The Modern Journalist

How Google Earth Will Save Public Relations

A couple things have happened since last week which got me thinking about modern journalism from a public relations perspective. The first was a conversation I had with one of the PR teachers at Northern Kentucky University about Google Earth. The second was a Twitter contest my old boss Jason Pontin posted.

The two are related for this reason: they are both about bypassing traditional means of communication (the media) and giving people information directly, information that they can manipulate and participate. You know, like a Read/Write world.

Jason posted a contest to describe, in 50 words, The Future of the Web, which you needed to Twitter to him for publication in the magazine. I took a stab and sent this: “More people adding bits; more software agents searching bytes; personalization on-demand.”

That definition isn’t actually new or groundbreaking, but it’s helped me clarify the mission of The Modern Journalist. Which brings us to the Evil Public Relations.

Greg, the professor at NKU, and I were talking about social media and how that may manifest itself in public relations. I started thinking about my definition of the future of the Web, and came up with this idea for PR.

We were discussing the Red River Gorge, a camping site in Kentucky that attracts campers, rock climbers, kayakers - you name it, they do it. Here was my pitch for a modern PR campaign, outside the traditional PRNewswire releases and such.

You geo-locate your releases — broken down by category (green for camping, red for climbing, ect) — and post the assets on a Google Satellite image or a Google 3D Map. Along with that, you have reservation information, contact information, videos. Whatever assets you’ve created.

Then when summer rolls around, you sponsor a series of contests for the different areas — campings, climbing, ect — for the best picture and the best 30-second video commercial. You allow people to upload their pictures and such with one caveat: they have to use GPS-tagged equipment, which means you can locate their images directly on your map. The winners get a free weekend or something the following year. What they get isn’t important. It’s that they get something for submitting.

You’re then building — through the community — a massive network of media around the very item you’re trying to sell, and effectively turning your customers into your workers.

The effect would be to bypass magazines, newspapers, radio and television, engaging with the population directly. Can you imagine putting up satellite images of your park, where people could zoom in to see the cabin they were staying at — and then pull up all the assets around them so they could get an idea of what they were going to do before they ever showed up?

That is powerful public relations.