How Social Media Is Changing The PR Industry

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…

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.