David Rothstein
David Rothstein

We’ve always heard that change is good. But when it happens at break-neck speed exacerbated by a global pandemic, many of the challenges we face require us to be smarter, quicker and willing to do things differently.

The good news is that technology has come to the rescue in so many ways. New platforms allow companies to reach out to customers, vendors and beyond in an effort to carry on with business.

At the same time, these platforms and other technologies have brought increased global competition. Physical proximity no longer matters. The cost of providing services has also fallen—and in many cases, dramatically.

Think about what’s going on in our world. Public relations agencies get dropped and replaced by an Upwork or Fiverr contractor with fresher ideas or adaptive skills. Clever clients realize they can learn how to run their own Google Ads and write their own press releases.

Whatever your situation, employer, or employee, it’s time to rethink the landscape.

Your future now involves services such as Slack, Upwork, Zoom and any number of cloud-based communication and collaborative work platforms available today, and on the horizon, reshaping tomorrow.

Any one of your employees—or yourself—working from home, can network with copy editors, artists, voice talent, digital editors or upload press releases into distribution platforms or manage their business through Google Sheets, QuickBooks or pay bills through Venmo, TranferWise and PayPal. Renting an office? That’s crazy talk. The gig economy is taking over.

This article is featured in O'Dwyer's Jan. '21 Crisis Communications & PR Buyer's Guide Magazine
(view PDF version)

Reasons to be optimistic about the future

For those in the MarCom space, there’s more than ample opportunity to survive, grow, and even thrive.

Anecdotally, what I’ve seen from my perspective as CEO of EIN Presswire, is a flourishing world of start-ups growing faster than they ever imagined. I speak with many people who work at small-to-medium-sized companies and organizations forced into restructuring their MarCom, finding that they can manage more tasks in-house—and do them better. We work with emerging MarCom businesses expanding into new opportunities as traditional companies recalibrate their spending, processes and procedures and adapt to a new landscape. When these companies can’t do it all in-house or choose not to, they rely on outside expertise for help when needed.

What these growing new MarCom services have in common is that they’re offering a pay-as-you-go structure. Not everyone needs a full-time app developer. They don’t need a full-time person to do SEO or graphic design. They can assemble teams as required. They can create a solid collaborative group structure that feels like a team—a company.

One of the most important things we’ve seen is that many of the people we work with don’t come from larger companies, where change is slow and getting things done is difficult. They’re nimble, rising up with learned skills based on client demands. They tend to be more relevant to today’s customer needs and market challenges—and aren’t limited by industry group-think. Of course, they’re using Slack, Upwork, and Google Meet, and all sorts of other cloud platforms that make collaboration work possible in today’s distributed cloud-based world.

What these emerging collaborative workgroups offer are real efficiencies. They’re faster to adapt to market challenges because their ears are closer to the earth. They have a headstart in using the new tools and have a cost structure less expensive than longer-established players.

Additionally, profound generational and workforce changes are at play reshaping the social contract between the employer and the employee. The relationships are collaborative between gig economy workgroups rather than the traditional employer-employee dynamic.

And finally, don’t underestimate how much these knowledge workers enjoy the freedom of working from home. Home is wherever their computer is. Hawaii. Prague. Austin. Washington. A cabin in Vermont. Where would you rather work? How far do you want to commute? Clicking from Zoom meeting to Zoom meeting is, well, more efficient—and it’s become a quality of life issue.

Being part of a virtual collaborative network empowers people to feel more like entrepreneurs than employees. Gone are the days when the company is king. Today, the boss is easily fired. Other exciting jobs one click away. This is the new normal.

MarCom is doing just fine

The breakneck speed of change has been great for my company, EIN Presswire. We’ve been leveraging a virtual workforce of gig economy talent with cloud services for quite some time. It’s in our DNA. That, combined with radically low pricing and proprietary distribution, is disruptive to our competitors.

Sure, the MarCom industry is producing some winners and some losers. But money is just shifting around. Everyone still needs MarCom. It’ll be interesting to see if these market forces will pull these newly established skills from these virtual collaborative networks back into the larger branded companies.

In the end, what this all means is that if you’re not in tune with the present and the future, you and your company are a click away from losing your clients because they require a better, more efficient, less expensive way of doing business in order to stay competitive themselves. If you don’t adapt, you’ll lose your best employees and, who knows … maybe to your competitors.

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David Rothstein is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of EIN Presswire, which has become the go-to service for professional communicators and organizations when they need to get their news in front of the media, stakeholders, and the public in a modern and affordable way.