Lots of positive comments, memories and sarcastic jibes followed the first one. Bring it on.

To the 1990s then.

I’ve quizzed another true rock star PR and all-round industry troubleshooter: Jonathan Simnett, next-to 30 years in the business and now imparting his wit and wisdom in developing The Reptile Group amongst other projects. The many people who’ve worked for and with Jonathan through his time at notable organisations including A Plus, Brodeur A Plus, Brodeur Worldwide, Fleishman Hillard and all those other Omnicom bits, Ariadne Capital, SpinVox and now Reptile and in clients from IBM and BT to two men in a shed and their robotic dog will know he is rarely short of an opinion. In fact, never.

During the 90s he was heart and soul of a team that built a technology PR firm from one of the best in its field in the UK to an international leader, taking on new talent, new clients, new challenges and an onslaught of new gadgets along the way. All that success, despite me being there for a couple of years.

Without further ado, here is the world of 1990s PR in the inimitable words of Jonathan Simnett. Sit down, grab a cuppa and put the phone on mute. You’re going to enjoy this.

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What things for you marked out PR in the 1990s as different to when you started in the mid-80s?

Well, the fashion sense had got a bit better ten years in, but when I started in PR PCs had been on the market for less than two years  and cost thousands a piece so were pretty rare and exotic beasts. Ethernet LANs hadn’t really staggered out of the labs at Xerox and even the fax was not yet in regular use – they were simply too expensive.  But its precursor – the Telex – lurked in the corner, constantly demanding fuelling with more coal (I may have made that up – the coal bit, not the Telex).

In the 80s most outreach was done on the (landline) phone and motorbike courier companies made a fortune ferrying bits of paper around to and from news distribution houses. I actually licked stamps, stuffed envelopes and sent people letters too. And I had a very big brown analogue phone with lots of buttons and the numbers of an ever-changed roster of journalists listed against them.  These I punched a lot (the buttons, not the journalists, although I did have a colleague and friend to this day who once did, but that’s another story). My desk was otherwise a mass of notepads, address books and Post-It Notes surrounding a temperamental (it was Italian after all) Olivetti typewriter-come-word-processor running God-knows-what operating system and connected somehow to an asthmatic daisy wheel printer. Oh yes and a Filofax…

What did your desk look like in 1990?

By the mid 1990s a four-grand black IBM Thinkpad laptop – probably with less computing power than my current Blackberry – hooked up to a Novell LAN took pride of place on my desk, not least because both were clients by that time and email and electronic diaries were starting to rule our lives. My desk phone had become less creaky and more of a designer object.  But thanks also to the – still very expensive – wonder of cellular telephony, my car had also become my mobile office, as I actually seemed to spend most of my time not at my desk but in traffic jams – the phone was still fixed in the car, though, just behind the hand brake – which sometimes led to confusion when parking.

Despite ideas of  `the paperless office` current at the time, my desk was still covered in endless bits of A4 though but the view out of the office had improved as we’d moved a couple of times as our firm grew.  But ever-innovative and ahead-of-the-curve my colleague Andrew Smith (@andismit as he is now known) had got stuck into the Compuserve  (a form of primitive ISP) account and become fascinated with a thing called Mosaic which he described to my disbelieving face as a `web browser`.  Little did I know… Later on he tried to get me off my Alta Vista addiction and turned on to an upstart beta search engine called, of all things, `Google`.

A Palm PDA, its unreliable docking station and laughable synchronisation routine came and went its place taken by a brilliant electronic device called a `Revenger` which I stuck to my desk with Velcro. This would make the noise of a rocket launcher, grenade or, my favourite, a ray gun, if I needed to let off steam (which I did a lot at the time – hence my native North American-esque nick name of `Little Dark Cloud`).  The Velcro was wizard wheeze as the Revenger could be quickly demounted and placed in my car for clearing – in my head at least – the aforementioned inevitable M4 and M25 jams encountered on the way to client sites and journalist meetings.

And what was a ‘typical’ day like back then?

They appeared to be nearly 14 hours long and come in blocks of six or seven at a time and had way too much Slough in them. This was because we were still two-thirds of the way through building what became the world’s biggest technology and business-to-business communications agency and that takes your life away.

The constant challenge was trying to strike the balance between client consultancy and running a business (and on very little sleep as the first – and, to those that know me, unsurprisingly noisy and demanding – little Simnett had recently arrived). We were growing steadily at 20 per cent plus a year so recruitment was a constant activity as so few people of the `experienced candidates` who came through the door of New Tithe Court met our, by then, exacting standards.

