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/

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.

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.