Advertisers frequently talk about viral marketing, earned media and social outreach in their pitches to clients and in turn the death knell is again being rung again for the public relations industry. Michael Shaw, Vice President of the Council of Public Relations Firms, warns "barbarians are at the gate" and the public relations industry is standing by and just watching as advertisers steal many of the tools associated with social influence.
A possible glimpse into the future was posited to me last month by a consultant from a marketing association, in the form of a rather bold prediction. He said that the changes taking place in communications, marketing and media are so dramatic, so pervasive and so fundamental, that public relations firms, for example, won't even be referred to as "PR firms" in 15-20 years?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùthat they will have morphed into something new.
Meanwhile, Shaw goes on to point out that the PR industry has grown three times faster than advertising since 1990. So what does this mean? If public relations is growing, yet being co-opted by advertising and marketing, will PR merge into an advertising-based hybrid and earned media and social influence will no longer be called public relations? Marketers certainly hope that is possible because without public relations tools and strategies they have very little to add to the social media landscape.
Clearly advertising is struggling to figure out the social aspects of the new media order and in turn find ways to monetize it. Public relations has sown the seeds of what has resulted in many of the social influencing techniques now embraced by the new communication tools. To counter all of this re-branding by advertising and marketing, the PR industry must finally recognize it needs to promote itself with a PR campaign of its own.
PRSA has an advocacy mission, but not much has been done to promote the industry as the inventor of social influence. Instead the national organization has focused on defending controversial tactics, such as the use of video news releases (VNRs). Perhaps, its time to dust off advocacy and push more industry leaders to take more of a role in promoting public relations as the recognized industry leader in social influence, with a goal of countering the theft and poaching of public relations strategies and tactics by other media professionals.
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