A few things of note this week. First up, the Chair of our Social Media Measurement Group, Philip Sheldrake, spoke with Katie Delahaye Paine – a special advisor to our group and author of "Measuring Public Relationships: The data-driven communicator's guide to measuring success". Listen to the six minute interview below:
Katie's view is that public relations has a fantastic opportunity to be the discipline of choice as organisations engage online and build dialogue with their audiences. And, we can measure this engagement, but only if we have the analytical skills to do so.
After getting to grips with statistical analysis recently at LSE, I know what she means – my inclination was to run for the hills. But, I think Katie has a point – she's not advocating that all PR practitioners are stats grads - because our skill set is broad and there are many competencies that we need - but it should be in our toolkit. No doubt there will be some divided opinion on this – but it gets the conversation going and if there is one thing PR people are good at, it's expressing their views…
Next up, a great piece in The Independent on PR as the new journalism. Again, there is recognition that the PR profession has an opportunity to be the dominant discipline online by using its engagement skills to build dialogue – as opposed to the advertising 'push messaging' approach. The piece talks about 'journalicists' – those that combine public relations and editorial content skills. So practitioners are content creators and curators – and that means all types of content.
And if anything, the front-page news in this week's PR Week magazine corroborates this perspective. The article "Top advertising agencies creep into PR territory" discusses the recent development of PR practices by two advertising firms, Karmarama and Beattie McGuiness Bungay. The disciplines are converging; new skill mixes are being brought to bear.
Finally, I took part in the CommsChat discussion this week on who 'owns' social media. Is it or should it be PR? Is it about ownership or integration? The transcript was available online but I wanted to point you to a post - 'the most important person in social media doesn't exist... yet' - by one of CommsChat's contributors, Adam Vincenzini (@AdamVincenzini). It makes thoughtful reading and again, touches on the development of the PR skill set.
This debate is going to run….
1 comment
This strikes at the heart of PR's ongoing struggle to be taken seriously. There are many brilliantly creative practitioners who are strong and successful communicators on behalf of their organisations or clients who, yes, are "allergic to math". The challenge is to buy into enough number crunching to give us the desired status of credible, accountable professionals without becoming full blow actuaries (no matter how attractive their comparative remuneration may be!)