How the world of PR works now

Here’s how the world of public relations and marketing works now:

1. In June I go to the reboot conference and meet the guys who made Plazes.
2. Plazes is cool, so I join up and start evangelizing.
3. Months pass.
4. Robert Scoble blogs about a need for an open database of locations.
5. I recommend Plazes.
6. Robert signs up and makes his current location a Plaze.
7. Robert says Plazes is cool.

And now more people will know about Plazes. Important things to remember:

• I didn’t make Plazes.
• I have no stake in Plazes (other than an emotional one).
• It’s a Sunday on a holiday weekend and it’s after supper in Berlin, where Plazes calls home, just after lunch here, and just after breakfast where Robert is.
• Robert and I are connected by a very thin, mostly digital thread: we met at Pop!Tech four years ago, and again at reboot (ironically). But I’m not an “insider” and, mostly, I just read his blog.
• All of the above happened in the space of about five minutes.

So in there somewhere are two continents, three time zones, some blog posts, and a neat product. No money has changed hands. No advertisements in trade publications have been purchased. And yet more people will know about Plazes.

This is the new world of PR.

Postscript: Stefan Kellner from Plazes emailed a link to this interesting page of Plazes statistics. I pulled off the following graphic, which shows a jump in the number of Plazes after Robert’s blog post: