Confessions Of A Media Manipulator By Ryan Holiday

For my book report I choose to read Trust me I’m Lying; Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday due to its catchy title and relevance to the public relations profession. Holiday mainly works as the Director of marketing at American Apparel, while also working for many other clients in the entertainment industry and during his career he was able to figure out the way media works and use that to his advantage. This book is spilt into two parts the first is about how he has figured out the processes and commonality of blogs and bloggers while the second part is about how marketers and PR professional have used their knowledge of media, mainly blogs, in their careers. I personally found these examples and blog “secrets”, ethical or not, …show more content…
For PR in particular, this book highlights the do’s and don’ts of; marketing, dealing with crises, and dealing with bloggers and journalists. While most of the examples that are mentioned in the book like, his efforts to get Tucker Max’s (one of Holiday’s clients) movie promoted (p.23), are examples of how one can manipulate the media in, what some might say, unethical ways to get what they want they are still helpful because the process that he used and the knowledge that he has from doing this for years can also be used in ethical ways. I can see it being very useful knowing how bloggers tend to get their information. On page 21 Holiday explains that most bloggers will get their information form social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, so if you wanted to get more buzz around your issue or campaign you can start by getting it posted about on those platforms in hopes that it will get picked up by bloggers. Another point that I feel like is helpful for PR practitioners is the realization that bloggers and journalist will turn anything into a story, whether it is true or not, (p.29) and once it is out there they do not like to make corrections to false information, and if they do it is usually placed at the bottom of the story and is not noticeable (p.139), so it is very crucial that we stay on top of the media …show more content…
While a lot of the examples given by Holiday were in no way ethical, they were still relevant as they still showed how to use media to your advantage and, in a lot of cases, what not to do when dealing with the media. The processes and information that Holiday wrote about in this book has definitely made me question the type of news I am being presented online which is something that I feel will help me in my everyday life, along with my career. I personally think that Holiday did the right thing by sharing his story to the world of how he was able to be a media manipulator by figuring out the how unethical the media and its journalists