Stories declaring 'death of PR' are misguided

For a sector that specializes in communicating with the public, the public relations industry has done a bad job of explaining what it does.

PR is often misinterpreted as something companies use to spin the truth, or it is confined to a marketing afterthought in the promotion of a “breakthrough” product. Some journalists view PR simply as a set of media relations tactics, from sending (bad) pitches and issuing press releases to holding press conferences and being the gatekeepers for CEOs and executives.

The reality is that more than anything, good PR is about having an awareness of outside trends and sentiments, being a corporate conscience, and enabling authentic dialogue between organizations and the public – through traditional and social media, as well as several other means. The best PR counsellors, and the companies they represent, are known for enabling and facilitating valuable two-way communications that result in action or, at a minimum, a strong debate that leads the public to think about things a little differently than before.

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Social Media the One Bright Spot for PR Hiring

While economists argue about whether we are now through the recession or whether we’re headed for a double dip, the Labor Market Outlook Report by the Society of Human Resource Management reports that 56% of their respondents expect job growth for the third quarter of 2010. 98% of U.S. companies say they plan to award base salary pay increases in 2011.
How is PR faring?

Executives polled in the The Creative Group Hiring Index for Marketing and Advertising Professionals said PR and marketing research top their list of new hires they plan to add in the next year. But the Simply Hired metro area job trend report shows that PR jobs are highly sought after by job seekers, putting PR high on the list for ‘most competitive jobs’ in a majority of the 15 cities they track.

One area in PR that is a bright spot in this tough hiring market is social media. The biggest stumbling block to getting started with social media programs is a lack of resources and knowledge, say the majority of firms and already 59 percent of the Fortune Global 100 firms have invested in recruiting staff specifically assigned to core social media duties that include customer outreach, PR and marketing support and internal communications.

Online recruitment sites are being flooded with social medial positions. At Indeed.com the number of social-media job postings has increased by more than 600 percent, from roughly 3,000 in 2005 to 21,323 as of May 2010. Yahoo HotJobs has also seen a significant rise in positions with a social-media component, says a Newsweek article.
“Hiring managers, recruiters, and management staff are often confused on where they can find qualified social media professionals for corporate positions. They get a lot of resumes, but few are qualified,” says Jeremiah Owyang on his blog.

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Americans Spening More Time With News

September 14, 2010

Americans have more ways to obtain news than ever before, and we’re spending more time with news now than during much of the past decade, according to a report from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. In terms of news consumption, digital platforms are making up for slightly smaller audiences on traditional platforms, and people continue to receive news from both. Roughly a third of Americans went online for news, which was about even with those who heard the news via radio, but slightly higher than those read daily newspapers. Additionally, 44 percent of Americans say that they received news through Internet and mobile sources by cell phones, e-mail, social networks and podcasts.

The proportion of Americans obtaining news from traditional media like television, radio and print has been stable or edging downward during the last few years, the report finds.

But there isn’t an overall decline in the percentage watching news on television, and three-quarters of Americans still receive news from print newspapers and radio. Rather than replacing traditional news platforms, digital technologies are becoming part of the mix in Americans’ news-consumption habits. Only 9 percent got news solely through Internet and mobile technology — without also using traditional sources — according to the Pew report.

Click here to read more and find out how many Americans get their news from online and newspapers. 

Like It or Not, Twitter Has Become a News Platform

There’s been plenty of debate lately about whether Twitter has become “mainstream” or not, but examples continue to pile up of how the social network/microblogging platform has worked its way into our lives, to the point where it has become a form of media unto itself. Whether it will ever become mainstream in the sense that it gets used by your aunt or grandmother is almost irrelevant — the reality is that, for all its flaws, Twitter is a publishing tool, and an increasingly powerful one. And it can be used by anyone, journalist and non-journalist alike.

Examples:
Several days ago, a Japanese journalist who was kidnapped in Afghanistan managed to trick his captors into letting him post a message about his location to Twitter. It’s not clear from the news reports whether his tweets helped get him released or not, but it is yet another example of how easy Twitter makes it to broadcast that kind of news — and not just to one or two people, the way email or text messaging does, but to potentially hundreds or even thousands (in 2008, Twitter helped American photojournalist James Buck spread the news that he had been arrested by Egyptian police while covering an anti-government protest).

Two other examples of Twitter as a news platform are the recent hostage-taking and shootout at Discovery Channel headquarters in Maryland, and the earthquake that hit near New Zealand last week. In the first case, reports about a gunman in the Discovery building started coming in before the news was on a mainstream news outlet. And in the case of the earthquake — as in similar cases involving earthquakes in China and forest fires in California — reports flooded the Twitter network while most mainstream media outlets were still unaware that it had even occurred. One resident said she relied on news she got from Twitter more than the radio, because it was a lot faster (although it should be noted that she is a Twitter fan and web consultant).

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