The NMK event earlier this week was well packed with most of the major tech PR firms represented – Edelman, Bite, Hotwire, Midnight, Harvard, Porter Novelli, Liberate, plus some online PR boutiques like Immediate Future - and a smattering of key players (all, notably, bloggers. Q: Were they influential first and then blogged or did they blog and become influential??? Either way the pairing of influential and blogger was clear.).
The brief was to discuss how disintermediation and the tools in the hands of the clients, enabling direct and untrammelled access to their stakeholders, their markets blah blah blah 2.0 etc, was changing the role of PR and particularly agencies, hence the agency community out in force.
Like true agency pros we didn’t particularly stick to that brief, but there was a good chatter between the audience and the panellists Roger Warner, Sarah Ogden, Drew Benvie and token non-PR person, me.
I spoke to a couple of seasoned online-savvy PR bods afterwards, and they didn’t feel they’d learnt anything. Education wasn’t the objective. What we wanted to stimulate was a debate about where PR goes from here – and I particularly wanted to put forward reasonably well-argued challenges only to be smacked down by a room full of vociferous PR people (50 odd people).
It didn’t happen. There was no fight back.
The only responses that had a positive ‘PR’s fine’ outlook, for me, smacked of self-comforting hiding behind the cosy blanked of yesterday:
- ‘PR’s always evolving’,
- ‘things haven’t changed that much – clients still want XYZ’,
- ‘Would HSBC have done their turnaround if the mainstream media hadn’t picked the story up from Facebook?’.
Yada fucking yada.
Where’s the dynamism? Where’s the opportunism? Where’s the ‘we’re picking up the mantle and have done this for these guys, we did this other radical new thing for these guys, we partnered with this little boutique to deliver something entirely new in this area, a first for PR’ etc etc. It didn’t exist.
It was the same old same old and frankly it was disappointing. I’d have been ashamed to have heard a similarly spineless defence from the digital community or from the marketing community (the two camps I’m caught between).
So I wanted to take the time to discipline my higgledy-piggledy challenges to the PR community, who I do feel warmly towards in the main, to be structured and clear about those challenges that I sincerely believe exist.
PR will NOT die at an industry level. That's plain stoopid.
Change is already happening and will accelerate for PR as a business function. Stakeholders, influencers, messages, communication and reputation are becoming more important not less important so the demand for PR is rising.
However, this IS a change or die warning for the agencies with the PR world, for the organisations and consultancies, and within them especially, for the traditionally structured account teams.
Challenges for the PR agency community:
- You are dated and at risk in your current form
- You lie about your understanding of and ability to deliver in this new world
- You market is being encroached by the wider agency community
- Yet your core abilities are needed now more than ever
One by one -
- You are dated and at risk in your current form
The traditional team mix of client-facing execs, managers and directors in a leveraged pyramid model is increasingly dated. There is a particular need now for multi-disciplinary teams.
My argument is that the terrain is now impossibly broad to be covered by traditional divisions only e.g. Tech, or Consumer. Within Tech the various media worlds are different enough that a good PR tech team should include a very deep, focused specialist in online - nicking the smart focus from Immediate Future's business model but in a per person way. I know the retort here will be 'well Tom tends to more of that, and Mary does more of this' but what we need here is explicit out-and-out focus, deep expertise learnt over time, an intuitive feel for the norms and quirks of online ettiquette and superb antennae for what's buzzing on the network.
Furthermore, beyond specialised PR pros all agencies now need analysts on board. Yes, digital's great because it can answer the measurement question better than ever, but clients are fundamentally exhausted by and lost in a quagmire of available stats.
Imagine if in a pitch situation you can present an analyst who works at account team level (not in a backroom never to be seen) - this is a hands-on person working with the client servicing team on a daily/weekly basis feeding the team with insights. This addresses the measurement question properly. It also defends against my point below no.3, the encroachment of more analytical agencies into PR's rightful (historicallly at least) domain.
This fundamentally adjusts the time horizon of PR campaigns towards 'business at internet speed' - something that PR and the media does better already than pretty much any other marketplace save finance. But there's room still for big improvements - note the Telegraph's reconfiguring of its whole business to accomodate the change in pace and blend of media consumption. Why shouldn't agenciies be doing the same?
