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How Social Media Is Changing The PR Industry
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PR is one of those businesses that is seeing a massive shift in how it operates thanks to social media. There are many industries that are in a similar position like the music industry, recruitment, print media and many others but PR is one that interests me especially and I have been following for some time. Many people (within the social media industry mostly) claim that PR is dead but that is an over reaction. Changing, yes. Evolving certainly, but dead no. To show the importance of PR here is what one of the most successful business men of his generation thinks of the business…
“If I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on public relations.” - Bill Gates, Microsoft Founder
Why It Worked For Bill
Lets go back 5 years in time. The world used to be a very different place back then where companies and corporations could control the message. Bill Gates loved PR so much because they used to be able to control the message. There were no blogs (please see correction at bottom of post) (there were a few but nobody read them) for individuals to voice their opinion. Nobody could review your products using video on YouTube. People didn’t swap opinions instantly on Twitter. Microsoft had a very simple job back then promoting their products and maintaining market share as they would spend massive amounts of money controlling the message that consumers would be getting. How did they control the message? Mostly through mass broadcasting the message through channels they could control. That could vary from getting the right coverage and having the right journalists in their pockets to throwing huge worldwide launch parties for their products. They were bringing in tons of cash and a large percentage of that cash would have been re-invested in straight back in to PR. The media worked on a broadcast message back then and that suited many companies perfectly as they had enough money to control the message and continue making massive amounts of money.
How PR Can Work Now
Fast forward to this week and one of the hottest and biggest start ups of the moment, Twitter. Now last year they enjoyed mainstream media coverage across every mainstream channel and celebrity endorsement that money could not buy but I don’t want to go in to the positive coverage. For the last 3 months Twitter has been getting a lot of coverage about dwindling user numbers and it was starting to attract a lot of bad press around the company for the first time. Most of Twitter’s growth had come as a result of the good press and mass media coverage so it was essential that they kept that going and eliminated the bad press that was starting to creep in. Enter modern PR. Rather than hiring teams of expensive PR’s around the world and spinning the numbers to their advantage it took one sentence…
Ev Williams Twitter
Evan WIlliams is the founder and spokesperson for Twitter. He didn’t need to go and spend 10s of thousands on PR companies but he did still need to get a message out there, a positive one. He has a million followers on Twitter (he would have wouldn’t he) and he knew that he would have the reach to have the message passed on to others. As it happens blogs all over the world picked up the message and pretty much killed all the speculation there had been about Twitter’s growth in a flash. With one tweet he bought himself at least 3 months of time, you won’t see another article about Twitter’s growth thanks to that tweet. Don’t get me wrong I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some very senior PR people involved in advising Evan to get a message like that out there but because the medium has changed there was no need for press releases, lunches with journalists or big budgets, just a simple tweet.
A New Era For PR
As I said above PR is not dead in anyway, there is still a huge market for it and there will continue to be for years to come. It is morphing with social media to a certain extent though as the mediums where the messages are spread start to change. The smart PR companies have already started to realize this and are adapting and changing as the whole market changes right in front of their eyes. If I was in the traditional PR industry I would be very excited rather than worrying as the ones who can adapt to social media, understand it and use it to spread the message in different ways and advise their clients to engage in conversation with their customers will be massive winners. Nobody likes their own industry changing but those who are nimble and who adapt will leave the other more conservative thinking people in their wake over the next few years.
It was pointed out to me correctly that blogs have been around for far longer and this is indeed correct. Rather than change the post am more than happy to acknowledge this mistake and point people to our social media time line which although features technorati a blog listing service in 2002 we had to leave blogs off as most companies running them were founded pre-2000. What I was trying to allude to was blogs in the context of engagement through PR which in my opinion is a far more recent activity as companies and brands start to see their true influence.
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Keeping yourself engaged and educated about changes around you will always serve you well. I do think that the public relations industry has a great deal to be excited about with the new tools that are available.
Yeah like I say in the article Susan the more tools PR people have the better and the smart ones are already using them as we speak
Niall,
There are many valid entry points for this discussion but bottom line is absolutely, the way PR operates is changing as we talk / type.
It may be a moot point to ask whether the tools are the agent for change or whether it is the effect of the tools. Certainly the change is technology driven – simplicity and speed of access for input on one hand combined with scale and range of distribution of output on the other to make what I do / can do now incomparable to what I was doing in the mid 80s when I started in this business.
The effect goes further because of the intelligence of the applications that technology enables – the field of social media being the case in point.
PR is changing also because of the experience and expectations of those that consume (real time and customised info) largely influenced by what is possible through technologically enabled media
For all that PR is still driven by the same dynamics that has prevailed since the time of Bernays. IMO, and I sense we are in violent agreement here, the ’smart’ bit of PR, or whatever one calls it, is less in knowing what’s the latest medium / tool or even what is being said via that medium (although knowledge of both is important) and more knowing the effect and benefit of the use of any one medium over another in the context of a specific objective with a defined audience in respect of a particular message. Having a current knowledge of what works where and how to integrate different methods / applications / technologies – that’s the smart piece… and yes, definitely, definitely changing.
Padraig great to have your opinion as you have lived and breathed it for your career. I always wonder when we talk about it being technology driven (the change) has that same process happened in the past? Like what was the transition when TV and radio came along? That must have had PR and marketing people in a real spin as journalists had new live access to people and could put them on the spot etc. Do you see similarities in the learning curve that we are all experiencing now?
I guess I think that the technology has just shifted the whole industry but I often hear people talking about PR being dead and I just don’t get that. Will be interesting to see how the tools change over the next couple of years because although the speed of change has been swift up until now I can actually see it speeding up if anything from here as we now have a base set of tools to use which will be further explanded and modified in the future.
Niall,
I think that a similar change was evident in the past although I’m not quite old enough to remember. I was around though when a press release was a motorbike courier delivery job and when physical access, much less virtual access was rarer.
The marker of change up to now has been speed – speed to broadcast / publish which has obliterated expected (demanded?) response time and therefore taken anything in the middle out of the equation as just a delay on publication.
I’m still runimating though on where the change will really occur. I think the challenge for PR is, as it always has been, to demonstrate relevance. The thing is that relevance now is not about the ability to access but instead the ability to interpret and advise. I hold the view also that those that we are advising will change as relatively quickly those lacking real substance will be recognised as such on the basis that they are either available and active in communications in real -time or they are not. Faking it, presenting proxies or hiding behind PR speokespersons won’t cut it. The response of PR professionals in that context will be important to the future of our industry/