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more than 90% of PR executives believe that the distribution of fake news and the purposeful distortion of truth are the biggest ethical threats we face in the future. Defense of malicious behavior and lack of corporate transparency were cited by over 80% of the respondents.

Today, earned media – pitching and placing stories through work with journalists and influencers — remains the dominant source (50%) of revenue for PR agencies. It’s predicted to drop to 37% over the next 5 years, with shared (23%), owned (23%) and paid media (17%) picking up the difference.

nearly two-thirds (64%) of PR professionals think that in five years the average person won’t be able to distinguish whether the information they consume comes from paid, earned, shared or owned sources.

The language used is vital. Munoz did not mention the words ‘sorry’ or ‘apology’ in his internal memo, merely expressing his “regrets” that the situation arose.  “You need to think about the ramifications of getting that apology wrong, because often it’s much, much worse if you don’t get the follow-up right. Mistakes happen, but the nature of the company’s response says a lot about their ethics in general,

“All people want to hear is an authentic message and some action that ensures it won’t happen again. Reputations take years to build and seconds to lose. It’s not worth risking anything.”

the first golden rule of corporate apologising is speed: get your say in first to limit the damage and give the impression of owning up to it. Munoz’s letter came nearly 24 hours after the debacle. Then you need to empathise with the people affected – in this case not only the passenger in question, but those around him.  “He hasn’t considered the distress caused to his other passengers here. The problem is bigger than defending the actions of his staff, he needs to apologise to those clearly upset by having to witness the event and feel uncomfortable on his service,”

But then there’s the whole obsession now with tying content to revenues—in other words, tracking whether people who are consuming your content will eventually buy something from you, and putting a hard number on each piece of content you create. Do you think that’s misguided? Oh, I think there’s no question it’s misguided. It’s been shown over and over again to be misguided—that in a world of zero marginal cost, being trusted is the single most urgent way to build a business. You don’t get trusted if you’re constantly measuring and tweaking and manipulating so that someone will buy from you.

I don’t have any problem with measurements, per se; I’m just saying that most of the time when organizations start to measure stuff, they then seek to industrialize it, to poke it into a piece of software, to hire ever cheaper people to do it.

There are constantly trends and fads on the Internet, and people make a good living amplifying them. But I think that industrialized content marketing is one of those fads, and it will end up where they all do: petered out because human beings are too smart to fall for its appeal.