Frustrated as ever, I decided we needed to `grow our own` and we put in place all the systems that would give us the best team in the industry. That resulted in the then A Plus Group becoming one of the first tranche of companies to be awarded `Investor in People` accreditation and the rigorous development and evaluation system that was put in place eventually allowed us to take on the whole of IBM’s PR world-wide in pretty much one big gulp.

When I wasn’t sucked up in endless business management meetings in the UK, I was travelling working on building our European and US business as the race to serve the dot.com boom heated up. During that time, the production of press releases was still the primary news vehicle but email rather than paper became the preferred method of dissemination.  We still got through a huge amount of fax paper though as, thanks to the grip of Luddite unions and weedy management, many of the publishing houses were lagging in their adoption of office automation.

There were lots of face-to-face interviews because magazines still had plenty of journalists on the staff and a fair smattering of `round table lunches` although the press conference was already becoming an endangered species. Clients too were taking a more holistic approach to that marketing communications so we started staffing up with analyst relations, speaking opportunity, design, marketing strategy and a host of other money-making activities that complemented the core media relations offering. 

How did the skills that an account manager needed changed over the course of the 1990s?

The key thing was the arrival of their own PC and knowing how to work and take advantage of all the applications available. Also, as the tech industry grew to become the worlds largest, PR was becoming more internationalised, so we started to develop a cadre of specific multi-lingual international account managers. The idea that agencies should actually be run to make a decent profit – a revolutionary idea at the time – also started to take hold so business management skills started to become as appreciated as much as the creative craft skills of communications. As the work got harder and more intense starting with the Far East in the morning and ending with the West Coast in the evening, the cultural climate of business started to get more informal – team-oriented rather than hierarchical and work started to become `what you do where you are` rather than `a place you went to.`

Was there a point in the 1990s, during the growth years, when you thought ‘this is actually becoming a serious industry now’?

You are assuming that is actually is one now?!  In order to keep our sanity at times we used to joke that `PR was not a job for grown ups` but it was quite clear to us that despite often wondering like the Talking Heads `Once in a Lifetime` lyric `how did we get here? ` in the second half of the 90s that we were running a network of 650 people with a combined fee income approaching $100 million.  So, despite the fact that my parents still had no idea what I did for a living or whether I was any good at it – despite my personal `key indicator` of ever more outlandish be-spoilered pieces of German engineering appearing at regular intervals outside their houses – the good news was effective communication had become a prerequisite for commercial success in the fastest-moving business the world had ever seen.

How has PR in the technology sector in particular changed over the past 20 years?

Hugely, as the technology sector is always the first to adopt new communications technologies. The game changers have been email, the World Wide Web, ubiquitous mobility, search engines and now digital and social media platforms. What hasn’t changed lamentably is the impression that somehow you need to be a geek to work in it but thankfully plentiful beer is still the favourite lubricant for journalistic discourse. And content still is king.

Do you remember the first time you went to a client meeting without a tie?

Clearly. It was at Silicon Graphics in California in 1988 – on a press trip in a freak heatwave in March. Apart from the unexpected spring sunburn everything was fine because, being the 1980s, a snappy pair of Ray Ban Wayfarers was de rigueur – 24/7.  Which was just as well as because of a family crisis affecting one of my colleagues I’d been dragged out of my sick bed with `flu (not the `man` sort by the way, the proper `my legs feel like pieces of string` sort) to lead it and was looking and feeling more than a little bit grey, so as well as protecting my eyes from the u.v. those faux-tortoiseshell rims disguised my malaise nicely and left my coolness intact. I just had to work out how to stop sleeping in them…

Do you remember when you first used the internet to do something for a client?

Yeah we wrote `Rough Guide to the Internet` for IBM which was published by – you’ve guessed it – `Rough Guides` on the basis that it was `a guide to travelling in cyberspace`. Sadly, I still think that was a pretty neat bit of horizontal thinking.

What stories do you have about 90s PR that not many people know about?

