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Last month a digital marketing expert wanted to include our firm’s public relations expertise in a new business pitch. ”How many impressions can you guarantee the client each week?” he asked. Hard to believe, but even a seasoned marketing professional doesn’t understand the basics of public relations.
For my friend, and all the friends of the PR pros who read this column, the family members who don’t understand what we do, and for entrepreneurs who need to understand public relations and how it can help their business, let’s explain Public Relations.It’s not advertising. We don’t buy impressions. We don’t guarantee placement. But the coverage we get, in the media, online, social media, TV and other places, usually has much more credibility than paid endorsements....
It’s just over a hundred years since the first press release was issued by a company in an effort to tell their story in the media. In 1906, after a railroad accident, the company hired a journalist to help them deal with the disaster and the media coverage. Soon press releases and media relations became a core part of public relations.In the 1930s radio was a part of most American households.
Companies and PR agencies soon realized that just sending a text press release to a radio station was not enough. Sending a photograph was a complete waste of time. This was a new medium with new technology and it needed new content. And so the sound bite was born. Smart PR agencies and company PR pros quickly learned how to make 15-second audio clips to send with their releases.
And then came TV. By 1955 half of all American homes had a TV and this became the medium of choice for news. Smart PR folk had to adapt once again....
...Traditionally, the ROI of PR that focused on Old Media was measured by a simple comparison of the size and number of mentions in a publication to the cost of advertising for that placement. What’s more, retaining an Old Media PR firm tended to cost upwards of $5,000 per month on a 6-month agreement with no guarantees. In short, calculating ROI for Old Media PR was crude and relied on a lot of ifs. Enter New Media PR. With the ever-growing fragmentation in how we consume media, it only makes since for PR firms to focus on serving content in real-time via the litany of technologies that allow for media consumption. What’s more, ROI is much more easily calculable. Where Old Media PR left a lot of ifs, New Media PR offers more substance. Need to know how many people read your press release online? Wondering how many Twitter followers you gained after an Internet-based publicity stunt? Done and done, all at the drop of a hat. Old Media PR isn’t dead, but it’s on the way out. New Media PR is the future. Adapt or die....
Three years ago, Citizen Renaissance was published as a reaction to three seismic shifts in society - the rise of digital democracy, falling global wellbeing and an imminent environmental crisis. The footballing cliché runs that teams must score when they are dominating the game. PR consultancies often manage early possession, but then struggle to find the back of the net. It happened with CSR and with social and now with content, too – a failure to convert early-mover advantage into sustained leadership. We let others steal our clothes and then bemoan their encroachment on “our” space. For a profession that prides itself on the quality of its strategic advice, it is perverse that we so consistently forget to take our own. This is partly a failure of visionary leadership; partly the lack of a rigorously defined point of view about our very purpose; but mostly a question of economics and business models. With the exception of the big, consultancy networks, PR rarely achieves scale. And, where the holding company groups do deliver scale, so some of the choicest bits are invariably siphoned off to the media houses and ad guys. Why? Because they make a better case for the economics and are able to enumerate their arguments on a factual base. This is exactly what is now happening with content and data. PR is increasingly banished to the fringes....
No kid dreams of being a PR person. And trust me, no PR practitioner wants his kids to follow in his footsteps either. Instead, most of us, I suspect, discover the field by accident.... Here’s the point, or, more like the paradox. Tech PR has never been both less important and more important than it is today. It’s seen as a commodity business, retainers are frozen or have actually decreased, with some clients asking for success fees (kind of like going to a contingency lawyer). It has been overtaken by social, search, and Google analytics. In its insecurity, PR tries to act more like a science than the art it really is, and comes up with KPIs (key performance indicators) to prove its value and keep away the dreaded 30-day termination notice. The PR training courses (from writing to client management) at Burson are now a relic, as the bean counters, squeezing all the billable hours, have no time to educate the young generation and instead throw them straight into the fire....
If you work in public relations (or are a business or marketing client who works with PR practitioners), you know full well the industry has been morphing and changing at a rapid rate. However, what might not be fully apparent is how deeply and radically things have changed as the industry adapts to a real-time hyper-connected environment. The infographic below - produced by Beth Monaghan and her company Inkhouse Media + Marketing - shows the profound impact new media and social technologies have had on the PR profession....
Lark: Creative agencies still want to spend all the money on TV The chief marketing officer of CommBank has warned the public relations industry... Lark said that many PR agencies were not maximising their strategic and creative capabilities and said that creative agencies were a threat. “You should be the owners of content, you should be developing content and managing communities, driving conversations… but I’m terrified as a recovering PR that you won’t get with the program,” he said. L ark held a senior role in the US at PR agency agency Fleishman-Hillard. He was also chairman of the juries for the CommsCon Awards. He cited PR agency One Green Bean’s recent campaign around the Commonwealth Bank’s Kaching app as an example of where an agency – led by executive creative director Kat Thomas – was using its strategic and creative muscle....
