The Changing Role of Public Relations: 5 Insights from the Global Communications Report 2017

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In-house PR professionals, agency PR professionals and client-side marketers are known for their differences of opinion about the future of public relations. Key points that these stakeholders disagree and agree on are outlined in the Global Communications Report 2017, compiled by the USC Center for Public Relations and the Association of National Advertisers in consultation with their partner organizations. Here are five important insights drawn from the report and its associated research on The Evolution of Public Relations.

1. PR is becoming more important to marketing, even as both disciplines continue to converge

Client-side marketers plan to increase both internal staffing and overall spending on public relations over the next five years, according to ANA’s 2017 survey of U.S. marketers.


Increased spending suggests that public relations is “becoming more important to marketers”, said ANA’s Group EVP Bill Duggan, citing the crucial role for PR in managing digital communication and feedback loops.

At the same time, a majority of surveyed marketers (61%) believed that PR will become more closely aligned with marketing, while 20% went so far as to say that PR will become a subset of marketing.

The global and U.S. PR professionals surveyed, however, were more hesitant about the convergence of PR and marketing. PR agency leaders indicated that they report most frequently into corporate communications (39%), which is more than into marketing (21%) or brand management (12%), but this gap is narrowing as client solutions become increasingly integrated.

Meanwhile, 18% of corporate communications departments were reporting into marketing. This proportion could grow if more organizations follow the example of Procter & Gamble, Virgin America and other well known companies by restructuring their marketing functions to include PR.

Whether convergence will expand or diminish the role of the PR professional is hotly contested. What does seem likely is that a broader skill set will be required to navigate the fluidity of marketing and PR in a digital world.

2. Declining revenues from earned media will put the spotlight on paid, shared and owned media – and the skills required to profit from them

PR agencies and in-house PR teams alike expect declining revenues from earned media over the next five years, prompting more spending on paid, shared and owned media.


Supporting this shift, over 60% of surveyed PR executives believed that branded content and influencer marketing, which are both primarily paid, will be important trends over the next five years.

Paid content, however, has long been the domain of advertising. PR professionals in a changing media landscape may benefit from mastering media buying, the report suggests, but this currently ranks last on the list of skills PR professionals consider important for future growth.

Meanwhile, more than half of the PR executives in the study believed that the consumer of the future will not distinguish between paid and earned media. Another one-third disagreed. The answer to this debate could have significant implications for all stakeholders.

3. PR professionals must harness social listening, digital storytelling, and social purpose

Digital can improve the quality of public relations by enabling instant outbound communication and inbound feedback. In this dynamic environment, PR professionals believe the most important trends impacting the future of the PR will be digital storytelling (88%), social listening (82%), social purpose (71%), and big data (70%).

Marketing professionals showed some consensus with PR professionals about these trends, but prioritized social listening (88%) over digital storytelling (80%), and real-time marketing (69%), influencer marketing (68%) and branded content (67%) over big data (63%).


Both groups agree on the importance of social purpose, which can be vital to the direction, cohesion and outcomes of the other top trends.

4. More clients will hire agencies to provide strategy, expertise, and creative thinking

The rising emphasis on strategy and creative in the client/agency relationship is a clear theme in both the 2016 and 2017 editions of the Global Communications Report.

For the in-house marketing professionals surveyed in 2017, the top reasons for working with PR agencies were strategic insights (67%), creative thinking (64%), specific practice areas (63%), media relations (62%), digital and social media (60%), and measurement and evaluation (60%).

For in-house PR professionals, the top reasons for working with PR agencies were similar: strategic insights (69%), creative thinking (69%), specific practice areas (62%), and digital and social media (61%). However, there was less emphasis on measurement and evaluation (50%) and media relations (49%).


The growing strategic and creative input of PR agencies needs to be reflected in compensation models, says Fred Cook, Director of the USC Center for Public Relations, who suggests focusing more on value delivered than hours spent.

5. The value of PR will depend on achieving measurable business objectives

The vast majority of surveyed PR and marketing professionals believed that PR can best increase its value by demonstrating how PR programs achieve measurable business objectives.