How sometimes life has a strange synchronicity.  You work in tech PR, your car gets stolen, it’s used in a ram raid on a computer warehouse, after a police chase it’s crashed in the IT Mecca of Bracknell and ends up as a bit of coverage in PR Week.  The embroidered story is still on the Web – look here – http://bit.ly/kQynfw Come to think of it, didn’t The Police actually produce an album called `Synchronicity`…spooky…

Of course the 90s too were full of great examples of the result of executives and journalists getting tired and emotional at company parties and on press trips.  Our own spectacularly bacchanalian company events served as a great safety valve for relief from the day-to-day grind. I never ceased to wonder when presented with the bill quite how we had managed to consume so much.  I blame the tequila… 

Anyway, though, I wish I’d recorded some of the content of some of the Kafka-esque meetings with overwrought and over-invested smart-arses who thought they were going to be the next dot.com millionaires.  The nuclear meltdown, for instance, when a hotel could not supply one of these brats with Pepsi during an interview.  `I only drink Pepsi, so get me f****** Pepsi!!!!` one teenage moron shrieked as a poor Coke-holding waitress backed out of the room propelled by his pompous, oafish ranting.  Or the constant clicking of keyboards as countless limited-attention-span jerks disinterestedly `multi-tasked` during presentations demanded at the last minute  - high on their own arrogance, caffeine and jet lag.

One particular moment of tragicomedy involved me being backed into corner by a furious pint-sized control freak American chief executive screaming `I’m the boss don’t tell me my f****** business` when it was again mentioned after his 13^th interview (he had 18 in total – how times have changed) that his sleepwalking `Rolodex presentation` was making the journalists lose the will to live and reducing his chances of coverage to zero (I didn’t exactly use those words, but you get the drift). Luckily I was able to hand over duties that day on that account to someone whose tact and diplomacy meant that he ultimately swapped being a PR for being an MP.

And then there was the chronically insecure MD who disagreed with our choice of photograph of him and clearly irked by the fact that it had been used very successfully in campaign he, in some weird passive-aggressive manoeuvre, secretly got another shot from the session contacts sheets (we had those in the 90s before digital photography) blown up to poster size and then pinned to the outside of his office door to make some sort of rather pointless point.

And there were the shows.  Particularly those held in Las Vegas, like the behemoth named Comdex.  Putting the IT industry into Vegas is like letting a bunch of delinquent teenagers with a sugar fixation loose on the confectionary counter. One particular event stands out.

The very young and very talented founder of a British cyber security company – which had been recently acquired by an investment of one of our VC clients – went to Vegas to man the stand at a big security show. He promptly disappeared. 48 hours later despite our frantic efforts to locate him and full crisis comms plans having been implemented, he was apprehended by the police and was found to have punished his company credit card on a two-day bender of drink, drugs, gambling and women of ill-repute.  When the local sheriff called the apoplectic new CEO to inform him that the errant and now dishevelled employee had been found, the somewhat relieved CEO’s first question was `Is he alive?` `Yes sir,` said the sheriff  `You’ll be glad to know he is`.  `Good, ` said the CEO, rediscovering his ire, `because when I get to him I’m going to f****** kill him! ` 

Strange and sweary times, I guarantee you, it’s all true. And then there was the endless `toys out of the pram` episodes as one salesperson or regional head got a Porsche or a Rolex or holiday or a bigger office or some tasteless gewgaw at a company ra ra event, (always it seemed held in Hawaii presented by a Z-list American celeb or executive who thought they were one who’d turned the cheese up to the full Monterey Jack) and the others didn’t. Or the unalloyed joy of having to stop a dealer race day as the last four sales directors standing looked bent on committing motoring murder on the track. They had the weapons in the form of designed-by-three-people-who-clearly-weren’t-speaking-to-eachother but then aspirational Jaguar XJSs and they were clearly going to use them.

Nevertheless, through all of these mad times there were (and are) some great clients – grownups who were (and are) a delight to deal with. I won’t embarrass them by listing their names but, of course, those that get PR inevitably get to the top of the tree and remain great mates to this day.  After all, great marketing trumps great technology every time and you simply can’t beat having drinks after a successful day with someone whose self-made talent has allowed them to own one of the ten biggest yachts in the world and is a really nice guy to boot.

You, Blur, Oasis and (naturally) New Order are down the pub and they all ask about PR. What do you tell them?

`Some Might Say` if you don’t `Acquiesce` you can make the sort of money that’ll get you a nice `Country House` although with very little `Leisure` time to spend in it.  Nevertheless, a career in PR is something you won’t `Regret` because you’ll never have a week that’s the same or a `Blue Monday`.

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So there we have it. Memory lane, and then some.

