Connect
Articles
Tomorrow's PR - Caroline Kinsey, Cirkle
INSIGHT ARTICLE
Tomorrow's PR: Businessman, Technician & Marketer?
Caroline Kinsey is founder and CEO of Cirkle.
The skill set of a PR practitioner has been fairly consistent over the last decade. Knowing the media, the
ability to write, being able to influence journalists with well-pitched stories, attention to detail and creativity
all come high up the agenda. So when it comes to recruitment, managers have followed a similar formula, hiring those who best demonstrated ‘conventional' core PR skills as their star account directors of the future. But over the last twelve months, things have changed. A combination of the longest and deepest recession in living memory combined with digital media becoming mainstream has led to what could be a permanent shift in the skill set of a PR, presenting new challenges to managers looking to extend their teams.
If you think back ten years, broadband wasn't even on the radar, mobile phones had only just taken off
and press releases were sent out by, wait for it, post! The skills that a PR needed to have included
researching journalists using printed directories, the ability to pick up the phone and talk to people, be
able to understand objectives, be able to tell a story both verbally and with the written word and, quite
simply, to be smart. Most of these are still relevant now and so, despite the technological progress that
was made during the noughties, PR recruitment has been largely unchanged.
2009, however, altered the way the world of communications works for good. The continuing recession
meant that the trend towards an intensive focus on ROI came even more to the fore. Clients now wanted
not only to see their brands in print and online, but also to see that activity impacting the bottom line. PRs
of all levels needed to develop a deeper understanding of commercial objectives, to apply measurement
to every initiative they undertook and to ensure that every client had access to these processes. They had
to think beyond the creative campaigns they were devising and focus on the goals and objectives
underneath them. In short, PRs had to start to understand the business world.
Coupled with this change of emphasis, the impact that social media has had during the last twelve
months is bringing about unheralded changes in the skills that a PR must bring to the table. The next few
years look set to totally transform how PRs work, with the public now getting their news from blogs,
Twitter, RSS and mobile streaming as well as online newspapers. It's no secret that the influence of
printed media is on the decline - nearly 60% of Europe's journalists think that the number of printed
media will shrink dramatically in the near future.
Knowing journalists is therefore no longer enough for forward-looking PRs. They need to understand who
the influencers are in their clients' fields and to know where the conversations are taking place. And this
only comes from following online news trends, RSS feeds, Twitter streams, reading blogs and reading the papers. They need to know about and understand how to use crowdsourcing, and they need to be able to instigate and facilitate debate on social networks. They have to live and breathe the media in all its many forms.
Then there's the technological angle. Sidewiki is effectively a form of ‘virtual graffiti', real-time search is a
major development for the next year, and Google Wave will take social networking and news/file sharing
to a whole new level when it comes out of Beta mode during 2010. Add to that not only the rise and rise
of the smartphone but the differences between the iPhone, Android and Blackberry devices, and you
have another completely new skill set. PRs must gain an understanding of SEO and the benefits of online
content working in conjunction with search algorithms; learn what makes good content for blogs and
social media channels; be able to blog and to tweet; understand and use RSS, file sharing and popular
web applications effectively; and be able to process and understand website analytics. Web 2.0 is
positively old skool now.
It's certainly a challenging time for PRs, but it's a very exciting time too. Perhaps the biggest challenge is
for those of us looking to extend our account teams, as the skills required in the near future are likely to
be different to those that we have traditionally recruited for. The ability to write, sell in a story and devise
creative campaigns is now only half of the job of a good PR. They now need a commercial brain and a
technical mindset too. The equation has changed and it's up to us as managers to work out what the
correct new formula is.
Caroline Kinsey is founder and CEO of Cirkle.
The skill set of a PR practitioner has been fairly consistent over the last decade. Knowing the media, the
ability to write, being able to influence journalists with well-pitched stories, attention to detail and creativity
all come high up the agenda. So when it comes to recruitment, managers have followed a similar formula, hiring those who best demonstrated ‘conventional' core PR skills as their star account directors of the future. But over the last twelve months, things have changed. A combination of the longest and deepest recession in living memory combined with digital media becoming mainstream has led to what could be a permanent shift in the skill set of a PR, presenting new challenges to managers looking to extend their teams.
If you think back ten years, broadband wasn't even on the radar, mobile phones had only just taken off
and press releases were sent out by, wait for it, post! The skills that a PR needed to have included
researching journalists using printed directories, the ability to pick up the phone and talk to people, be
able to understand objectives, be able to tell a story both verbally and with the written word and, quite
simply, to be smart. Most of these are still relevant now and so, despite the technological progress that
was made during the noughties, PR recruitment has been largely unchanged.
2009, however, altered the way the world of communications works for good. The continuing recession
meant that the trend towards an intensive focus on ROI came even more to the fore. Clients now wanted
not only to see their brands in print and online, but also to see that activity impacting the bottom line. PRs
of all levels needed to develop a deeper understanding of commercial objectives, to apply measurement
to every initiative they undertook and to ensure that every client had access to these processes. They had
to think beyond the creative campaigns they were devising and focus on the goals and objectives
underneath them. In short, PRs had to start to understand the business world.
Coupled with this change of emphasis, the impact that social media has had during the last twelve
months is bringing about unheralded changes in the skills that a PR must bring to the table. The next few
years look set to totally transform how PRs work, with the public now getting their news from blogs,
Twitter, RSS and mobile streaming as well as online newspapers. It's no secret that the influence of
printed media is on the decline - nearly 60% of Europe's journalists think that the number of printed
media will shrink dramatically in the near future.
Knowing journalists is therefore no longer enough for forward-looking PRs. They need to understand who
the influencers are in their clients' fields and to know where the conversations are taking place. And this
only comes from following online news trends, RSS feeds, Twitter streams, reading blogs and reading the papers. They need to know about and understand how to use crowdsourcing, and they need to be able to instigate and facilitate debate on social networks. They have to live and breathe the media in all its many forms.
Then there's the technological angle. Sidewiki is effectively a form of ‘virtual graffiti', real-time search is a
major development for the next year, and Google Wave will take social networking and news/file sharing
to a whole new level when it comes out of Beta mode during 2010. Add to that not only the rise and rise
of the smartphone but the differences between the iPhone, Android and Blackberry devices, and you
have another completely new skill set. PRs must gain an understanding of SEO and the benefits of online
content working in conjunction with search algorithms; learn what makes good content for blogs and
social media channels; be able to blog and to tweet; understand and use RSS, file sharing and popular
web applications effectively; and be able to process and understand website analytics. Web 2.0 is
positively old skool now.
It's certainly a challenging time for PRs, but it's a very exciting time too. Perhaps the biggest challenge is
for those of us looking to extend our account teams, as the skills required in the near future are likely to
be different to those that we have traditionally recruited for. The ability to write, sell in a story and devise
creative campaigns is now only half of the job of a good PR. They now need a commercial brain and a
technical mindset too. The equation has changed and it's up to us as managers to work out what the
correct new formula is.
