The Dissident Spin Doctor: 2013 sees PR enter the boardroom

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by Emma King (@EmmainSA) I can’t tell you what this year’s big business start-up or new social media phenomenon will be (oh, that I wish I could). But we can look at current trends and begin to plan around what we know will happen, so here are my thoughts on the big things we will see in 2013, and how we can prepare our businesses.

 1.       PR gets (way) more important Emma King

We’ve said this for a long time, but it’s never been truer. In a time of change, it’s important for businesses to manage their reputation efficiently, build relationships, and communicate clearly about what they are doing and why. Corporates realise that these practices need to be built into their very way of working, rather than trying to stick PR Band-Aids over their fundamental business issues.

It’s heartening therefore to see PR entering the boardroom, as with the recent rise of SABMiller’s ex-corporate affairs chief, Sue Clarke, to European MD. It’s recognition that reputation has a very real impact on the bottom line.

Hand in hand with this comes further collaboration between disciplines. I’ve already spoken about the need for integration, and for PR t to sit within creative planning, rather than stuck on as an afterthought here [link to previous article].

Communications professionals arebecoming increasingly responsible for managing the minute-to-minute face of a brand or business – and they cannot do this within virtual silos. Collaboration of talent and experience, irrespective of job titles or department, is crucial for brands to thrive in our super-connected future.

What does this mean for us? Experienced and heavy weight communications professionals need to be included in planning, and have an impact in the boardroom. Those businesses that strike it off a ‘nice-to-have’ rather than an essential, or, even more worrying, entrust their communications to a lightweight PR manager or junior social media intern, do so at their peril.

 2.       PR agencies become content producers

Advertising agencies are traditionally thought of as the content producers, but 2013 is the year that PR specialists become content producers in their own right.

The times of farming out generic press releases are long gone, and to connect and engage audiences we all need to be story tellers.  This is not just important for brands –corporates weave a mythology about their business develop reputations that are hard to crack at time of crisis, look at Google or Apple for example.
Within all of this there needs to be substance. 2013 will see data becoming cheaper and ever more available, so fluffy PR speak will be tolerated less. And conversely, intuition remains key – those brands who overanalyse and nitpick an idea or content to death, will lose out in the fast-paced and instinctive work of digital and social media.

The learnings for us are as follows: we need to be content producers, not just news producers. Consumer wants stories – and they are used to be told them in visual ways, though videos on Youtube, memetastic viral pictures and interactive videos and downloads. That means staffing and upskilling so that PR agencies can create this content – not outsource it.

3.       Activism continues to grow

It seems forever ago, when digital communications came to the fore as a weapon for the man on the street to drive global change. Globalism means that underground activism continues to become mainstream.

For corporates this means a continued demand for transparency, information and real time response. Consumers demand that brands be accessible, and businesses need to be ever more social. They must invest in telling micro-stories – little stories within larger stories, which connect consumers with companies that are compatible with their values and interests.

This means we must ensure the brands we are custodians of are transparent, connected and work hand-in-hand with communities within which they operate – whether real life or virtual. And we need to ensure that, in the very foundation of the business, we are answering questions about the role of corporates, over and above making a profit.

4.       The continued growth of the niche

One of the greatest things that the digital age has bought about, is the power of the niche. No longer are we confined to creating mass communications which hit the lowest common denominator. We can create super-targeted content to engage readymade communities and dedicated social networks.

Having said that, I still think TV will continue to have staying power – purely because it connects to all of our other screens. One only needs to see the way we consume superevents on YouTube to see how we will consume TV in the future. Again, we as PR professionals need to look at ourselves as content producers – and present brand news as such, rather than via the dying press release.

When I started out in PR, it was so different to today. I used to sit next to a fax machine faxing out press releases, and we had to find out information without the help of Google (it seems impossible now). But we need to change and be relevant, or we become outdated and drop by the wayside, as many PR agencies have.

A friend fittingly said the other day, after a school PTA meeting, “We don’t know what the future holds, we can just equip our children with skills for jobs that we don’t even know will exist.”

Emma King is Head of PR at The Jupiter Drawing Room (Cape Town). You can find her on Twitter at @EmmainSA

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Published by Herman Manson

MarkLives.com is edited by Herman Manson. Follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/marklives

One reply on “The Dissident Spin Doctor: 2013 sees PR enter the boardroom”

  1. Great article. If PR does nothing more than promote corporate activism in 2013 it will have made a major game-changing contribution to the industry and the country and I look forward to hearing more of those stories. But when it comes to content production and storytelling you are going to need to import those skills or redefine what to expect from clients.

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