“PR is dead”.
I’ve heard it a thousand times. Everyone from Social Media ‘gurus’ to hacked-off reporters are busy spreading the dirty rumour. The truth of course, is that Public Relations has never been more alive.
Okay so, that’s not entirely true. The fact is that traditional PR – those halcyon days of fag-smoking, Spritzer-guzzling PR-types pitching news stories punctuated with air kisses to a chorus of “darrrrling!”, are long gone. Frankly, good riddance!
Traditional PR, with its armoury of fax-friendly press releases and Rolodex, is redundant. It’s no great shock – the world changed and PR changed with it. But a decade ago there were industry murmurings that an apocalypse was coming – a future when the press, who never liked us, wouldn’t even need us, resulting in every PR professional being rounded up en masse and thrust onto the communications scrapheap.
Fast forward to 2013 and the future of PR never looked so bright. Sure traditional tactics were a casualty of the Noughties, but the digital age has brought with it endless possibilities – a whole new mantra which starts and ends with ‘content’.
PR has stepped out of the smoky corners and into the real world – a digital world.
These days I find that PR strategies are increasingly mirroring clients’ digital content strategies – yes, we’re writing press releases like the good old days, but this activity is supplemented with blog posts, commentary, white papers and social media content. The one-pronged attack of the press release has been transformed into a digital assault and the days of only getting coverage by ‘selling in’ news to the media are all but over. After all, this is a time of smart phones, instant updates, citizen journalism and billion dollar social networks. These days, we are the media!
Every story now has the potential to be printed, featured on websites and blogs and discussed on social channels – this is just for starters, so crafting interesting, original, targeted content is the only way to make the most of the stories we PRs have to share.
The PR landscape has changed – we’ve evolved, embraced our developing environment and sidestepped the scrapheap, so is PR still PR at all?
Sure it is! Despite the professional whiplash we’ve suffered trying to keep up in the past few years, some things have, and always will, remain the same. More than ever, the relationships we nurture are crucial to our success, there’s just a whole lot more of them to have and to handle. Every traditional journalist, digital reporter, blogger, and website editor are in our sights, and whether we email, phone or air kiss with a hashtag, there’s a whole world of connected people out there opening up their arms to our content, so make it good and just like PR, it can last forever.
Image source: careers.ox.ac.uk
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