Top Five | PR and the Social Web

Seven Predictions for the Future of PR

10 02 2012

It’s usual to post predictions for the year ahead in the first week of January rather than well into the second month. Convention also dictates that thoughts for the future should come in nice round batches of ten.

My main reason for not posting earlier in the year was that I was holding back my ‘Mystic Meg’ style musings on the direction of PR for the Insight Twelve event brought to you by those wonderful people at Don’t Panic. Now that’s a mere memory, I’m sharing them here.

There’s no science behind the number seven. That’s all I could muster, there are also no guarantees attached but the insights fall into three categories: no brainers, highly probable and debatable. The last of these doesn’t indicate that I’m not convinced, more that others disagree. You decide which is which.

1. Social Media will vanish

Strictly speaking I mean the description rather than the ‘thing’ itself. The notion that social media marketing or PR exists in isolation of other channels will quickly disappear. So called mainstream media is becoming more socialised, so I see the distinction evaporating and we’ll talk about media again not social or conventional.

2. The link between PR & Search will become more significant

The top results on Google are the most important single influence on the reputation of any organisation or individual. Search engines are also in a constant battle to promote natural search elevating real news and information. That’s where the enlightened and educated PR person comes in.

3. The dymamics of the journalist and PR relationship will alter

This isn’t my prediction is was made by the hugely insightful journalist and blogger, Tom Foremski. He has said “PR people … are pitching stories to journalists who have very much smaller pageviews on the stories they write, and far smaller Twitter/Facebook communities to which to distribute their stories, than the PR people.” He also saw this trend over two-years ago. Read his full post here.

4. The decline in print and in newspapers will accelerate

No-one could have predicted the closure of the UK’s biggest selling newspaper in 2011. It was prompted by scandal but owners NewsCorp know that they have to reduce their exposure to print. Circulation, pagination and title numbers will all fall in 2012.

5. Video content will become more evident in PR campaigns

The growth in video consumption is astronomical. Apple TV will demolish the wall between web TV and current broadcast platforms. Cost of production is in free fall. You do the math.

6. The definition of PR will change to reflect the reality

The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) is leading a global campaign to modernize the definition of public relations. It is addressing the prevailing confusion about public relations’ role and value and it is doing so in an open and engaging way.

7. The reality of PR will change to reflect the impact of social channels on reputation

At the Think 11 conference last May, Colin Byrne, CEO UK and Europe, Weber Shandwick and Robert Phillips, CEO (EMEA), Edelman, both identified that the practice of PR was changing and that reputation was now built on action not spin. We would do well to heed the brightest leaders in our profession.

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Tags: natural search, pr person
Categories : Social Web, Top Five, Top Ten

Why PR Needs to Wake-Up

4 03 2010

The bulk of the PR profession needs a wake up call and fast. We have seen what is happening to print media at a regional level in the UK and US and the UK national newspaper heartland will be the next sector to feel the squeeze. Never mind the quality of the Sunday papers, feel the width. Not as bulky as they used to be are they?

Broadcast media is changing too, with event TV dominating schedules and more traditional content being driven by on-demand services. The cosy relationships where PR people sit between journalists and clients trafficking ‘news’ just isn’t enough any more.

So here are five things every PR person should be thinking about.

1. Earned Media

Media coverage achieved for clients in the digital world falls into three categories; bought, earned and owned. ‘Bought media’ was always and is still the province of the advertising business. ‘Earned media’ is the heartland of PR. At one level this is just the online version of editorial but it is richer and deeper than that. We should be collaborating to create content that will earn coverage. Audio interviews, creative videos posted on YouTube and disseminated across the web as well as words and pictures are the collateral we must use.

2. Owned Media

We can create our own spaces on-line that have the capacity to become channels in their own right. I firmly believe that PR people should blog but the concept of ‘owned media’ can extend much further. Relevant content brings people to you. The PR and corporate communications team at ASDA know this. They have 18 million shoppers, mostly mums and they have used that weight to engage with the major parties during the coming general election and will be using their ‘owned’ channels to host political debate.

3. Reputation Online

“Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that’s one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.” These words were written by Clive Thompson in Wired almost three years ago. PR has always been about reputation management and arguably a key determinant of reputation is the content on page one of a Google Search. Search therefore is very important to PR.

4. PR & SEO

If you’re not sure what SEO is you may be in the wrong job. The most important tool that search engine optimisation specialists have at their disposal is now the ‘press release’. They may in many cases be badly written, off message and even inaccurate but the SEO companies are all using them, with embedded links. This is a serious threat to the PR industry as it stands. If we don’t educate ourselves about the value of good editorial and link strategies as part of PR, we’ll be left behind. Whatever you think about the idea of ‘social media releases’ when you send out content to the media you should embed links.

5. Evaluation

We’ve always claimed we don’t like rate card equivalent and then used it any way. Well now is our chance. So much of what is online can be measured, sorted and analysed and we need to know how to do this. Every PR person should have a least a working knowledge of web analytics and should be able to manage tools for analysing conversations on-line.

All of these areas are natural extensions of traditional PR but that doesn’t mean we own them. We need to stake our claim …or others will.

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Categories : Blogs and blogging, Media evolution, PR, SEO, Top Five

Top 10 Web Wonders of the Decade #10

16 12 2009

As we draw to the end of the zeroes (sounds so much better than naughties surely?), this blog is counting down the ‘PR and the Social Web’ top ten wonders of the internet, brought to us over the last ten years. No place here for the likes of Amazon or Google which appeared in the nineties. So in reverse order….

Number 10: WordPress

‘Blogger’ would have been in the running if it had launched six months later but the original blogging platform was a product of the nineties, just. It is highly arguable that ‘WordPress’ is also the better bet. The templates look better and it feels more accessible and straightforward to use, though admittedly less popular (it sits at number 20 on Alexa.com with Blogger currently at number 6). Blogging platforms have been instrumental from redistributing publishing power from the few to the many. User generated content and web 2.0 apre products of the blogging revolution. The social web has WordPress at its heart.

It isn’t just the ‘have a go’ bloggers that use WordPress (this site is built with WordPress.com using a standard themed template), many major organisations use a wordpress platform because it is both robust and easy to work with. CNN, Techcrunch, The New York Times and Le Monde all use the WordPress platform as does Playstation and Ben & Jerry’s.

WordPress was launched in 2003 with less than twenty users it is now used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are people all over the world work on it and everything from the support documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. It also means it is free to use. As it says on the site Code is Poetry.