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Social media has become a prevalent part of public relations practice. Research and observation suggest young public relations practitioners are often the ones to perform social media tasks. Guided by literature on public relations roles, millennials, and pigeon-holing, this qualitative study explored whether new professionals are in fact relegated to being social media practitioners. Analysis revealed several factors, including agency billing rates, mentorship, and personal attributes, which impact the tasks new professionals are assigned....
Key Findings
- Several participants admitted that they used social media for one-way message dissemination, although they recognized that this might not be the best use of such platforms.
- Although many participants spent more time on social media than they did on traditional tasks, very few of them did social media exclusively.
- Many participants attributed their social media use to agency billing rates, rather than specialized expertise. Senior practitioners have higher billing rates that do not fit into the client budgets allocated for social media.
- Several young practitioners discussed the role of mentorship in their professional development. Those with strong mentors and advocates shared more diverse professional experience.
The USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations today released an executive summary of its Global Communications Report, a comprehensive survey of senior public relations executives, which predicts the worldwide PR agency business will grow from its current estimated size of $14 billion to $19.3 billion over the next five years. To accommodate this growth, agency leaders anticipate their headcount will increase over the same period by about 26%. Industry leaders, both in agencies and in-house, believe future growth will be driven by content creation and social media, as well as more traditional activities such as brand reputation, followed by measurement and evaluation. Earned media still ranks relatively high for both corporate and agency leaders. Paid media ranked last of 18 possible growth drivers. “Overall, we are sensing a continued optimism about the direction the industry is headed, which is good news for people entering the field,” said Fred Cook, Director of the USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations. “But questions remain about the industry’s ability to attract the right talent, adapt to new technologies and increase the level of investment required to capitalize on these opportunities.”...
The Role and Responsibilities of a Chief Communications Officer … and How It’s Rapidly Changing Thanks to Tech...
Essentially I wouldn’t have been able to achieve much success (and sales) at all if I hadn’t followed Marc Andreessen’s 50/50 Rule, which is essentially the understanding that one should spend 50% of your time building product and the other 50% of your time gaining/building traction (i.e. marketing and message expansion).
It’s a tough blend and balance, there’s no two ways about it and for many developers and engineers the thought of spending half of their time marketing is upsetting, to say the least....
Let me open the door to a new world for you?
One Where Good Guys Win
One where the more truthful and honest you are, the more you enjoy your work, the more money you make.
One that few people know about.
Walk through the door and when you’ve stopped blinking, I’ll show you the light.
And if, when you get to the bottom of this post, you agree with me and the 36 experts’ experiences, share the secret with your friends.
In the meantime, while you get the Sun out of your eyes, indulge me for one minute as I share a wee story…
The global PR industry grew by 7% in 2014, with currency volatility helping to soften another positive year for PR firms around the world, according to the 2015 World PR Report.
The 2015 World PR Report, produced by the Holmes Report and ICCO, again provides the clearest picture available of the global PR industry, based on submissions from more than 400 PR firms across the world.
The research reveals that, for the first time, the Top 250 PR firms in the world cracked the $10m barrier in terms of fee income last year, reporting $10.4bn compared to $9.7bn in 2013....
Global expansion. Blurred lines between PR and marketing. An explosion of creative services.
Chief executives from 12 of the largest agencies in the world discuss their firm’s performance over the past year and share their pitch for the future of the business....
Invariably, each year brings its share of PR crises and scandals, and 2014 was no exception. This year had a robust number of meltdowns, PR debacles and downright embarrassing episodes among some of the globe’s most recognizable brands. Here’s a partial list of some of the year’s worst PR crises.
With the recent revelations about Sony ‘s movie studio executives behaving badly and its discriminatory treatment of female stars, I decided to look closer to home—to my own industry of public relations—to see how women fare. If anyone should treat women well, shouldn't it be a field like PR, which is predominated by women?
