As we expand we contract....

All living organisms expand and contract as part of their life cycle, and businesses and companies are no exception to this rule. I learned this the hard way, I do that alot, years ago while working at Novell. Despite fulfilling my duties beyond expectations, (I was the senior manager of business media in the PR department and had successfully placed newly appointed CEO Eric Schmidt on the cover of BusinessWeek among other accomplishments), I was laid off when the newly appointed VP of Marketing came aboard and changed the structure of the marketing department. It contracted and I, like many others, was not part of the counter expansion move. It ended up best for all as I entered a more rewarding conversation a few months later.

Valeria Maltoni's insightful post, Revealing Yourself To Others, wrestled this memory from me when she postulated, "Has mutual disclosure through memes, for example, also become a form of PR?" As we know a meme is a theoretical unit of cultural information, and as Valeria also says-- more and more people are using social media. The PR craftsman, and I deliberately use the term craftsman, is faced with the task of knowing when and how to craft a client's 'disclosures.' Much the same way we used to manage lists of journalists to pitch, today's craftsman must know how and where to enter the best conversation possible to disclose his clients 'meme.' And as Valeria goes on to say, "revealing yourself takes time. There are many layers."

Stuart McFaul at Spiralgroup,(disclosure: I perform business development duties for Spiralgroup) puts this very succinctly when he says, "Social Marketing is really about getting the right message to the right person, using the right media at the right time."

And as social media expands the ability to insert memes of disclosure into the conversation will contract until the only way to do so is to always be part of the life cycle.

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