So much has changed in the media landscape over the past ten years. Whether you’re working in public relations, digital media or marketing — what once was, has evolved to encompass a much larger playing field, full of new considerations and challenges. If we apply the recent 10 year challenge to the changing media landscape, it becomes quite clear just how much the industry has changed.
What stands out most?
We can talk about all the different ways that Facebook has infiltrated our way of life — and love or hate it — it’s grown exponentially in the last decade.
We can talk about how more of us, everyday — from your mother to your colleagues — are getting their news from social media — in whatever form it takes.
Ultimately, we can talk about how with so much data at our finger-tips, as marketing professionals, we still don’t know how to make sense of it all.
We can look back to see how much things have changed, but we must also look forward to see how we can begin to change the way we work, the way we reach people and how we connect with others in the years ahead.
Here are 6 most important trends in digital public relations and online reputation management.
More Strategic // Less Transactional
The state of online influencers is a little ridiculous right now. For many brands, the lure of an A-List celebrity to be photographed with or to post about your product is intense. For a considerable fee, a celebrity can pose or post a quick video about Brand XYZ, and in return a brand can benefit from increased page views, clicks and dollars. But where is the relationship (not to mention the transparency, but we’ll get to that in a minute)?
In the traditional sense, someone who influences you should be able to because they’ve established trust or a considerable foundation of leadership upon which you can rely. Not just because they have millions of followers. Previously, a brand’s success was based upon how many fans or followers they had. Today, thanks to influencer debacles like the Fyre Festival (whose brand influencers are being subpoenaed!) brands are taking a closer look at their influencer relationships to put substance over style.
Micro Influencers Gain Ground
What’s the opposite of a celebrity brand influencer? A micro – or – nano – influencer — or those who have fewer than 1,000 fans! In an attempt to cultivate more meaningful relationships with their influencers, brands are looking at those who are influential within their own, less notorious networks.
This is good news for the rest of us, I suppose, who are able to persuade or who are persuaded by our friends to check out the latest find on Etsy or ModCloth. The truth is that not only are micro-influencers more convincing at being brand ambassadors than celebrities, but it’s better for brands to leverage real people in their marketing efforts. User-generated content — that is, content created by the people actually using your product — makes great copy!
Micro-influencers solve brands’ transparency problems, which is good because Gen Z — one of the most powerful US consumer groups — are really good at sniffing out sponsored posts and celebrity-endorsements.
Working Smarter, Not Harder
In most companies, Public Relations is separate from the Communications Department, which is separate from the Customer Service Department. Working in silos stifles innovation, as well as collaborative approaches to integrated marketing. If you’re working on promoting outreach through earned, paid, shared or owned media, you need to be in the same room. I’m excited that this is becoming a reality for a lot of brands.
Adopting a digital first approach —that is, a shift in organizational culture away from favoring traditional channels to prioritizing digital ones — allows a more holistic view of the communications life-cycle, considering that more advertising dollars and marketing campaigns are going to social media and other online platforms, rather than print and other non-digital channels.
Integrating isn’t easy if you’ve been working in silos, but for start-ups and younger brands, digital first is all they’ve ever known, so they’re more open to knowledge sharing and cross-channel collaboration.
Artificial Intelligence Integration
Chances are, artificial intelligence is already integrated into your daily life. Whether you ask Alexa for the weather; Siri to add something to your shopping list or ask Google for directions, artificial intelligence is helping us all streamline our daily task to make life a little easier. So why not have AI streamline your work?
Much of our regular communication tasks can be automated. From customer chatbots on websites to auto-messages on Facebook and scheduling genius-bar reservations, our customers are already interfacing with platforms built on Artificial Intelligence.
If PR and marketing are serious about working smarter, not harder, they will continue to find ways to integrate AI to not just take on the smaller, day-to-day tasks, but also to make sense of the big data that so many PR professional struggle with. Using unsupervised learning — that is, giving machines a large data sets to draw inferences from to identity trends and hidden patterns. Who are the micro-influencers? which of your customers are die-hard foodies, who follows which series on Netflix, or who among them have similar travel plans.
Protecting Personal Data
Intelligence might be artificial, but it is intelligence none the less and in the continued rise of consumer data, protecting personal data is now a part of the communications professional’s job description. There’s too much data being collected for the consumer to be in the dark about it. And they’re in the dark about it, because brands actively find ways to mislead them or choose to communicate only the bare minimum. But consumers are rising up — thanks to GDPR — or the General Data Protection Regulation. (GDPR is the recent regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA).
The GDPR also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas and means that when data is collected, data subjects must be clearly informed about the extent of data collection, the legal basis for processing of personal data, how long data is retained, if data is being transferred to a third-party and/or outside the EU, and disclosure of any automated decision-making that is made on a solely algorithmic basis. In other words, if you collect data, you need to be transparent about it and let users know how to opt-out.
But you’re a PR professional, not a data scientist. But you should be a consumer advocate. Helping consumers make better decisions begins with educating the consumer about how their data is being used. If they know why it’s being collected, they’ll be able to decide for themselves if it’s worth it.
All that transparency will be worth it, because with great data, comes a greater responsibility to protect it from being exposed, stolen or otherwise tampered with.
It’s All About the Story
Finally, communications as we know it is all about the story! Everyone loves a good story! You know what people don’t like — being sold; being talked at or worse, read to from a script.
How do we take something as basic and as traditional as the press release and turn it into its own charm offensive? By applying the elements of a good story, of course.
Whether it’s leveraging user-generated content from micro-influencers or learning how to hook prospective stakeholders through compelling Shark Tank-style pitches — communications professional will be well-served by creating digital stories in compelling and emotionally engaging and interactive formats.
What can you do to prepare for the future of communications?
Embrace a collaborative learning environment and if you’re started new ventures, create a digital first culture to build upon.
Network smarter — as a both a professional and a consumer. Don’t just build a bigger network; build better relationships.
Find new ways to integrate new technologies into your work. Bring your consumer expectations into your professional work.
Don’t ignore consumer data and privacy. It might be boring and no one reads their user agreements, but you owe it to your industry and consumers (not to mention your role as a consumer) to learn how your data is collected, how it’s used, and if the benefit outweighs the risk.
Know your audience. Pew Research reports on the state of social media every six to nine months. The data they provide gives a great snapshot about what platforms are being used, the frequency they’re being used and trends in usage over time.