It turns out that while the PR profession skews heavily female, men make significantly more money and hold the majority of the seats of power in the largest agencies.
Consider who's running the world’s top 10 PR agencies as ranked in the Holmes Report. The vast majority has white men at the helm, though two have women running their North American units. It would almost be amusing if it weren't so sad to see some of these agencies’s leadership pages,with men holding all the top spots and women peering out beneath them.
What if you brought together one the best-regarded thought leaders in communications and social media with one of the funniest cartoonists?
You'd get a very thoughtful little book with big ideas about people and relationships online and how PR plays a critical role in bringing the two together. And you’d be smiling while you read it and reflect on public relations in the digital age.
Welcome to “What if PR stood for people & relationships? A manifesto for building relationships in the digital era” written by Brian Solis and wonderfully illustrated by Hugh MacLeod. Sponsored by Vocus, the book captures PR’s dilemma today and where it needs to be tomorrow....
Here's an interesting take on PR: We’re mainly talkers, when companies are looking for makers. Read on for five ways to go from talker to maker.
... I thought about the term after I talked to Jay Baer on Inside PR 3.49.I was interviewing him about his new book Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help, Not Hype and forthcoming keynote at Meshmarketing in Toronto.
I asked him about the state of the PR industry and he said the challenge for PR is this: We’re mainly talkers, in a world where companies are looking for makers.
Makers are creators of content – videos, websites, infographics, white papers, or other sharable social objects. Talkers on the other hand…well, they talk about it, maybe even offer advice or a strategy, but when push comes to shove they have to outsource the work....
Do people quoted in newspapers review the stories before they run? Can advertisers legally lie? Are PR people the biggest liars of all? How much does it cost to get a story into The Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star?
Just a few questions that show people do not understand public relations.
Much has been shared about the way the PR gig has changed over the past few years. While all of what’s being said is accurate and important, noteworthy is the fact that seeking new business has also changed. Listed here are a few of the ways new business generation has changed since I first jumped into the business:
In 2013, prospects find you. This is the first and by far the most significant item on this list. Prospects find agencies or individual PR professionals in a home office somewhere by way of their online presence. That’s an online presence far beyond just a website – although that remains hugely valuable. Prospects are looking for professionals who practice what they preach, and who are active and engaged....
New webmaster rules from Google just killed PR agencies according to Tom Foremski's post "Did Google just kill PR agencies?" last month.He highlights a Google webmaster update warning about black hat, linkbait press releases and other similar improper SEO content practices trying to manipulate search engine results.Look out PR agencies Foremski warns....
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I was having a discussion with one of my oldest and closest friends the other day about his career. He wants to go farther in the world of public relations but doesn’t quite know what he needs to get there. So, as an enterprising go-getter, he started making connections and asking other PR pros what he needs to know in this day and age to get ahead of the competition. What one professional told him made me laugh and then made me think. “To get ahead, you need to know two things: Google Analytics and SEO. ”This kind of stopped me in my tracks. Yes, analytics and SEO are extremely important in the digital world. They go hand in hand – one promotes your website while the other tracks how you’re doing. For instance, you can be at the top of the rankings for a key term, but if your bounce rate for that page is insanely high, you might need to change some things. SEO only gets you the attention you need; analytics will tell you exactly how long and what happens after the user sees your page. But what shocked me is that it wasn’t a marketing executive that was telling my friend how essential these tools are, but a public relations professional with many, many years in the business. So has public relations and marketing suddenly become the same thing?...
...On the other hand, this seems like a strange time to be accepting a supporting role for PR. The things that PR has always been about—transparency, authenticity, credibility, engagement, conversation—are at the heart of successful marketing today, and that ought to create an opportunity for campaigns that are driven by a PR idea to win big at Cannes.
We certainly should not be looking at narrowing the definition of public relations to ensure that the winners all feel like “real” PR campaigns....
