Forget “Better PR” — The PR Industry Needs Education

You and I must save the PR industry.

PR is in con­stant flux, and our industry must evolve.
Yes, we recently missed our window.

But we can still fix ourselves — via online education.

Here we go:

The Digital Transformation of PR

PR Must Adapt — Or Die

The biggest chal­lenge in mod­ern pub­lic rela­tions is the con­stantly chan­ging media land­scape. With the pro­lif­er­a­tion of social media, the rise of fake news, and the decline of tra­di­tion­al journ­al­ism, it can be dif­fi­cult for organ­isa­tions to con­trol the spread of inform­a­tion and pro­tect their reputations.

When Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge pub­lished Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media Is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR in 2009, it pro­posed how PR should embrace the digit­al-first media land­scape and elev­ate our pro­fes­sion to new heights. ¹Solis, B. & D. Breakenridge (2009, February 1). Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media Is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR. Amazon​.com: Books. … Continue read­ing

As we choose our future as pub­lic rela­tions pro­fes­sion­als, we must real­ise that the inter­net and its algorithms are more power­ful than a few (barely sur­viv­ing) newspapers.

The era of tra­di­tion­al print media is over:

Digital-first is no longer a mat­ter of per­spect­ive — it’s a promise.

PR pro­fes­sion­als must be stra­tegic and pro­act­ive in their approach and able to adapt to new tech­no­lo­gies and plat­forms to com­mu­nic­ate effect­ively with their publics.

“The authors argue that earli­er paradigms are mostly inad­equate in address­ing the needs of a 21^st Century in which com­mu­nic­a­tion tech­no­logy is cre­at­ing rap­id glob­al­iz­a­tion while it is dan­ger­ously exacer­bat­ing the ten­sions of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. Through a crit­ic­al dis­cus­sion of pri­or assump­tions and paradigms in pub­lic rela­tions schol­ar­ship, the authors under­line the need for pub­lic rela­tions to revital­ize and bring its body of know­ledge into the 21^st Century.”
Source: Public Relations Review ²Valentini, C., Kruckeberg, D., & Starck, K. (2012). Public rela­tions and com­munity: A per­sist­ent cov­en­ant. Public Relations Review, 38(5), 873 – 879. https://​doi​.org/​1​0​.​1​0​1​6​/​j​.​p​u​b​r​e​v​.​2​0​1​2​.​0​6​.​001

The biggest chal­lenge in PR is ensur­ing that our pro­fes­sion keeps up with new com­mu­nic­a­tion tech­no­logy and stays valu­able and rel­ev­ant as a busi­ness function.

Learn more: PR Must Adapt (Or Die)

We Had Our Window (But Missed It)

After the dot-com bubble in 2000 – 2001, the inter­net slowed down. Social media emerged with behemoths like Facebook, foun­ded in 2004 and Twitter in 2006. Their social engin­eer­ing aimed to con­nect people rather than turn them into online buy­ing machines.

For a good num­ber of years, inter­net mon­et­isa­tion pro­gressed slowly. We got to exper­i­ence the Hippie Web (2005 – 2015) revolving around earned and owned media. It was a golden oppor­tun­ity for PR to gain trac­tion in a space dom­in­ated by two-way com­mu­nic­a­tion, rela­tion­ships, and trust circles. ³Silfwer, J. (2012, January 22). The Hippie Web is Dead (2005 – 2015). Doctor Spin | The PR Blog. https://​doc​tor​spin​.net/​h​i​p​p​i​e​-​w​eb/

The win­dow of earned-owned suprem­acy was nev­er going to stay open forever. One and a half dec­ades after the dot-com bubble, the Money Web (2015 – present) began to gain momentum. On the inter­net today, everything is mar­ket­ing — except per­haps for Wikipedia and a few remain­ing journ­al­ists not hid­ing behind pay­walls. ⁴Silfwer, J. (2012, September 8). Enter the Money Web (2016 – Present). Doctor Spin | The PR Blog. https://​doc​tor​spin​.net/​m​o​n​e​y​-​w​eb/

We had a win­dow. We missed it.

How Marketing Kicked Our PR Ass

Today, SEO (like SEM) is con­sidered a form of mar­ket­ing instead of earned and owned communication.

And the list goes on:

Make no mis­take about it — this is a PR fail­ure of epic pro­por­tions.
Doesn’t the PESO mod­el make it clear­er? ⁵Silfwer, J. (2012, April 13). The Peso Model: Paid, Earned Shared, and Earned Media. Doctor Spin | The PR Blog. https://​doc​tor​spin​.net/​p​e​s​o​-​m​o​d​el/

Paid online media has its fair share of chal­lenges, but a pro­found lack of PR know­ledge is caus­ing mar­keters real head­aches. This is no mys­tery: online mar­keters mainly deal with earned and owned media. Still, they derive their way of think­ing from mar­ket­ing perspectives.

Sorry for being blunt: on the inter­net, the paid media mind­set is just tac­tic­al icing on a stra­tegic cake, a wel­come boost when everything else is in work­ing order.

As mar­keters, they know how to push products and ser­vices.
But they lack basic PR knowledge.

Marketers will protest. And then they will cel­eb­rate a 2% con­ver­sion rate without giv­ing the oth­er 98% a single thought.

And it gets worse.

The Generational Disconnect in PR

Organisations are left with impossible choices with many new digit­al indus­tries and spe­cial­isa­tions. What should an organ­isa­tion do?

Having truck­loads of agen­cies adds com­plex­ity and kills ROI. Hiring an army of in-house spe­cial­ists causes bloat — and kills ROI.

