Perhaps because I can be incapable of covering an issue in fewer words, I’m going to do another of those blog series next week about the PR department of the future.
Here’s what it’ll be about, in a nutshell:
- The way in-house PR teams are structured, and how they use the services of agencies, has fundamentally not changed in the best part of 30 years
- In that time, media has changed dramatically, particularly in the past couple of years
- Media is changing, PR and related services are having to change too. Are in-house teams able to make best use of those services, or even understand what they’re buying?
- The PR departments that have a long-term view of how they need to evolve stand most change of gaining competitive advantage in the future
Views on this are very welcome. Leave comments below, or send by closed ballot (or en plein air) to @mynameisearl or steve.earl@speedcommunications.com.
Blog – PR department of the future (another blog series begins): http://bit.ly/aUALW1.
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
PR department of the future: another blog series http://goo.gl/fb/Zkfo (@mynameisearl)
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Excellent – very happy to contribute to this: RT @mynameisearl: PR department of the future: http://bit.ly/aUALW1.
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Hi Steve – A little rambling and long perhaps, but here are some thoughts – probably largely driven by Phil Sheldrake’s thinking, as I worked with him for a few years before leaving Racepoint – his views have a tendency to rub-off.
It’s an interesting topic, and one that is close to my heart, having moved out of agency (10 yrs) to in-house just 18 months ago. In itself it gets to the core of the issue by looking at why in-house teams are structured the way they are.
I’d suggest that in-house PR tends to have grown-up organically as the poor cousin of ‘marketing’. This means it’s developed in response to what the business needs, not what the businesses customers need. This is not surprising. It’s only with the introduction of Web 2.0 style technologies that the entire nature of PR has had to change from ‘a set of messages being delivered to customers via the media’ to ‘a conversation with individual customers who control your brand.’
Agencies were the first to start adapting to this change, as there was an opportunity to make gold as well of course as the opportunity to brand themselves as ‘unique’ amongst the competition. This has changed so that agencies that don’t or haven’t adapted, are in danger of becoming extinct, but that same evolutionary driver simply hasn’t been on hand for in-house teams. The result is that they’ve not changed. They’ve allowed all the change to happen within the agencies they use, and have left it at that. The outside world needn’t touch them beyond those steps.
On top of this of course is the fact that it’s not just about a PR dept. needing to change. Social media has changed the way entire businesses need to run (although many haven’t realised this yet) – it’s almost the reverse of the process before.
Rather than messages and product development being driven from the internal to the external audience, they all now come from the external audience back into the company. The company that listens to, interacts with and responds to their followers, critics and fans will be developing what they want and will buy, rather than what the company wants to make, and may or may not manage to sell.
The point is that all too often, in-house PR is taken as an independent aspect of the business. It’s not, it’s an integrated aspect – even if it sometimes doesn’t look that way from the outside. A PR team that is operating in a completely different way to the rest of the business is no good to anyone, regardless to the success it might be having in the Social Media sphere. For the structure of a PR department to be able to change, the structure of the entire business behind it must also change – and that’s a much bigger challenge.
Hope that makes sense – apologies for any typos. Best get back to work now…
Alex – thank you, really good input. PR depts out on a limb? A lot of people I know who work in them would agree.