However, improving measurement of results itself was a lower priority for PR in the eyes of PR professionals than marketing professionals, who, in turn, were less preoccupied about PR’s ability to address the wants and needs of all stakeholders. These disparities in stakeholder expectations can be reduced by establishing clear goals from the outset, as the report recommends.

The report also highlights the growing demand for PR to develop sophisticated ways to measure less-tangible variables like brand reputation, purchase intent, leadership, and creativity.

Repositioning PR to maximize relevance and talent

The five key insights above provide some clues as to how PR might reposition itself as an aspirational career choice – something which less than one-third of PR executives believe the industry is doing well. Given that recruiting and retaining the right talent remains a big challenge for PR, it will be interesting to see how the growing demand for strategic thinking – ranked in the study as the most important skill for today’s PR professionals – will shape PR in the years to come.

Table: The Evolution of Public Relations report by ANA and the USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations
Graphs and charts: the Global Communications Report 2017, presented by The Holmes Report and USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations

6 Key Strategies Media Companies Need to Prosper in the Future News Industry

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One of the most striking trends in 21st century innovation is the significant potential for media to create value on a global scale.

Media, in all its forms, is fuelling economic growth, structural change, and technological advances like never before. As society debates the role and influence of media in a “post-truth” world, it is increasingly apparent that the future of media is crucial to shaping the future of humanity.

Media futurist Ross Dawson shared useful insights on how to create a vibrant future for media organizations in his keynote at the #SchibstedNext 2016 event held by Schibsted Media Group. You can see the video of the full keynote below.

Despite the widespread changes impacting the global media industry, Dawson pointed to the enduring and insatiable human appetite for information in a multichannel media world.

“Arguably the entire economy is becoming based on media, the creation of messages, the flow of messages, and where they are going,” Dawson said.

Here are six key ways in which media organizations can empower themselves to create their own future, drawn from Dawson’s talk at #SchibstedNext.

1. Create a compelling vision

“The best way to predict the future of media is to create it,” Dawson told the media leaders assembled in Oslo. For today’s media organizations, achieving a successful transition to tomorrow hinges on understanding “who it is we can be, who it is we want to be, moving forward”.

Forging a compelling vision for your media organization and communicating it effectively is vital for staff to adapt to the merging of technology and humanity, Dawson said, in an era when “technology is more and more capable, taking more and more of who we are”.

Without a clear strategic vision, companies are more likely to be blinded by past successes and overpowered by technological change. As the report of the 2020 group for the New York Times recently put it:

“To do nothing, or to be timid in imagining the future, would mean being left behind.”

2. Translate experimentation into value creation

Today, in the space of a day, you can test an idea, see how people respond, and develop it further. This has become a fundamental capability of every organization in the entire media industry.

“Revenue is highly uncertain, so you need to be able to experiment,” said Dawson. “For every experiment you should know what you want to learn, and when you learn that, you will be able to design the next experiment.”

Dawson referred to a basic test-and-learn model favored by entrepreneurs and outlined in The Lean Startup by Eric Ries: come up with an idea, put it into action, learn from that, iterate, and turn it into a result. “You can learn from others, absolutely, but you need to be able to create your own guidebook,” Dawson added.

Part of converting experimentation into value creation is a focus on community: “Being able to connect people, define what it is that’s common between them…to be able to create media which is relevant to all of those people, and to be able to filter that…to the individual…across many news or media organizations.”

3. Make the most of human and machine intelligence

Alongside advances in algorithms and the proliferation of convenient, high-tech user interfaces, robots and amateurs are now making music, art, video, and journalism in ways that were once limited to professionals. Dawson offered advice on how media organizations must respond:

“I believe that in the last 20 years, one of the most important things is how technology has enabled our creativity. If we are looking for the best media, we must bring together the professionals—who have the expertise and the context—with the amateurs, with all of us, with the many that are enabled by technology to create new possibilities.”

Optimizing both human and machine intelligence will become increasingly critical to value creation as organizations collect ever more data and achieve new milestones in consumer knowledge and engagement.

4. Ensure a clear and dynamic platform strategy

As existing and emerging media platforms vie for our attention, a solid understanding of platforms and their relationship to value creation is essential to steer media towards a positive future.

