Article by Julian Boulding, President, thenetworkone

PR. Public Relations. Influencing the public, via editorial media. Lunches with journalists. Press conferences. Press offices. That was then. Today, rather like advertising people, communications professionals are almost embarrassed about the label ‘PR.’ But these days, one hears ‘I work in PR” almost as rarely as ‘I work in advertising.’

We live in a time of existential crisis: we don’t know who we are, or what we do. A few years ago, we thought we had the answer. Some bright spark coined the terms “paid media” and “earned media.” Aha! PR doesn’t pay for media, so we do “earned media.” And since the big new thing was social media, which was essentially earned media, the future looked rosy.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple; because paid and earned media became indistinguishable. Organic search spawned paid search. Amateur bloggers became paid influencers. Viral communications agencies paid “seeders” to kick-start the sharing process. Native advertising proved more lucrative than features.

Meanwhile, paid media started to reverse into earned media, as advertising agencies realized they had to create communications that people chose to watch, and share, and talk about. And in new markets like China – soon to be the world’s biggest economy – the distinction never existed anyway.

We need to learn a new lesson. And we need to work in a new way. The lesson is: PR and advertising are dead. But communications is not dead. It just needs redefining.

Agencies today are either reputation managers (long term) or creators of visibility (short term). Both are fusions of what-used-to-be-PR and what-used-to-be-advertising. Customer insight. Storytelling. Engagement. User experience. Video content. Brand ambassadors. The tools are the same. Where’s the difference?

Actually the big difference is data. What do individual consumers actually read, view, share and do. When, where, why and how.

The advertising industry has bought into this. Even a small media buying agency in the US spends half a million dollars a year on subscriptions to data provider services. But PR and data still live miles apart.

The PR industry, all too often relies on gut feel and experience: darling, you need to be in Elle, not Cosmopolitan; the Mail Online, not Facebook. This is last century stuff. And yet.. how many examples have you seen, of a PR agency actively partnering with a digital media buying agency?  With this one little fix, PR could end up top of the heap.

PR professionals are used to orchestrating multiple stakeholders with differing objectives, needs and skills. They just need to engage better, with professionals from other communications disciplines. A leading PR firm needs a broader competence than media relations, or content development, or event management: and that means looking outside the box. Some niche firms are also showing the way.

Montieth & Co in New York, knits together media communications with litigation expertise: 35% of their staff are trained lawyers. Jericho Chambers in London, leveraging its founder’s communications skills to create and manage diverse stakeholder and advocacy communities, to defuse tension between proponents of differing policies.

The traditional multinational holdings could to this, but mostly don’t, due to their finance-driven models, silo structures, earnout deals and separate P&L’s.

Independents have the biggest challenge, because developing diverse capabilities, expertise and contacts takes time and money. But they also have the greatest potential: only if you can choose your partners freely, do you have the power to choose the best.

Julian Boulding is President of thenetworkone, the world’s biggest independent agencies organization. thenetworkone hosts the annual ‘Indie Summit’ (indiesummit.net), a unique forum for leaders of independent communications agencies of all disciplines. The next Indie Summit will be in London on 14^th and 15^th June 2017. @thenetworkone

Jelena Djelic, eKapija interviews Maxim Behar, President of the International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO)

In the past decade, the public relations industry has changed much more than any other business industry. A drastic shift in the ownership of media throughout the world has contributed the most to the process. It was certain during the 1990s that it would happen, but many of us ignored the fact that both us and our clients already had strong ties to the media and the we needed to learn quickly and carefully in order to use the relations as well as possible.

This is how Maxim Behar, the president of the International Communications Consultancy Organization (ICCO) begins his interview for eKapija. The Public Relations Society of Serbia has become a member of this organization this year.

We also talked with Behar about the upcoming Global ICCO PR Summit, the largest gathering of PR experts, to be held in Oxford on September 29-30.

eKapija: How do you see future PR trends, where is PR headed and what should, in your opinion, PR professionals focus on in the future?

– In the past, public relations mostly meant acting as a link between our clients and the media. We were making great efforts to be as creative and innovative as possible. However, there was a limit to innovativeness. The situation has changed completely and PR professionals now manage entirely different requests and tools in doing their job. We have suddenly turned from advertisers and consultants to content managers of our media and the media of our clients. There’s been a clear crossing between public communication channels – public relations, advertising and e-business and the process is getting faster and faster.

Nowadays, many experts express conflicting opinions on who will take the leading role in the future and it is my firm conviction that it will be us, public relations professionals. The reasons are quite simple.

Firstly, we are the only ones in charge of the content, words and expressions in the whole process, and the content is currently the most important part of public communications. Secondly, and in my opinion most importantly, PR professionals are absolute leaders in the two areas of key importance to our clients and their operations – reputation management and crisis communication. We need to focus on these areas in the near future as the basis of our profession’s success.

eKapija: Do you believe that online PR has in a way replaced traditional PR and how do you feel about the transformation?

