I've been thinking about the way PR folks measure their success. In Singapore and most markets I've worked with, the standard KPI is clippings. But I have a problem with that. Yes it is easy to count, but as a boss or client, what is my influence? You see, the mass media is dead. By dead I don't mean out of business, but dead in terms of influence. Before the age of the Internet and cable TV, it was easy to communicate your agenda and news to the masses. Just get into the newspaper (most cities/towns in the world have only one) and get on TV or Radio. But today, with hundreds of cable/satellite/IP TV channels, approximately 200 million blogs, millions of online news sources, and not to mention endless hours of uploaded video, there is no media that reaches the masses. All that's left is niche media and highly distributed media. This shift affects the PR industry the greatest and it really calls for a different game plan. I feel that most PR agencies, at least in Singapore and Asia, still live in denial and continue to sell the "we have great friends in the media" pitch to prospective clients. In our social media age where a single obscure blog post can turn into a whirlwind of influence (remember the HD DVD key issue?), calling the editor-in-chief of the newspaper your best buddy isn't exactly a trump card anymore. The advantage of a good PR agency is its ability to produce stories that spreads. It doesn't matter if that story goes out to a journalist or a blogger, as long as it's online because good story spreads no matter what. So until we can do wireless keyword search on everyone's brain, I think that the true tangible effect of influence from a PR perspective is how well it spreads. It's not impossible to accomplish as proved by the launch of Cuil. All it took was one good press release to get this snow ball rolling.