The best platform strategies, in Dawson’s view, are dynamic and user driven: “How is it you create value for participants? That’s the fundamental aspect of a platform,” he said. “Designing value for the participants in ways that they can create that together.”

In order to maximize value for participants across platforms, Dawson highlighted the role of data analysis, signal monitoring, user feedback loops, and collaboration with both internal and external platform creators.

5. Build on your existing capabilities and transcend their boundaries

A focus on transcending the boundaries has underpinned recent innovations in the media world, including the immersive virtual reality smartphone app available from the New York Times.

Media organizations must continue to think beyond the boundaries—such as print, broadcast, and even digital—if they are to create more compelling experiences for the audiences of tomorrow. Dawson elaborated:

“You need to be able to say, what are our capabilities today? What are we great at? What are we distinct at? What are we world-class at? What is it that we are going to build on? As organizations and individuals you need to be able to map your path and capability development moving forward.”

In order to transcend the boundaries and promote innovation, media brands are learning “to actually live what they are doing so that the messages that flow outside represent who they are,” said Dawson. This involves building the flow of communication and transparency internally in ways that mirror the external values and perceptions of a brand.

 

6. Foster bold and agile leadership to create your own future

Even as user participation in media continues to flourish, Dawson reminded the Schibsted audience that strong leadership remains crucial, because the future of media “is not a spectator sport.” As the Law of Requisite Variety makes clear, only those organizations that are as flexible as their environment will have the power to be able to create the future.

Therefore, leaders’ ability to put a bold vision into action, to push out the boundaries and set new standards for media will be crucial to success in the industry going forward. This is especially important because, at its core, the future of media “is an experiment,” Dawson believes.

“There is no roadmap to be able to say, this is exactly where the future of media is going. You need to create that. For your individual organization, it is going to be a different answer.”

Expanding Customer Engagement: Case Studies of VR as Storyteller and Skill Builder

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As virtual reality technologies improve and become more accessible, organizations are finding increasingly meaningful ways to use VR to educate and engage their customers. When an exciting VR experience is carefully built around an immersive brand story and useful content, VR can take customer engagement to the next level. Here’s how two very different companies are each using VR to unify storytelling and skill development.

Lowe’s Holoroom How To: Immersing customers in home improvement learning

U.S. hardware chain Lowe’s is one of the first retailers to use VR to teach customers practical home improvement skills. Since 2014, Lowe’s Holoroom How To experience has gradually transitioned from a tool for customers to visualize what a bathroom or kitchen renovation could look like, to a platform for DIY skills training. The focus is on exploring real-life applications of VR “to directly help our customers solve everyday problems”, according to Kyle Nel, Executive Director of Lowe’s Innovation Labs.

In 2017, the six-month pilot of the Holoroom How To skills clinic is available to customers at two Lowe’s stores in the U.S. (Framingham, MA and Burlington, ON) and one RONA store in Canada (Beloeil, Québec). Wearing a VR headset, customers act on instructions from a video to practice skills such as installing shelves, painting a fence or tiling a shower. Tactile responses on the handheld equipment give customers the sensation of actually holding a drill or other hardware tool. The immersive nature of the technology makes it a valuable experiential learning platform and a source of useful insights into customer knowledge, recall and motivation.

Lowe’s asserts that people who participate in the Holoroom How To demonstrate increased motivation to take on DIY projects and better recall of the steps involved. “We believe innovations like Holoroom How To will soon enable instantaneous learning moments and massively scalable training opportunities that empower both customers and employees around the world,” says Nel.

CommBank’s Start Smart VR pilot: Fostering financial education

In a different take on customer education, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia is incorporating VR for school children into its Start Smart corporate responsibility program. CommBank partnered with Australian author Ursula Dubosarsky to create a picture book, Sammy the Space Koala, that teaches children about financial decision-making, saving and investing. The book is made interactive by a VR headset, ‘The Teleporter’, developed by M&C Saatchi’s innovation lab Tricky Jigsaw.