More conclusions to follow in the wrap-up post. And next: The Naughties. 

But one quick thought on the 1990s: it was a transitional period, during which the pace of change in PR accelerated like never before. We went from basic computers to powerful computers – and, some might say (Oasis hat-tip again there), from basic PRs to some pretty sophisticated ones. And along the way, madness, mayhem and a lot of maturity. Well, relatively-speaking for PR anyway.

Do you work hard? Are you hungry for success? Will you put work ahead of everything else in order to fulfil your potential and meet the expectations of your employer?

Thirty years ago PR people may have given quite different answers to the same questions. Things were different then (not that I know first-hand, I was in primary school), before the 80s boom and long-hours culture took hold.

Having watched a few episodes of Kirsty Young’s excellent series on Britain at Work, charting how earning a crust has changed in this country since the post-war period, I got thinking about how much PR has changed in the same time. Or more specificially, since the introduction of computers in the 1980s.

There is so much crap flying around at the moment about the future of PR, how social media is just oh-so-friggin’-wonderful and how PR is now somewhere between one of the most important things a business can do and an irrelevant niche exploiting fast-declining media. So it’s time to take a long hard look at reality, and history. Not just look to an uncertain future, but see what we can learn from the past, and then see if that gives us some food for thought about the future of PR, given our past mistakes and advances.

PR is on the cusp of some definitive change. If only we knew what. Some agencies fear change, others are falling over themselves to stuff our heads with digital things, some are doing the same old thing and hoping for the best.  Some people get it, some people don’t. Change is the only thing that is certain, and those that get it right will be the successful ones.

Why will it be worth reading this blog over the next few weeks? Well, I don’t know whether it will, but let’s give it a shot. Each week I’ll be focussing on one of the past three decades, bringing together some perspectives (or memories, for the grey-haired amongst us) on what it was like, what progress we made and what we’d rather forget. I’ll be interviewing some of the people who’ve been in PR a long time, others who’re done a decade or more, and some fresher faces.

This week it’ll be the 1980s. The decade of the Falklands conflict, hairspray, the Mini Metro and some of the greatest yet cheesiest pop yet produced.

Next week, the 1990s. Grunge, Maastricht, Britpop, the rise of the internet and the first football team to win the treble.

After Easter, the 2000s. Dot.com flop, credit boom, credit flop, ropey music generally.

Then bang up to now, with some thoughts on what we can learn from the past and how PR may look in the future.

These posts will cover things like how success in PR has changed, how techniques have changed, the agency/client relationship, part-time and remote working, dress codes, and the conspicuous consumption of booze and drugs. Perhaps.

So some properly thought-out out stuff, about PR across old and new media, across old and young people. Without all the jizz about influence, sentiment, successes, learning and early bird discounts. More anon.

I got into PR, and in particular the technology side, because I trained as a journalist and was brought up playing with technology. My mum had been PA to the late Robert Maxwell. My dad installed mainframes for big companies. The bubblewrap opportunities were sensational for a seven-year-old.

I wrote crap for my local paper at 13. At 15 I was writing it regularly, after doing some intensive journalism training (mostly how to stitch people up). Then after a news journalism course I started working as a ‘normal’ reporter for a local newspaper. I chased down parish council tittle tattle, interviewed local ‘personalities’, knocked on the doors of newly-bereaved families and was humiliated at the judging of school fete fancy dress competitions. Then it was regional dailies, tabloid writing, some broadcast stuff, then PR.

Since then (the early to mid-90s) the media has changed hugely. It wasn’t a cosy world back then, especially if gypsies chased you with bricks, but now the media is not what it’s used to be. Print is on one knee. TV is wobbly. Radio is growing. Social media is rocketing. If Maxwell was still with us, he’d probably have tried to do some dodgy deal to cut on it on.

Snapshot of media change in the UK
1709, oldest surviving UK newspaper starts in Worcester. It was to be 282 years before I wrote for it, yet it survived that and is still around today
More newspapers, more magazines
1920s, early public radio
1930s, early public TV
1950s, TV really took root. If PR had been an established sector then, everyone would’ve rushed to start hip new TV PR agencies
1980s, beginning of diversification sparked by technological change
1990s, the internet. The conventional media largely ignored it until the second half of the decade, some beyond that

So media really started to digitise in the mid 90s. Initially it was about the web being a new platform for publishing words and pictures. Then video came. Technology has made all of this possible. About six years ago we saw the arrival of much-hyped web 2.0. There was a load of bollocks about this, but basically from a media perspective it means media began to change from being one-way to two-way. Before then, the only way the media had really been two-way was the odd TV vox-pop and the letters to the editor page, which was mostly made up anyway.

