PR Must Adapt — or Die

PR must adapt — or die.

Today, we con­sume more social media than tra­di­tion­al news media. We get more news from our social media feeds than from news out­lets directly. 

The clas­sic PR argu­ment that pub­li­city is more cred­ible than advert­ising might still hold, but is the news media more enga­ging than peer-to-peer communication? 

I doubt it.

The tra­di­tion­al pub­lic rela­tions industry must act.

Here we go:

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 ¹McLuhan, 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

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. ²Solis, 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 ³Valentini, 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)