Major companies and big media bring financial rewards to pros in the Northeast and on the Pacific Coast, a PR Daily survey shows. ... The recruiting challenge is just one result of regional salary variations—a matter explored by the PR Daily Salary and Job Satisfaction Survey of 2,787 industry professionals ranging from associates to company presidents and chief executives. The online survey showed that the Northeast and West Coast mostly dominated the high salary categories, with one possible outlier in the upper range, the Midwest. Respondents to the questionnaire on PR salary and job satisfaction largely came from the U.S. and Canada, with contingents from Europe, Oceania, Asia, and Africa. ...
According to an article in Forbes, whether you’re just starting out, or you learned your Marketing skills years ago and need to get up to speed, these six skills are essential: How to build and nurture an online community.Researching new social media tools and platforms – the “next big thing.”Blogging – planning content, writing compelling posts, reaching out to other bloggers and even building a WordPress blog yourself....
It didn't hit me until I tried to teach it, but the most recent definition of public relations offered by the Public Relations Society of America is wrong. It isn't a little bit wrong. It's a whole lot wrong. It's wrong because public relations is not a strategic communication process. There is much more to it than that. Even my students crinkled their brows when the full force of comparison was offered for consideration. And then I gave them a working definition I've been crafting for some time....
Clay Christensen literally wrote the book on disruption, so it’s worth paying attention to him when he talks about where the disruption fueled by the web is going to strike next. The Harvard business professor and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma spoke to Jeff Howe — the Wired writer who coined the term “crowdsourcing” — and had some interesting things to say about where disruption is occurring now and where it is likely to strike next. At one point, Howe asks Christensen to name some industries that are “either in a state of disruptive crisis or will be soon,” and the professor says: “Journalism, certainly, and publishing broadly. Anything supported by advertising. That all of this is being disrupted is now beyond question. And then I think higher education is just on the edge of the crevasse. Generally, universities are doing very well financially, so they don’t feel from the data that their world is going to collapse. But I think even five years from now these enterprises are going to be in real trouble.”...
Baby boomers represent the largest percentage of business owners in the United States. Thus, it’s safe to say that a majority of the top leaders in the PR business are baby boomers -- in their late 40s to mid 60s. This is all about to change. The first group of baby boomers turns 65 this year, and a new poll by the Associated Press and LifeGoesStrong.com reveals that nearly half of all baby boomers now work for a younger boss. If 2012 was the year of the social media surge, 2013 will be the beginning of the end for our baby boomer PR compadres. The media landscape is evolving rapidly, and baby boomers are about to be left behind because of their inability to keep up with technology and the changing times....
Public relations professionals who have provided ethics counsel to senior management are at least as fervent about serving the public interest -- sometimes even more so -- as they are about their duty to their organizations, according to a Baylor University researcher. A new study of 30 senior public relations professionals, most of whom had served as an "organizational conscience," showed the individuals viewed themselves as an "independent voice" in the organization and not "mired by its perspective or politics," said study author Marlene S. Neill, Ph.D., a lecturer in the department of journalism, public relations and new media in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences....
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The competition between public relations agencies and inbound marketing agencies is heavily one-sided. What can PR professionals do to step up their game?
Most agencies (advertising, social, search, design, digital) realize that inbound marketing isn’t just some concept waiting to get trumped by the next fad. It’s actually a comprehensive, forward-thinking type of marketing that puts the power in the consumers’ hands. I know this can be scary for some, and that may explain why not everyone is as excited about inbound marketing as they should be.PR agencies have all the makings of successful inbound marketers (in fact, some could argue that public relations professionals were the original inbound marketers), but for some reason they just don’t seem to get it.
Rather than integrating their practices to keep up with the competition, they are choosing to stay in the background and focus on less competitive areas like crisis communications, social monitoring and CSR.For the past few years people have actually been saying that PR as we know it is dead. Rather than adjusting to the new world of journalism, many PR agencies are content to sit on the sidelines and wither away while other firms take their business. Which makes no sense, because public relations is the industry most similar to inbound marketing....
In an age of public conversations, ethical decision making and accurate communications are top of mind for the PR professional. With the public accessing social media for their news and information, the topic of ethics is even more prominent.
The major professional associations provide a Code of Ethics to educate and guide PR professionals on the subject. However, with the shifting media landscape and technology advancing rapidly, communications ethics are challenged....
...The post defines it as the belief that “word-of-mouth and trust for brands is most important.” I would add that for many of us who work in PR, the essence of PR thinking is about generating and using influence. It’s explicit or implied third-party endorsement, – what most of us learned during our first week on the job. But beyond the survey, there are many, even more compelling reasons why “PR thinking” will continue to dominate marketing communications. One is Google, which rewards content and social sharing and metrics like follows, comments, and views over black-hat SEO tricks. Another is the obvious struggle of the traditional ad industry to redefine itself and to move towards word-of-mouth marketing and even brand journalism. But here’s my list of the key ingredients....