What digital actually means for PR people
So now the people can answer back. Brands may be able to talk to them directly, but then there are conversations they may want to have and they may not want to have. These are some of the fundamental issues for building reputation through social media these days and you’ll be familiar with them I’m sure.

What does this mean for PR? We’re about managing reputation. What it means for me is that we have to modernise what we do so that we can do that across the diverse and digitised media landscape, and be ready to tackle the way that landscape will evolve further.

Five years ago I felt I was looking over my shoulder at the rise of digital PR. Today that’s not the case. We are not there yet, but soon there will be no regular PR and online or digital PR. It will all just be PR.

The reason for that is that there will not be a distinction as such between conventional and social media. It will all just be media. We just have to figure out how to become the new middleman for a new media landscape.

Examples of how conventional media is addressing digitisation
Oil and water – can conventional and social media mix?

I think that The Guardian site is the closest I’ve come to a national newspaper that has rebuilt its content around its audience using features such as content curation and micro-blogging. An example is the microsite created for the Grand National. Content was posted in real time in a micro-blog format. Race results appeared in real term. And longer stories filed after the racing at Aintree. It’s typical of how The Guardian deals with a big story. It handled the Chilcot Inquiry in exactly the same way.

If you’re a reader of The Guardian site and follow some its journalists on Twitter you’ll spot how stories develop. Journalists tweet about stories they’re writing on. PRs or people in their network make suggestions for sources of information. A first story will go live as a blog maybe after a journalist has done a couple of interviews. Readers will comment on the story. Additional sources will chip in and the journalist will curate comments and produce a second and third version of the story. This provides PRs with more opportunities than ever to influence how a journalist writes a story.

Secondly, branded media: The Economist. Media is in turmoil, no doubt. Social media provides a means for brands to build develop communities in their own right. The Economist (Speed client) on YouTube is a media owner that has a branded video channel for disseminating its own content. But we could equally be looking at any number of consumer brands. Vodafone is a great example on YouTube that you might want to check out. The Economist has always done video but you have to look hard on the site to dig it up. We’ve created a channel on YouTube and promoted it as an asset in its own right. It has become so successful that it’s a top 100 channel on YouTube, and it’s generating revenue. Increasingly this will become a model for brands wanting to engage with their audience, bypassing traditional media altogether.

How PR people need to change/upgrade their media skills
I think what media change means is that PRs have got to assess what they do and how they do it. Across the board. We’ve got to become the type of PR people, PR agencies and PR sector that that media and clients will demand in the future. If we don’t, we should sod off and find another line of work.

But putting that delicate issue to one side, let’s look at the digital media that are changing the world of PR, and their pros and cons.

Conventional publishers: we need more understanding of each media and how content is likely to permeate within that platform and beyond. The pro is that the ripple effect can cause far broader and potentially more lasting impact, the con is that is requires far more work than just knowing a journalist on a publication and tapping them up. There is a need for firm insight and really clear planning so that our ideas can be successful

Conventional broadcasters: as above, but understand that journalists working for them are following what social media is generating, and that technology is going to change this media big time. An example is IPTV. Of course the ability to watch what TV when you want it has changed things, but imagine if you could engage with a local community group and some of your neighbours via the TV when a topical piece of programming content is there. With integration between the TV and social media communities, and the devices to support user interaction over that content from anywhere, it’s not far away perhaps. TV has long been influential, it will gain combined influence alongside new technologies and its content should have high editorial integrity. The flipside, again, is that keeping tabs on all of that for a PR means a lot of work.

Social media platforms: the pros are that conventional editorial barriers aren’t there, but influence will still be created by editorial content, albeit with the nature of editorial changing. It’s very agile, it can be comparatively cheap, but the potential to backfire is huge because it has that two-way channel. It can go from a minor problem to a crisis in minutes. It also means clients’ PR teams have to make themselves far more agile to ensure the right content is delivered.

