Steve Rubel
Micro Persuasion
Micro Persuasion
“Today you have to be different, because it’s harder to get
noticed than it used to be.”
noticed than it used to be.”
Steve Rubel is a marketing strategist and senior vice president at Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations (PR) firm. He has spent most of his professional career—15 years—in PR. Rubel’s first new computer was an Atari 800, which he bought when he was 12. He learned to program on the Atari and soon upgraded to an Atari 800 XL. It was around this time that he discovered the online world and its communications potential.
In www.micropersuasion.com addition to setting up a bulletin board system (BBS) on his home computer, Rubel spent time on several of the pre-Web online services—CompuServe, GEnie, and even the PLATO network for Atari owners. He was, of course, an early adopter of the Web. Rubel became interested in blogs in 2003 and soon had several on his RSS feed. (He cites bloggers Robert Scoble and David Winer as his favorites.) He realized that blogging was going to have a strong effect on the business world, so he began thinking about how to get on top of the blogging phenomenon. At the time, Rubel was working at a small PR agency, and there he found an opportunity to get two of his clients to start blogs early in 2004. The move was highly successful, increasing the companies’ media coverage. “From there,” Rubel says, “I was hooked.”
Steve Rubel was one of the early adopters of blogging as a PR tool, and he has proven that blogs can be a channel for mainstream media attention. He harnesses the power of online conversation by following these basic guidelines:
In www.micropersuasion.com addition to setting up a bulletin board system (BBS) on his home computer, Rubel spent time on several of the pre-Web online services—CompuServe, GEnie, and even the PLATO network for Atari owners. He was, of course, an early adopter of the Web. Rubel became interested in blogs in 2003 and soon had several on his RSS feed. (He cites bloggers Robert Scoble and David Winer as his favorites.) He realized that blogging was going to have a strong effect on the business world, so he began thinking about how to get on top of the blogging phenomenon. At the time, Rubel was working at a small PR agency, and there he found an opportunity to get two of his clients to start blogs early in 2004. The move was highly successful, increasing the companies’ media coverage. “From there,” Rubel says, “I was hooked.”
Steve Rubel was one of the early adopters of blogging as a PR tool, and he has proven that blogs can be a channel for mainstream media attention. He harnesses the power of online conversation by following these basic guidelines:
- If you want people to come to your blog, you must offer them something of value.
- Bloggers just starting out must post in high volume to build an audience.
- Sometimes it’s easier to go where people are than to get them to come to you.
- With competition among news bloggers being so strong, and bloggers filling every available subject, the best option for new bloggers is to find a niche.