The picture books and VR headsets were distributed to around 1500 students from 24 Australian primary schools during late 2016. The students were encouraged to take the VR experience home to revisit key concepts about financial literacy with their parents or carers, who were asked to provide feedback on the experience. According to Stuart Tucker, GM of brand, sponsorship and marketing operations at CommBank, one parent reported their child learned more in a 10-minute VR journey in outer space than they had in five years on Earth.

Using VR “teleports” kids into a “richer learning experience”, says Michael Canning, M&C Saatchi Australia’s Executive Creative Director. “VR is everywhere at the moment, but the reason that VR is relevant is because it becomes an active decision-making tool – if you’re just reading the book you can’t choose the items you buy. It’s hard to do that in a passive medium but VR turned it into immersive storytelling.”

Making the most of VR in PR

One of the key advantages that VR has over other mediums is that there are no distractions for the customer. This has significant implications for PR, as Alex Halls observes in a blog post for Wolfstar consultancy:

“The best PR campaigns have the power to grip the consumer but the weaker campaigns are often filtered out among the many news stories we see day to day. VR’s advantage is once the headset is on, you are completely immersed in the media, you choose where you look and what to focus on. Every part of it, every turn of the head, can be intricately planned for the best results and the biggest impact.”

Nonetheless, an effective use of VR must be closely connected to brand narrative and customer engagement to avoid “the gimmick factor” and ensure “that it’s still story first and technology second”, says Ian Shying, UX and Design Director at Edelman Australia. The way forward for PR, then, is to use VR as a strategic tool for meaningful storytelling and customer education.

#DeleteUber: How much will activism shape the on-demand economy?

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I was recently interviewed for a News Corp article on the Australian response to the global backlash on Uber.

I told the journalist in our interview that while I know a number of Australians who have deleted Uber, most Australians focus on the utility of the service. I was quoted:
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The evidence is in: we are all born to be futurists

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I believe that we all need to be our own futurists: in a rapidly changing world we need the skills and capabilities to think effectively about the future so we can act better today.

Perhaps humans are all in fact born to engage deeply in the future, it is simply a capacity we need to develop further.

Renowned positive psychology professor Martin Seligman, in a recent New York Times article prefacing his forthcoming book Homo Prospectus, says humans are intrinsically focused on the future.
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How to Become a Data Journalist

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First, the bad news: If you want to be a data journalist, odds are you’ll need to teach yourself. There are courses and organizations that can help, but journalism schools are only slowly adding data to their degree offerings. What’s more, if you’re reading this, you’re probably a journalist who wants to add data to your skill set. Going back to grad school may not be practical. One does not enroll in a design undergrad because one wants to learn how to use Photoshop, for instance.

Now, the good news: it’s possible to transform yourself into a data journalist. Here’s how:

1)    Pick a platform.

2)    Learn the basics.

3)    Tackle one example of each of the Big Three.

This is how those steps work in more detail:

Pick a platform

First step is picking your platform. You can take the traditional approach and just learn barely enough of a dozen different platforms to churn out a serviceable pie chart after an hour of bashing around and Googling everything, but I don’t recommend it. At a certain point, one must commit. This is one of those points. Figure out which software feels right to you, whether it be Tableau, Google Data Studio, Power BI, or some other platform, and go with it.

This choice may not be entirely up to you. If your newsroom has already done some data projects, you should probably get with the program and use whatever they’re already using. There are also plenty of other ways to visualize and analyze data than with the three I listed above. However, I’m operating under the assumption that you’re a reporter, and therefore probably do not find yourself in possession of coding skills, and that eliminates certain options like D3.

Learn the basics

Second step is learning enough of your chosen platform to get started. Most platforms come with their own tutorials, and you can also look to services like Lynda for training. Alternately, you can just dive into step 3 and try to learn through trial and error. Learning software this way is a bit like learning to swim by jumping in a lake and hoping things work out for the best, but experiential learners may find it’s the only approach that really works.

If your newsroom has any experience with data, your very first step should probably involve finding whichever reporters have done data work in the past, and wheedling them for help getting started. You can also hunt down a full-time data journalist outside your newsroom and ask them to mentor you. There’s a good chance they’ll go for it.

