid, as he grew up, basically changed how we think about economic patterns (increased individual investors, more informationally efficient markets), social patterns (new media for personal publishing, need for "identity management"), and geographic patterns (decreasing importance on locale, greater need to work in a global timeclock).
Those are just the few that come to mind immediately. And forgive me for overextending the metaphor, but can we presume we've even hit the adolescence of the web?
For me, we're still in that lurchy, awkward and pimply state where much is left to define. For example, how do we build the semantic web: is it a restricted decision, is it crowdsourced, or does federalism play a part? What countries? How about business exchange: what are the common business process vocabularies? And oh by the way, what can you do if everything on the planet has its own URL?
Those are lofty ideas that peer 2-3 years into the future--if even that far. They're the ones that tend to bubble up in pragmatic discussions like: "is a blog appropriate for my company....and who should own it?" And they're the ones we debate offline, at lunch or after work
To wrap up, The NOW is more compelling that than when Gutenberg pressed his first work. It places nearly unlimited capabilities in the hands of people who have historically had few channels. It's somewhat uncontrollable. And identifiable groups of people want to participate. How should we handle this?
[1] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html
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