Analytical tools: to measure influence on reputation. The great thing about digitised media is the audit trail – if you can track it, you should be able to measure its impact. Another big pro is that a lot of the tools for tracking and assessing social media and all forms of published digitised content are free – the trick is knowing which ones are most effective. And the downside is that PRs could end up digging in the wrong place for the measurement they seek. These tools mean we can track not only what is published and what the reaction is, but the sentiment of those conversations – but what price sarcasm? These tools move us much closer to honest and clinical measurement of PR value, but still we can only really know what impact editorial content in any media has on a brand’s reputation and purchase influence by asking the audience. And even then, they may not be straight with us.

Engagement: both with social and conventional media. Obviously engagement with social media is direct and requires skills. Engagement via digital means with conventional media is growing, but again needs skill and the downside can be that fickle PR methods used in conventional media relations are transposed to digital tools. Crap pitches don’t work offline, so best avoid them online. For media and social media engagement, the network is key.

What this network business means
The first thing to point out is the the value of network to brands lies with the trust factor. People trust other people they’re networked with. If they’re networked around a passion for a brand, that is a good thing for us.

But remember that networks are just really word-of-mouth digitised, and so preserved for the best part of eternity. Social media conversations pretty much replicate those that happen and have always happened in society anyway. The difference is that the media encourages conversations to build faster, encourages more participation and can engage more people. A bigger, bolder, faster, more impactful type of conversation typically – and they can be tracked and joined.

The trick for PRs is to apply themselves in the right way to that environment, rather than blundering in to a pub conversation like a gobby or naive person, and quickly ending up as the object of derision.

So I’m hoping to wrap things up with this post, having covered quite a lot of ground already:

- A quick history lesson and thoughts on a new intermediary role
- The fragility of agility: why as conventional and social media all just become media, speed is the need
- Are agencies even worth hiring? The myriad of choices for PR buyers today and what the future may hold

Let’s start with a question. If you work in-house, think of your own team. If you work for an agency, think of your clients. Question: how has the PR department modernised or changed to capitalise on media change in the past five years?

My point here is not that it has all gone stale and that PR teams are failing to move with the times. It is that all must realise that PR is going to look quite different in the future and we are all in the midst of an evolutionary process. You may well have your finger on the pulse of media change and have taken many smart steps to up your game in the past few years. More, much more, is yet to come.

Reputation: no control
Brands have never really had control of their reputation. But unless they keep track of and respond to media change through the way their communications functions operate, influence will be harder and harder to come by.

If you’re going to try to understand how you should evolve in order to protect and develop your reputation in the future, you must first understand and continue to chart media change. Reputation is the result of what you do, what so you say and what people therefore think and say about you. The digitisation of media can put you in greater command of it, but only if you play it right.

Spin gets thin
I’ve already outlined that in my view conventional and social media will evolve rapidly in the next couple of years and before long will all just be ‘media’. These posts are all intended to give some thoughts on how PR teams must evolve to align to that changed media landscape and get the right value out of the agencies they work with. There’s no magic formula for what the ideal PR department should look like and do, as needs obviously vary.

But while I’ve looked at the need for faster action in meeting media information requests reactively, let’s just quickly consider what the PR department will need to do in order to influence a media agenda in the future. I say influence rather than dominate, because spin as we know it has changed. It’s probably dead, of if not dying fast. With a handful of newspapers, fewer broadcast outlets and limited online publications it used to be far easier to set and lead a media agenda. Today the attention of major conventional media is still a big asset, but there are dozens of other influential channels that attract the same audience, often simultaneously. Plus a brand that attempts to be anything but completely honest with the media can be quickly shamed via social media.

Priorities for evolution
This bit should really be a conclusion, but I think I’ve already tripped across that several times: PR departments must evolve to meeting changing media needs or they will become less effective in influencing reputation. Worst case, their influence will slip away.

Here are what I see as the priorities for making sure a PR department is ready for the future:
1. Acknowledge that media change will affect you
2. Start a conversation about all of this with the people in your organisation responsible for how PR is funded, undertaken and supported
3. Recognise that you need to be able to move faster. If not, it won’t just be a case of a few missed opportunities, it will be a case of your reputation in the hands of others
4. You will have to continually assess which media is creating the influence you seek. This will not be comfortable or easy, but needs pragmatism and a long-term view rather than being swayed by any hype or FUD
5. By all means talk to agencies, but do not put contracts out to tender before you are clear about what sort of service you need. The word ‘might’ can be dangerous. Figure out what you want to do commercially, define your brand strategy, then look at how and what PR can best deliver for you. Then you can assess who you want to reach and understand what media is best, and what content you’ll need. And recognise that media change will be ongoing, so your plans must be agile too

Hopefully this is all useful, even if in places it is fairly obvious. One final question, if you’re in-house, you should probably ask your agencies is how they plan to evolve to meet the requirements of media change.