Data journalism can be a lonely, isolated life bereft of human sources to interview. In other words, many data journalists could use a break and some human contact. Reach out to one and see what they say. I’ve spent years trying to wheedle the journalists I work with into learning Tableau, with little success. Every single journalist who has come to me asking for help with training has received some variation of, “Absolutely! Of course I can help!”

Tackle one example of each of the Big Three

Third step is tackling the Big Three: elections, census, and economy. If you’re a journalist, you need to be able to cover elections, you need to be able to cover demographics, and you need to be able to cover economic issues. From these three basic types of data, most other types of analysis can be extrapolated.

Further, all three types are topics for which data should be fairly easy to find. Most countries have plenty of election data available, whether generated internally or externally. Same goes for census information and economic metrics.

In each case, you will follow the same basic production outline:

1) Hit Google and figure out which data is available on the subject. This is the most difficult step. Don’t be discouraged if you hit a wall early on–data is often surprisingly elusive. Keep trying. Be prepared to jump through some hoops even once you find the data. Many sources have a learning curve simply to figure out how to select or download their data.

2) Pull up the data you find in something simple like Excel, so you can see how the file is structured and what it contains. Figure out how the headers work. What do those column names mean? Are there any cryptic titles that need to be replaced with titles that make more sense? Is your dataset manageable in size? If you have more than 20 columns, it’s probably a poor choice for your first data project.

3) Clean your data, if needed. For your first training datasets, this shouldn’t be an issue. Try and just steer clear of dirty data right now. When dealing with data, anything that’s wrong is “dirty.” For instance, if you have two alternate spellings of the same person’s name in your dataset, that’s “dirty” data because your software will treat those two spellings as different people. When you’re first starting out, you should seek out simpler datasets with few or no mistakes. You want to have a firm footing in your platform of choice before you try and tackle really messy data sources. These types of sources can easily lead to errors in your analysis and conclusions.

4) Figure out the question you want to answer. Think about which columns (which data) you’ll need to answer that question. What sorts of views make sense? Is there a geographic component? Time component? Both?

5) Open your data in the data platform of your choice. If you decided to go with something Excel-based, like Pivot Tables, you can pat yourself on the back at this point for having saved yourself a step.

6) Start to answer your question from step 3. Remember that most visualizations begin life looking homely and unintelligible. It takes time to shape them. Be prepared to make multiple visualizations looking at the data different ways, and throw away those that don’t do anything useful. Often your finished product will be a dashboard with multiple views on the same page, and it’s normal to build more views than you need as you’re exploring your data. There’s nothing wrong with throwing away a third of the views you construct by the time you publish. This is perfectly normal.

7) Decide whether you’ve answered your question. If you have, see if that answer leads to any more questions–or if you’ve stumbled across any other interesting questions as you’ve worked through what you have. The side questions are frequently the most interesting.

8) Go show your results to someone. Their response can be anything from shocked astonishment at your feat to bored indifference. Bear in mind that just because you blow someone’s mind, that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily a genius. (But it certainly does encourage you to go out and keep analyzing.)

Strength in Numbers

Once you’ve tackled the Big 3, you should have enough familiarity with your chosen data platform to see whether data is for you. Many journalists are math phobes, and find numbers intimidating. It’s okay if you feel out of your depth. Bear in mind that as well as being scary, numbers can be transformative. Presented properly, they lend credence to your stories in a way that no amount of good prose can match.

One of the standby rules of writing states, “Show, don’t tell.” Data visualizations are the ultimate expression of this rule. They sit alongside our words and show the audience the numeric truth in what we report. This is of tremendous value to us, our work and our audience. In a world where credibility is a continuing challenge, we could all use some authoritative weight to throw around. Data can be that weight.

Smaller companies will drive innovation and economic growth with nimble learning and work structures

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I recently did a media briefing for Telstra Business on why small and mid-sized businesses need to adopt relevant technologies to keep pace with a rapidly changing business environment. One of the interviews I did after the briefing was with Kochie’s Business Builders.

The two short videos below were excerpted from the interview, with summary notes below.


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How CIOs and technology leaders can map the future shape of their industries

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I was recently interviewed for a podcast on The Future of IT for Cisco’s Connected Futures program, along with leading CTOs, CDOs and technology strategists.