2. You lie about your understanding of and ability to deliver in this new world
I am on record as congratulating the PR industry as embracing the new online world better than most. Yet I have found, consistently, that PR people talk a good game about 'web 2.0', 'user-generated content' and 'bloogging', but that it's almost all bullshit and hotair.
Most PR people I know and have asked are not heavy users of RSS - in fact in a recent session at a London PR agency I found that 3 consultants of a group of 9 did not use RSS on a daily basis to manage their campaigns. Shocking. Same for social bookmarking - a fantastic tool for collaborating inside an agency, and for servicing, educating and delighting clients.
What I was hoping was that the PRs blogging and getting stuck into social media were the tip of the iceberg and that broader, slower shifts were also occurring further down the 'berg. Not so. It seems there are PR digital-haves and digital-haven't-a-plucking-clues. It turns out the only ones that do really get it are those that publicly participate - the few high profile PR bloggers, almost all in that room that night.
At the moment these buzzwords are nothing more than a bullet point on a powerpoint pitch to a prospective new client, nothing more than a grin and a nod and a 'yeah we do that too'.
Agencies need to either develop, encourage and train willing consultants to lead their internal digital drives, or better and quicker, achieve a step-change by hiring in digital talent. And this can happen in exciting ways - note Mat Morrison heading to Porter Novelli (a direct swap for Antony Mayfield who we digital types nicked from Harvard a year or two ago!). [Note - sorry Mat, you said not to mention who you're with now but everyone else has already 'broken' that story. PR eh?]
3. Your market is being encroached by the wider agency community
Whilst the trad agencies noodle along (and the digital trad agencies and divisions talk a better talk, but fundamentally still don't evolve in pace with the wider changes in the environment), other agencies are stealing your market.
SEO agencies are all over your rightful turf online.
As they set up social media practices and hire PR professionals like Antony, they threaten you. Deeply.
At Nixon McInnes we're finding that more and more of the website design and build projects we do are involving an element of determing brand architecture, or are catalysts for rebrands - not our rightful terrirtory. But for clients at CEO, CMO, head of marketing-level, digital is increasingly leading as the heaviest used and therefore increasingbly most important marketing asset. Strategy is being set by the digital table. (Drew kicks off a nice discussion of this as the elephant in the room - I did mention it at the talk, but I guess it got lost in the conversation).
And technology measurement providers and buzz monitoring players like Onalytica are getting paid to do the measurement you never quite cracked and claim they can measure influence, sentiment and other core constituents of the PR mix.
Look around you, guys. The pen is closing in around you.
Ged Carroll, a PR man, says that he would get Poke London (a creative digital agency) to set the strategy, and that they were stronger at researching stakeholders, audiences and then telling powerful stories, and that he'd then present that to a PR partner for 'implementation' aka the legwork. 'The strategy's done guys - now go to work...' - is that what the PR community wants for its future?
4. Yet your core abilities are needed now more than ever
This is the biggest business opportunity for PR firms.
I sincerely believe in a tumultuous thundering sea of networked conversations, happening globally, 24/7/365, where reputations are made and lost and shared in seconds with many others, where campaigns rise and fall within online communities, where democratised news flows freely, WE NEED WHAT YOU OFFER MORE THAN EVER.
The online PR boutiques like Immediate Future, Headstream and Cake (who I hadn’t previously heard of) get this.
It is the biggest hugest bestest biz opportunity for you.
We need people that understand:
- listening first, before talking
- points of view
- angles
- reputations
- crisis management
- how to be a spokesperson
- consistent messaging
- influence, and clusters of opinion
- engagement and influence over broadcast and control
That's what I think.
And I from chatting on Tuesday, I think the PR community is in denial, is losing it's seat at the big table and it needs to wake up and revitalise its structures, services and products to reflect the step-change that's happened. Yes, you're always evolving, and yes, you will eventually, but what about now. You're out of date.
Check Drew's post for links to all the other write ups or use this google search.
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