PR Squared: OhMy! CGM’s Long-Term Impact on PR

OhMy News is a very popular South Korean news website with as many readers (700K per day) as any large U.S. news outlet. It relies 100% on citizen journalists to report the news; OhMy’s only staff is comprised of a handful of professional copyeditors. Articles reach prominence digg-style, via a user voting system.

To date, Consumer Generated Content (CGM) has been seen as a wave of craptastic YouTube videos, easy-come/easy-go blogs, inane MySpace chatter, podcasts, etc. Revere it or revile it, CGM is a BIG wave; it cannot be ignored; its “wavelets” (content, producers, mediatypes) will get ever-more sophisticated… But so far, CGM has not posed an outsized threat to mainstream content sources (Hollywood, MSM, MTV, etc.).

Except for OhMy News. It’s as good as it needs to be. It’s accurate, timely, popular, profitable. It’s probably what the BBC 2.0 project strives to be; a model for journalism in the dawning CGM era.

So here’s the Question of the Millennium for PR types: what if every journalism outlet in the U.S. morphed into an OhMy clone?

First off, we’ll end our subscriptions to journalist-tracking services like Bacons. You’re on your own, kid. There will always be “professional citizen journalists” like Foremski and a cadre of A-List bloggers to impress, but their ranks are likely to thin out. The reporter you’ll need to impress could be your dog-walker, or your pesky kid-sister, or the butcher...you won’t know til it’s too late; the article is posted, amigo.

So what can we do to supplement PR's traditional capabilities?

A few ideas spring to mind, but we’ll need more:

Event planning – manufacture a buzzworthy gig
Word-of-Mouth Marketing – tell your friends! (And your dog-walker, butcher, sister…)
Blogger Relations – already underway
Blog Monitoring - already underway
Purpose-Built Blogs (CEO, news-based, crisis-made, etc.)
Press Release-As-Content – for the media remixing needs of the media- and blogopshere
Podcasts – “timeshift your content”
Remixable Media – it’s not just the press release; we can produce scads of cool content
Psychological Counseling – I am only half-joking; it will not be easy for the clients to offer up their content in an easily remixable format (to "set it free"), only to watch their message and content get hacked & contorted by legions of amateur journalists and bloggers!