Confidence, collaboration, technology are future of PR

What does the public relations department look like at your corporation? Are they a standalone division? Do they have a separate (most likely smaller) budget?

If you answered yes to either of these questions your corporation might not have much a future as technology becomes a bigger force in the world, according to leading minds in corporate communications and public relations.

“Technology has become the force and function,” Martin Murtland, Vice President, Solutions for Corporate Communications with Dow Jones & Company said at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit on June 28.

It has become the catalyst that should be breaking down the silos that keep marketing, public relations and communications in their own separate worlds in organizations.

“We need a whole new business model,” Aedhmar Hynes, CEO of Text said. “Communications and marketing need to develop brand goals and then decide on the disciplines and skill sets necessary to achieve those goals.”

Hynes and Murtland were joined on the panel by Peter Land, Senior Vice President of Communications at PepsiCo Beverages America and Matt Harrington, President & CEO of Edelman U.S. All four agreed that the future of Public Relations lies in collaboration, storytelling, and prioritization of social media.

“Don’t get carried away thinking this [technology and social media] is all new and different – it’s a lot of the same,” Hynes said. You just have to adapt to new ways of using it.

Prioritization is key, Land added. PR helps shape a story, but your company (hopefully) won’t be the only people talking about it. You have to decide when you’re going to engage — you can’t correct every blogger who makes tiny mistakes about your company, nor should you want to.

You also have to remember that not everyone will love your brand, he said.

In other words, when Joe Schmo tweets that he hates the taste of Pepsi One, you shouldn’t drop everything to placate him. Pick your battles.

While third-party advocacy is more important than ever in the “pop-culture universe” that we live in, you can’t constantly combat those that say negative things. Instead you have to cultivate your fan base.

And what do you do once that fan base is in place?

“At PepsiCo, we put ourselves out there. We turned control over to the consumers,” Land said.

He referenced the PepsiCo crowdsourcing movement DEWmocracy 2, which recently gave way to three new Mt. Dew flavors – Typhoon, Distortion and White Out – which were created, branded and marketed by fans on social media.

“It’s almost like we took the ad agency out of the equation,” Land said, because no one better understands the product like those that use it. “We aren’t consuming the product like our fans and clients are.”

But not every company has as much power as the B2C behemouth that is PepsiCo, which is also crowdsourcing ideas for social responsibility with it’s Pepsi Refresh Project. They can’t leverage a huge social media fanbase, nor is that fan base the most important part of the future of public relations.

So how can PR in other organizations grow?

The ability to succinctly and compellingly tell a story is key. Which means writing in plain English — not corporate gobbledygook — that your consumers and target markets will understand.

You also have to be able to create ideas for content and be dynamic in doing so. PR could do everything right and a product still might not sell, but that doesn’t mean the time and effort spent working on that project was wasted. Instead, look at it from every angle to get great content – for example, was your project sustainable? Write a blog post on that. Did it bring new, value-added talent into your organization?

Remember that you support the brand, but ultimately, that supports the organization as a whole. Figure out what positives your organization can take out of a negative experience and write about those.

Publishing that writing is equally important – whether it be in a press release, third-party publications or on your own publishing platform like a blog.

You also have to determine how you’re going to measure success when using online tools – both quantitatively and qualitatively. If you’re only looking at the number of clips and columns or your Google ranking, you might not be seeing the whole picture. Make sure you’re also looking at whether or not those clips and rankings are moving the needle and impacting your business.

And remember, as Peter Land said…

“The future [of PR] is about confidence and being equal. You want to be able to walk into your CEO’s office and make a suggestion as to where you go next. You have to be aggressive.”

Liz Harter has a degree in English Writing with a minor in Spanish from Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind. She is an award winning journalist on the collegiate level with a strong background in journalism. She currently works in PR and is a social media autodidact Google+

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