You can listen to the podcast below.

Points I make in the podcast on the role of CIO and technology leadership include:
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What Motivates People to Click on News Stories

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In the digital era, a news story’s success is often measured by its page views. Not only that, metrics play a large role in informing editorial decisions, partly because of the assumed link between clicks and audience interests.

While these statements may seem self-evident, a recent study in the academic journal Journalism reveals some cracks in these notions. Researchers at VU Amsterdam, a university in Netherlands, explored 56 news users motivations for clicking or not clicking stories by asking them to share their thoughts, or “think aloud”, as they browsed news online.

The researchers found several reasons for why people click on certain news items and not others. They also suggest that a lack of page views doesn’t necessarily mean users think a news story is not interesting or important.

Click-worthy news stories

Some of the motivations for clicking on news items:

    • They were personally relevant to a reader’s everyday life and offered information for discussions in social settings.
    • Events happened nearby, though what constituted close proximity was subjective.
    • Prominently placed news items received clicks because their location gave the impression that they were important.
    • Follow-up pieces were clicked, granted a user had been tracking the story and the news item had a new development.
    • Headlines with familiar information, such as a name, a news user recalled but could not immediately place.
    • Headlines, even if considered uninteresting, received clicks if accompanied by a visually appealing photo.
    • Amusing or funny headlines attracted clicks, even if story content had little value to users
    • Disheartening headlines garnered clicks, but not if they were perceived as excessively sad. “Feel good” headlines received clicks because of their light-hearted nature and positive affect on the reader, not because they fell into a particular news genre

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Why people don’t click new items

  • Headline appears informationally complete, so there is no need to read full story.
  • There’s an associative gap between a headline and the story, so readers don’t connect the news item with their pre-existing interest in a topic.
  • Users already know the story, think the news is obvious, or that the news repeats itself (“supersaturation”) too often without providing new developments.
  • Headline is an opinion a news user disagrees with or is dismissed as petty.
  • A news item is too in-depth and the user doesn’t have enough context to understand it.

When not clicking doesn’t mean not interested

There were pragmatic reasons behind why users did not click on stories, even though they were interested in them.

  • Data-heavy stories weren’t clicked because they cost the user too much to view.
  • Items with videos were sometimes avoided because load times and commercials would disrupt user experience
  • Users didn’t have time to read the full story or thought they’d get more information on it later from a different source.

Other news users browsed headlines to stay informed, but were satisfied with this superficial “scanning” or “checking” that they didn’t click on stories. They went online for the news headlines alone.

Takeaways

In terms of page views, these findings give insights into what makes a headline weak versus strong and “clickable,” thus offering direction on how newsrooms can improve. However, behavior from news users who prefer to scan consistently for snack-sized developments suggests a more compulsive and cursory tendency in consuming news, and it’s doubtful that more effort in constructing headlines will translate into higher click through rates from this group.

If an online publication’s goal is to gain more clicks in order to bring in more advertising revenue, experimenting with site design and focusing on user experience may result in solutions that override the pragmatic reasons holding back user engagement.

The study suggests that news users are not simply interested in so-called trivial and soft news items, but that explanations for not clicking on a story are more complex and nuanced. If news organizations can focus in on what users do like, such as personally relevant stories and ones with social utility, while delivering it an user-friendly and and tailored format, it’s possible both to maintain journalistic integrity and better captivate audiences.

Read the full study here.

Domain names for thought leadership content – showing clients the future

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Over many years I have registered domain names for interesting topics, almost all of them about the future.

Using these, I have launched a number of online publications over the years, including FutureofSex.net and Creating the Future of PR, among others. One of the possible paths for my business was to launch many future-oriented publications in parallel. I accumulated close to 400 domains to support possible projects.

While I intend to be doing a lot more in publishing in years to come, my core business model is fundamentally shifting (more on that another time). As such, apart from a smaller collection of domains I will keep for my own projects, I am offering these domain names for sale.

These domain names are perfect for thought leadership content projects. For example, one of the few domains I have sold was TheFutureofStrategy.com, which AT Kearney bought for a web publication featuring the firm’s thought leadership.
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