This is all a bit odd.

Here we are, the end of this five-part series that has gripped (a very small PR sub-set of the) nation all week. Ish.

I’ve tried to poke into each corner of the issues that PR agencies and their employees are facing as Generation Y becomes a more prominent factor in the workforce. I’ve even tried to be objective about it.

And you know what? When I started this on Monday, my sense was that on Friday I’d end up writing about why Gen Y should just suck it up, snap out of it and get back to the harsh realities of toil.

Yet that is not the conclusion of this strange little blogging experiment.

Bosses must lead, tension is their gig
Instead, it is this: the people running PR agencies have to stand up and be counted over the growing issue of differing generational attitudes and outlooks amongst their staff.

Secondly, Generation Y needs to avoid going down in history as Generation Whine. The stereotypical whingeing of today’s teenagers is tarnishing the self-honesty and modern pragmatism of Gen Y in the workplace. It is up to Gen Y to change this, with the support of bosses.

Thirdly, all other generations need to pull their heads out of their fast-maturing arses and realise that we are all part of the problem and can all help to improve understanding.

The growing, oft-silent tensions in PR agencies today between people with differing ambitions, approaches, goals, motivations and communication techniques are the by-product of rapid technological, economic and (to a much lesser extent) political change. It’s the job of bosses to tackle it. If your boss isn’t, or isn’t even prepared to acknowledge it, perhaps you should ask them why.

So let’s go through some ‘learnings’ from all of this. Some points that each generational group (although many people have commented that they’re not quite sure which bracket they fit into) should probably take on board if they’re going to enjoy their jobs and develop their careers:

Generation Y
1. Think about how you’ll be the boss. I don’t mean be career-hungry and obsessed with rapid progression. I do mean think about how what you do now will enable you to manage, motivate and lead people in the future. If you don’t think the way you’re managed, motivated and led now is necessarily the right way, it probably isn’t. Don’t whine, have a discussion and figure out how you’ll do it better when your time comes, by which time workforce motivations should be even more diverse than they are today

2. Understand the business. Whereas Gen X was brought up on 1980s greed, boom ‘n’ bust and exploiting the property ladder, Gen Y has it different. But if you turn a blind eye to how the business works, how it makes money and the commercial realities that govern how you can reward and develop people, you’ll struggle to develop personally and professionally. PR businesses are simple anyway: a five-year-old could grasp the basics.

3. See it from the perspectives of others. Yes it does not make sense to be seen to work long hours any more: doing that for no good reason beyond impressing the boss is just stupid. Work long hours if you’re getting something out of it by developing your career and the business. Go home on time whenever you can. But remember that Gen Xers had it differently when they were younger: you must make them understand the value of what you’re doing. Sell yourselves more and it will go a long way.

Generation X
1. Get real. Some people will inevitable just be lazy bastards and blagged their way through those interviews, but many Gen Yers have desires on your job. They may just struggle to show it. They will show ambition in different ways. Their enthusiasm may not be overt. Get under the skin of why, work with them rather than dismissing ‘kids today’ as disengaged drifters. Unless they are, in which case consider encouraging them to find another career.

2. Take a long hard look at yourself. You didn’t really want to be that Michael Douglas character in Wall Street did you? Secretly, you may be a bit envious that Gen Y has the nonchalance and career outlook that it does. You thought you’d turn out like that, until the machine got hold of you. Be honest with yourself rather than bemoaning the differences of others.

3. You’re in a position of responsibility, and it is – probably – your generation that has the biggest role to play in cracking this generational change issue. You’ve got to lead by example and transition agency approaches to flourish from the diversity of motivations and attitudes, not sink under their weight. It’s not like me to write things that look a bit like self-serving political correctness, so let’s be clear that I don’t intend it to be. But I do mean it.

Generation Jones
1. The in-betweeners. Obama is a much-lauded example. The future now rests in their hands, it’s said. Not in PR it doesn’t. But what Gen Jones must do is realise it is different. You are very different to Gen Y, and Gen X has more of an opportunity to understand the younger generation. I think your best role is to help Gen X to open its eyes to the differences in generations by telling them what you’re thinking, and how you struggle to get to grips with the pace of change.

