Musings of a Marketing Maven

I’m sup­posed to be writ­ing a book review on social media for PR pro­fes­sion­als, but I stum­bled on Wor­dle and couldn’t resist putting my notes into visual form first. (Yes, I con­fess this is cre­ative procrastination.)

Here are ideas sparked by the hand­writ­ten notes I took while read­ing Putting the Pub­lic Back in Pub­lic Rela­tions: How Social Media Is Rein­vent­ing the Aging Busi­ness of PR, by Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge:

For those who haven’t yet played with Wor­dle The tool scans a text stream (Atom feed, RSS, etc.) and then applies some magic algo­rithm to the selec­tion and place­ment of words that appear in the visu­al­iza­tion. You can influ­ence (but not con­trol) the font, color palette, and a few of the lay­out elements.

Wor­dle lets you influ­ence what appears, with­out allow­ing you to con­trol the mes­sage or its place­ment. I chose this play­ful approach for my review because it seems sin­gu­larly appro­pri­ate for the sub­ject mat­ter of the book, which is all about sto­ry­telling, influ­enc­ing the influ­en­tials, and the burn­ing need to rein­vent and trans­form the prac­tice of pub­lic rela­tions in the face of the social media revolution.

I do rec­om­mend the book for PR pro­fes­sion­als, although not for lead­ing edge PR pros who have been immersed in con­ver­sa­tional mar­ket­ing, active lis­ten­ing strate­gies, or “the new PR.” For pio­neers like you, this book would be too basic.

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