Two huge public-relations firms are going into the advertising business -- focusing on areas that are natural extensions of PR.... In general, public-relations firms have been quicker to adapt to the changing social-media landscape. It's not just the big players like Edelman and Weber Shandwick. Independent firms such as Shift Communications and Digital Influence Group saw social media, and in turn content marketing, as a natural extension of their mission. It's important to note that public-relations firms aren't banging down doors to break into the traditional advertising world of print and television, at least not yet. Rather, they're smartly taking advantage of opportunities that have come their way. For example, the concept of native advertising -- embedding paid content in an editorial environment so that it is barely distinguishable from the journalistic information around it -- is conceptually the same as placing press releases that look like independent journalism. It's a natural fit for public-relations firms. These firms come to this new world with advantages. They understand the publishing business and have a long tradition of collaborating with publishers to create content. And they get that content marketing is not only about creating interesting material; it is equally about managing the distribution of content through all of the social channels. With the major social platforms like Facebook and Twitter introducing paid-media opportunities, the public-relations firms simply are climbing on board.
Are London and New York still the dominant worldwide hubs of PR? Why do certain parts of the world lead in PR?... ... Today’s digital media means it is less vital to be close to key media producers, but agencies have yet to move out of New York. One reason is because of the other businesses located there. Yann explains: “There is a concentration of major global firms and brands. New York remains home to 42 corporations listed on the Fortune 500, making prospecting and networking geographically convenient and advantageous.” And because New York is a buzzing city, it attracts talent, as Yann says: “The same things that draw tourists from the world over to New York – world-class cultural attractions, Broadway entertainment and dining – make it a sought-after destination for young professionals and a rich source of diverse local talent.” Why London rules London is also a centre of media, business and culture, which explains why it has such worldwide PR force. One way that the UK is different from other countries is the style of its media....
Hubspot managed (under the stewardship of my friend Laura Pistachio Fitton) to completely surprise me today with a custom care package delivered to my door. ... One of the clear opportunities of social media is that we all have a chance to be more human brands, and that applies whether you’re in marketing, in PR, or in any kind of business online. I also love that Laura took the opportunity to practice some “real-time PR” or “real-time outreach,” delivering the right thing to me at the right time. Skeptics might argue that this kind of outreach isn’t scalable… and maybe it’s not. But what is scalable is the notion of listening, empathizing, and responding....
An infographic shows a side-by-side comparison of public relations skills and tools from a decade ago and today. ...At the turn of the century, PR practitioners were faxing pitches and mailing press kits. Today they’re tweeting pitches and emailing virtual press kits.
The upheaval in technology and media has been advantageous for savvy public relations professionals. As PR executive Beth Monaghan explains in a blog post...
Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, shares his views on PR recently in a provocative post. His comments apply to others, including journalism. A couple of quotes from his 1992 critique still resonate today: " The call of the flack is not a grateful one. Almost all casual references to public relations are negative." " So PR has the biggest PR problem of all: people use it as a synonym for BS. It seems only fair to defend the profession, but there is no point to it. Common usage is impossible to correct. And frankly, there is a much smaller market for telling the truth than for shading it." " Yet most editors would rather insert a spider in their nose than a press release in their publication. First, no self-respecting editor would let anybody else — least of all a biased source — write a story. Second, press releases are not conceived as stories, but rather as “messages." " So why does PR persist in practices its consumers hold in contempt?" " Maybe it is time to do with PR what we do with technology: make something new — something that works as an agent for understanding rather than illusion."
That pretty much sets the table for a serious discussion about the change that's needed for PR to thrive.
...We, as public relations professionals, are trained and empowered to help clients or employers reach a level of understanding with their stakeholders…their target audiences…that can pave the way for better relationships, better cooperation, and better success.
When you take all that into consideration, there is a lot to be proud of.
From the Olympics to presidential elections and enough headlines and scandals to entertain us for years to come, 2012 was a busy year for public relations professionals. Fortunately, for those looking to break into the business and those hoping to move up, job prospects continue to look promising for 2013. A new research study by CareerBuilder and Economic Modeling Specialists Intl. (EMSI) highlighted the top 18 occupations with the most growth (most added jobs) since 2010. With 8,541 jobs added over the past two years, Public Relations Specialist snagged a place at #13 for the best jobs of 2013. This year, we can expect a continuation of this trajectory, especially if PR proceeds to gain leeway in the battle against marketing and others over control of social media....
It was No. 51 on U.S. News and World Report ’s list of the 100 best jobs. Not on the list: journalist. A recent report named public relations specialists one of the nation’s best jobs.
According to U.S. News and World Report, PR specialist is No. 51 on the list of the top 100 careers, sandwiched between construction manager (No. 50) and middle school teacher (No. 52).
Here’s how U.S. News and World Report described the job of PR specialist: “There’s a lot of finesse involved in producing and distributing materials that uphold and promote a client’s image. The field’s elite also have a gift for gab and understand the art of the sell. Expect this occupation to grow by nearly 23 percent by 2020.”...
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Public relations kinda, sorta explained...but there were an awful lot of stereotypes mixed in with the explanations.