I was in the same room as Sir Martin Sorrell a week or two ago. It happens about once a year. He articulated very clearly why people like me get paid by businesses.
"I know," said Sir Martin, "that if someone writes an article about WPP and I buy an ad in the same magazine, they believe the article." Simple, pragmatic, basic stuff - and a good definition of publicity 10 years ago. As a grey faced, skint account executive that was my world. Get up. Go to work. Carve out a sharpened news angle, give a hack a tickle, and Bob's yer Uncle that's 2.5 million people the next morning reading your story, and saying, 'wow, did you see that?' Then I went to the pub and talked about the Britpop scene.
Today though, normal civilians are increasingly more interested in what others closer to home have to say and do. Now I, and many others' first port of call is not the media, but our community - both in-person and online.
Charlotte Ross in the London Evening Standard has been getting pissed off about Facebook lately, and argued that people like me with 300 'friends' are show-offs. I don't have 300 friends in the literal sense, but I do have a community around me. It's a community made up of 300 people I've worked with for years or a handful of days, people I've shaken hands with, had sex with (you could count them on less than one hand), drank either one pint or several hundreds with, or most likely talked a lot about sport with. The vast majority of them, I'll never want to see again - but that's not the point. If they're a friend of mine, then we have something in common. I would expect them to be interested in similar things to me. I would expect them to be read the same stories as me in newspapers, have opinions that will interest me on brands, issues, stories, football managers etc. And above all, I would trust them.
With smart people like Mark Zuckerberg in the world, our personal communities are only going to get stronger, broader and ultimately more influential. Our industry needs to recognise that when people go looking for information they trust - more and more they will head into their own community. It's there that they'll gather info, whether it's the written word on blogs, interesting newspaper articles, photos, widgets, downloaded applications or thrown sheep.
Our skills need to adapt and evolve - that much is obvious. But so does our mindset, and so does our content. Stories, emotion and useful information will always move people - but the manner in which we create it, package it and deliver it is changing fundamentally. Leading the community is where our future resides.
Broadband was switched on in my house this week, despite a letter from Sky confirming my switch on date as August 22. The letter was headed 'It Just Keeps Getting Better.' It didn't. It also explains the rather irregular posting here, which I hope will now improve.
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