The out­come? Marketing depart­ments keep doing what they do best: push­ing mar­ket cam­paigns to sell online and off­line products and ser­vices. Everything else? Everything else is left in a big dirty pile on the com­mu­nic­a­tion department’s door­step. And it’s a mess.

No won­der com­mu­nic­a­tion depart­ments world­wide struggle with digit­al trans­form­a­tion issues: Fresh PR hires from school haven’t been taught the first thing inbound strategies, con­ver­sion tac­tics, or rank­ing factors. When com­mu­nic­a­tion depart­ments look out­side the organ­isa­tion for spe­cial­ists, they find … legions of mar­keters. It’s one big disconnect.

I con­stantly hear young­er pro­fes­sion­als dis­reg­ard seni­or ones because “they don’t under­stand TikTok or Twitch.” Conversely, seni­or pro­fes­sion­als dis­reg­ard young­er ones since “they don’t under­stand the fun­da­ment­als of cor­por­ate communication.”

We’re quickly los­ing know­ledge and prac­tic­al skills at both ends.

Save the PR Industry Now

The PR industry must save itself.
And there’s only one way for­ward — education.

However, tra­di­tion­al edu­ca­tion is slow and time-con­sum­ing. The dynam­ics of the online media land­scape will have changed many times before PR stu­dents get their hands on a rel­ev­ant text­book. And we can’t expect seni­or pro­fes­sion­als to quit their jobs and return to school for years.

PR does have a bright future still. 

With many AI break­throughs fast approach­ing, the inter­net will reward com­mu­nic­at­ors who can lever­age earned and owned chan­nels to build online audi­ences. If we want to mani­fest change, the edu­ca­tion­al respons­ib­il­ity falls heav­ily on us all. 

Digital PR spe­cial­ists must share what they do, how they do it, and why. Even if that means shar­ing their best secrets for which they typ­ic­ally charge good money.

As for every­one in the PR industry, sup­port the cre­at­ors when great online PR courses start to pop up every­where. Share their work. Invest in your­self.

Mark my words: it must begin now:

PR Resource: The PESO Model

The PESO Model

I often use the PESO mod­el to under­score the crit­ic­al dif­fer­ences between mar­ket­ing (paid media) and pub­lic rela­tions (earned, shared, and owned media). 

The PESO mod­el divides the media land­scape into four dif­fer­ent media chan­nel types: 

Don Bartholomew, vice pres­id­ent of digit­al research at Fleishman Hillard, presen­ted a ver­sion of the PESO mod­el in 2010. According to PR blog­ger and PR meas­ure­ment expert Heather Yaxley, his 2010 art­icle is likely to be the earli­est men­tion of the model:

In 2013, PR blog­ger Gini Dietrich pop­ular­ised the PESO mod­el on her blog and later trade­marked her heav­ily pro­moted and widely spread infographic.

“In June 2013, Gini Dietrich presen­ted the first iter­a­tion of the PESO mod­el you may recog­nise in a blog post: The Four Different Types of Media. It was fol­lowed in August by the post Mobile Marketing: Use the Four Media Types in Promotion, where she talked about integ­rat­ing paid, earned, owned, and shared.”
Source: PRConversations​.com ⁶Yaxley, H. (2020, June 28). Tracing the meas­ure­ment ori­gins of PESO. PRConversations​.com. https://​www​.prcon​ver​sa​tions​.com/​t​r​a​c​i​n​g​-​t​h​e​-​m​e​a​s​u​r​e​m​e​n​t​-​o​r​i​g​i​n​s​-​o​f​-​p​e​so/

“It is also worth point­ing out this 2010 McKinsey Quarterly art­icle by David Edelman and Britan Salsburg that includes sold and hijacked media along­side what used to be called POEM (paid, owned and earned media). Both of these con­cepts still have value even though their exe­cu­tion has changed in the past dec­ade.“
Source: PRConversations​.com ⁷Yaxley, H. (2020, June 28). Tracing the meas­ure­ment ori­gins of PESO. PRConversations​.com. https://​www​.prcon​ver​sa​tions​.com/​t​r​a​c​i​n​g​-​t​h​e​-​m​e​a​s​u​r​e​m​e​n​t​-​o​r​i​g​i​n​s​-​o​f​-​p​e​so/

Learn more: The PESO Model: Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned Media

PR Resource: The Electronic Age

Enter: The Electronic Age

Human cul­ture is often described based on our access to pro­duc­tion tech­no­lo­gies (e.g., the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age).

According to Marshall McLuhan and the Toronto School of Communication Theory, a bet­ter ana­lys­is would be to view soci­et­al devel­op­ment based on the prom­in­ence of emer­ging com­mu­nic­a­tions technologies.

McLuhan sug­gests divid­ing human civil­isa­tion into four epochs:

“The Gutenberg Galaxy is a land­mark book that intro­duced the concept of the glob­al vil­lage and estab­lished Marshall McLuhan as the ori­gin­al ‘media guru’, with more than 200,000 cop­ies in print.”
Source: Modern Language Review ⁸McLuhan, M. (1963). The Gutenberg galaxy: the mak­ing of typo­graph­ic man. Modern Language Review, 58, 542. https://​doi​.org/​1​0​.​2​3​0​7​/​3​7​1​9​923

As a PR pro­fes­sion­al and lin­guist, I sub­scribe to the concept of the Electronic Age. I firmly believe soci­ety is unlikely to revert to the Gutenberg Galaxy.

Read also: The Electronic Age and the End of the Gutenberg Galaxy