But what are the skills that will define the PR professional of the future? It's a question I am often asked, so in turn we asked the industry during our definitive World PR Report research study this year with ICCO. And here are the results:
If you dig deep enough, you’ll find some interesting clues from the past that mirror what an effective public relations strategy should look like today. Want proof? Below are five essentials to successful public relations efforts that began in ancient times:
According to PR News’ 2015 Salary Survey, written communications (57 percent) and media relations (48 percent) are considered two of the top PR skills most important for advancement within an organization.
The survey, which took the pulse of 1,133 PR and marketing executives, also found that content creation (54 percent) trumped both crisis management (22 percent) and reputation management (32 percent) when it comes to skills most important for career advancement....
2014′s been a pretty good year for PR happenings and case studies in crisis management. From Uber to Ray Rice to scientists in naughty shirts, from ice buckets to British Airways, the year has been especially generous with teachable publicity scenarios.The outpouring of finely distilled, distractingly quotable PR know-how that flowed from these events has been just as generous, to, and twice as nice.In a word, we in PR kicked some serious tail in 2014 – and we got the quotes to prove it!....
PR has probably changed more in the last ten years than it has in the last three decades. For communicators, new challenges and opportunities have come along with the changes we have experienced as a society, most of which have roots in the influence of the Internet and social media. We are living through a creative and transformative period. With each passing year comes a time to reflect on how far we've come and, perhaps more important, how much we still have left to figure out.
What will PR look like in 2015? What will the challenges be? As communicators pause to celebrate the holidays, let's take a look at where the profession is headed next year:
In other words: change becomes more manageable when you understand what's going on, how long it will last and whether you are on course to conquer it change becomes more manageable when you understand what's going on, how long it will last and whether you are on course to conquer it. Within companies, "change management" is generally a focused effort; but within industries, there is less support and less understanding of these changes without centralized leadership to navigate.
As an industry undergoing massive changes — with journalists fleeing to brands and budgets shifting to data-driven metrics — PR stands at a fork in the road, which requires both a new way of thinking and new, diverse skill sets.
The evidence just does not support the claim that Isocrates put the practice of rhetoric (read PR) on to the moral and ethical high ground.... Marsh invites us to believe that Isocrates laid the “effective foundation for [modern] public relations” and that ”history shows that Isocrates’s symmetrical rhetoric clearly was more effective than its adversarial/advocacy rivals.” He also wants us to accept that Isocrates demonstrated that ”effective, achievable ethics foundation for public relations need not function at the relatively low level of the advocacy/adversarial society model.”I beg to differ.
An op-ed from The Huffington Post draws clear lines between the marketing and PR fields, but the reality is those distinctions are getting blurrier.
...PR people shouldn’t be offended by being perceived as marketers any more than marketers should be offended by being seen as public relations pros. We should all recognize that the lines are blurred in the new paradigm—it’s only when the efforts are coordinated that the best things happen.
Back in March, Edelman advisor Steve Rubeltold us that upcoming PR professionals need to “look at the bigger picture” and “orient [themselves] toward both creating and distributing content”. The firm’s newest tech advisor Burghardt Tenderichrecently gaveThe Holmes Report a more direct version of that statement:
“PR needs to grow up and become real content creators.”
Even as economic power has become increasingly concentrated in large corporations, communication power has become more diffuse. Most of us now carry global publishing power in our pockets, and we are connected to one another like never before. This combination of access and interconnection gives us the ability to make or break reputations and brands.
For the last two years, I’ve had a unique vantage point on this tumultuous change, as chair of the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, the confederation of the world’s PR and communications professional associations.Professional business communicators are on the front lines of the communications revolution. The Global Alliance represents 160,000 practitioners and academics around the globe and I’ve been able to meet thousands of communicators on every continent, from at least 30 different countries and many different cultures. Based on that experience, I can share a few insights about how communication is changing the world of business — and how business communication itself must change as a consequence....
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Research indicates juniors get social media role because of lower billing rates for social media functions. Iandicates PR agencies aand organizations haven't bought into the value of social media.