2. Use the tools. If you don’t get to grips with how PR is modernising because of digitising media, you won’t only hit professional snags but will increasingly struggle to understand younger colleagues. Don’t try to get down with the kids, but don’t shy away from change, grab hold of it with gusto.

3. Think about how you can rebrand your generation, because the Jones thing sounds really sh^t.

Baby Boomers
Interestingly, I’ve had some really insightful comments from people in this category in the past week, with the benefit of experience coming to the fore. My thinking is age and experience make it easier for them to spot the signs, but the pace of change remains frightening. Beyond that, boomers should really look at the points for Joneses above.

The end
So there we have it. Hardly academic, not particularly pretty but hopefully an interesting read at least.

Gen X: the ball is in your court. As well as our industry modernisation challenges, we’ve got to make PR jobs engaging and emotionally fulfilling for all. We’ve got to think beyond salaries and benefits. We’ve got to think bigger. We’ve got to pull our fingers out.

Gen Y: cheer up, liven up, realise how good you are or can be.

If anyone has any ideas for other PR topics I should tackle, do let me know. Mistakes execs make, account managers with a power complex, sadomasochism in the boardroom, whatever; I’m game.

Today, the PR person comes in all manner of shapes and sizes. In many ways, we are a symbolic reflection of the diverse, fragmented, rapidly evolving and somewhat nervy media we work with.

We now have these types of PR people, amongst many others:

- Moderately experienced female PR, invariably blonde, lives Fulham, very comfortable with conventional media and tries hard to play lip service to social media

- Young digital pup, of-the-moment trainers, the hair of the commercially innocent, social media slurper but does not read the papers really

- The experienced senior director, a fondness for expensive moisturisers and knows PR is changing, but looks in the mirror each day and really wishes it wasn’t

- The overworked agency stalwart, dabbles with social media, sometimes surprises with digital acumen, but employer does not give them time to really learn the digital ropes so conventional remains the bread and butter

- The extreme digital enthusiast, made a personal vow a year ago to practically abandon conventional PR and bathe in the heady waters of digital, often tweets about pets and weather

You may recognise some or all of these.

Not clones, but better skilled
But in the future, the PR person will become much more of a standard item. Of course agencies will always look for diversity and range of experience when building the right team and the right culture. But the set of skills will become more regular across the team. And those skills will be a good deal more sophisticated, as well as comprehensive.

As Speed people covered at a Social Media Week breakfast this morning, our view is that PRs of the future are going to need to be experts in all corners of the media, and how to use editorial techniques to do commercially-valued things for clients. Social, print, broadcast, all types of media. Animal, vegetable, mineral, as The Bishop of Bath and Wells (pretend) once said in Blackadder.

The PR person of the future will need to be a complete know-it-all. We’ll need to know how the newspapers work (and boy is that changing fast), how social networks evolve and what has greatest influence at any given time, how ripples effects can be created and PR’s role in a rapidly changing marketing mix.

PR and advertising: let’s sort it out
Danny Rogers at PR Week has picked up on the latter point. He has also touched on why PR may need to hire people from beyond PR. My view on that is that is only one part of the picture: too many PR people have simply not been given encouraged (or had the foresight) to learn the skills they will need in the future, which is why some agencies may be thinking broader. The bigger picture is that PR must grow up and work with advertising to establish the mutual value we can create for clients.

Face it: PR must stand up and be counted
But first, we need to upgrade PR. How we gather insight, the ideas that will really work across diverse media, who the right influencers are now and for the long term, and how we can really, honestly, properly, confidently, unashamedly measure impact.

And the answer to the last point is not just about the latest slightly-better-than-previous-versions social media monitoring tools. It is more like what blend of tools will be more effective for each client, and above that how we can truly tell whether audiences have been influenced to act to our benefit, and when they will do so.

Speed’s approach to the skills challenge we now have in PR is bootcamp-like, but we feel the only way to ensure everyone across a PR business has the skills they’ll need for the future and that clients are coming to rely on. We make no apologies for this. We do not see how half measures or half-cock schemes will cut the mustard. We are working to ensure we are the consultancy that really cracks where PR – all of PR – is going amidst a diverse and fast-changing media.

We are not know-it-alls by any means, but – within the confines of public relations, and how the industry is changing – we aspire to be that. If you know what I mean. PR people who are experts across the new, broader remit of PR, rather than those who stick to our traditional knitting or cling to trends.