Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

We live in a world of personalised ringtones, 21″ spinning alloy wheels and mashups. Simply put, the days of Henry Ford’s philosophy that consumers can have a car in any colour they want as long as it’s black are long gone. Personalised consumer goods are the future.

One interesting aspect of this is that the ‘Pimp My Ride’ culture is blurring the lines of the media. For example, it used to be the case that motoring press would be the only journalists to review a new car, but as a recent Gizmodo review of a Honda Civic Hybrid shows this isn’t the case anymore.

We’re at the beginning of a cycle which will see a shift from working off a media list labelled ‘technology journalists’ or ‘motoring press’ to shaping a list of journalists that would be interested in covering a topic/product based on their interests or an application of the product/service. An era of adaptive journalism as it were.

For example, look at Flickr. Flickr is a photo sharing site that was purchased by Yahoo last year in a mulit-million dollar deal. The company started out as a feature of a video game, and it wasn’t until the game makers realised how the public was using the game that they realised that they were onto something much bigger.

So suddenly introduce a GPS system and a car is appealing to a technology journalist. Show how kids are using dance mats to keep the weight off in gym class and educational correspondents ears perk up. Give a business journalist access to a mobile phone with an application to control PowerPoint and you have an article on how technology can help in the boardroom.

Move over Xzibit, the media have just been pimped !

Technorati Tags: Journalism, Media, Piaras Kelly