The “Black Swan” Nature of Media and PR

Posted by on Apr 8, 2010 in Blog, Driving PR Performance | 0 comments

Many PR professionals work by rote. Follow the formula: press releases, bylines, speaking gigs, daily blogs, site optimization. Then customers will flock to you, right? Not necessarily. Media and PR, like business and life itself, are stochastic, with many possible outcomes.

Nassim Taleb made the point in his book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  The gist: Life is random and our best efforts to map the future with 100% precision, futile. Statistics and bell curves — a joke. Taleb demonstrates this with a software tool called the “Monte Carlo engine.” Feed the exact same data and variables into this program, and it can produce 10s of thousands of possible “futures,” any of which might come to pass.

Because the future is random, Taleb never predicts. But he often bets on potential outcomes that go against the grain. One such was the economic meltdown, a possibility thought inconceivable and laughable by Wall Street’s best and brightest. . .until it happened. Taleb calls these events “black swans” — things that seem impossible up to the moment they become real (“all swans are white” was the rule of science til the 18th century discovery of black swans in Australia).

Black swans can be good — the Internet, the Web, and the Salk vaccine are just a few examples — but whatever their nature, they’re rarely foreseen.

In PR, great results rarely arise from doing the safe and routine, but rather by seeing opportunities everyone else overlooks, disdains or dares not try.  What about you?

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