– This has happened without a doubt and we are all aware of it. The transformation happened overnight, while we were organizing events and press conferences. We simply woke up one day and realized that press conferences and press statements no longer work, that online media are more powerful than anything before and recognized one of its greatest advantages, which we hadn’t been aware previously – cost competitiveness.

Finally, this is what’s most attractive to our clients and we realized this many years ago, but we couldn’t do anything in order to measure the effects of our work and ideas precisely.

photo: Deyan Georgiev/shutterstock.com

eKapija: Based on your personal experience, are PR professionals ready to accept new challenges in the PR area and adjust to current technological trends? Are they prepared to learn and change?

– On the whole, my answer is ‘yes’, but the pace of changes varies from country to country. The fact is that the new media will prevail and that they are the present and the future of communications. What’s expected from PR professionals is to keep track of all new trends and case studies every day, hour and minute, and of course, to create their own.

eKapija: What will be the main topic of the upcoming ICCO PR Summit?

– The most important one is, of course, how to run a successful PR company in the times of drastic changes in our profession. Global ICCO PR Summit is the most important annual event in our industry in the whole world. More than 250 top professionals from all continents will have the opportunity to discuss modern trends in our profession.

There are two main prerequisites for an event’s success – good speakers and enough coffee breaks in which to meet them personally. This year, on September 29 and 30 in Oxford, these prerequisites will be fully met and I’m sure that we will share a great number of new trends, stories and case studies and discuss them to the general benefit of our line of business.

eKapija: What’s your opinion on the future of media? Can content prevail over sensationalism?

– Creating good, brief, attractive, intelligent and professional content is currently the most important element of our profession. We need to be aware of that fact and work hard on it.

eKapija: What is the role of social networks in the PR world? Do you believe that social networks can endanger traditional media?

– Social networks are the most powerful tool we’ve ever had in our hundred-year-old profession. Above all, despite all the apprehensions and concerns, they really are an independent and genuine medium. Theoretically, you can “buy” a journalist, the media, a TV station… but you can’t buy Facebook, you can’t buy Twitter, nor any social network, as they show opinions from all sides.

It is precisely this that is the advantage of social networks – they are interactive and wholly independent, which currently makes them the only medium we can trust and the most important channel that we as public relations experts have at our disposal in order to provide the best service possible to our clients.

http://www.ekapija.com/website/en/page/1529446/Maxim-Behar-president-of-International-Communications-Consultancy-Organization-New-media-are-communications-present-and-future

Written by Neil Kleiner, Head of Social Media and Content, Golin London

This year Golin celebrates its 60^th anniversary and the celebrations of the huge achievements of our founder Al Golin are front of mind for us all.  He is truly an inspiration, especially as he still comes to work every day to our Chicago office, despite being 86 years old.

In amongst all Al’s successes, I’ve been also thinking about how the world of PR has changed over the last 60 years. From a world of type writers and hand delivered press releases when Al began, to a world of Facebook, Snapchat mobile and interactions at an unprecedented scale.  A world where, as noted psychiatrist RD Laing said “…change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.”

How do we keep up with the speed of culture? How can we make our brands relevant to the conversations of the day?

Every day we post 500 million tweets and upload nearly 900,000 hours of video to YouTube… how do we manage information at such unprecedented scale?

The world has become an incredibly noisy place and in social media sites marketers are more part of the problem than the solution.  For over a decade social media professionals (myself included) have turned brands into always-on publishers and in a lot of cases we’ve struggled to have something interesting to say or maintain a compelling way to say it.

We’ve just added to the noise.

Let’s be honest, there are very few people who actually look forward to seeing a promoted post on their News Feed when all they really care about is what their friends or family are up to.

This is the hegemony of advertising.  Interruption.  Taking something we care about and cutting it in half or putting up barriers.  No wonder it pisses us off.

It’s why we’ve had to wrap our messages in a creative wrapper for the last 100 years…..to buffer the blow of interruption.

But in a world transformed by infinite choice, interruption is something that audiences don’t have to tolerate any more…they just go somewhere else that doesn’t make it annoying to engage with the things they care about.

Simply put, marketers need to develop a better relationship with the noise…discovering new ways to analyse it and cut through it, rather than try and beat it.  It’s our biggest challenge but also our biggest opportunity.

If we can use technology to analyse conversations across the internet in real time, we can understand what audiences want to talk about and the things they care about.  We don’t have to interrupt.

We can listen and join in.

Add value.

Have an opinion.

Help solve problems.

Or just make people laugh.

It’s a way or pairing technology and creative specialists to ultimately create more welcome communications. Golin developed our own technologies to answer this challenge and launched The Bridge in 2011.

We’ve seen this type of strategy grow in recent years.  The social newsroom / command centre.  Social media marketing has always been about reactivity.  Real time marketing has us all looking for our “dunk in the dark” moments.

But data driven communications are not just the sole preserve of social or digital marketing.  Data should be the fuel that drives all public relations activity, because there has never been a better time to do what we do.  It’s certainly got more complex over the last 60 years but rather than fear “the noise”, we should be investing in technology and the smart people who help us understand it.

Anything else is just guessing.