The ICCO Summit is a bi-annual event that pulls together senior practitioners from public relations consultancies around the world to explore the issues and trends affecting the industry. Last week’s event saw 120 PR consultancy directors from 30 countries come together in Sintra, Portugal.

In my session I explored the emergence of social media and the opportunity it provides for the PR industry and argued that the future of PR is the future of social media.

In time I reckon we’ll come to recognise the development of the Internet at the turn of the 21^st century to be as radical to society as the invention of the printing press in the second half of the 15^th century. That’s incredibly exciting for anyone in the media but it’s also incredibly daunting.

Powerful individuals and journalists have always had a platform to share their views of course. But now social media means that anyone can demand “do you know who I am?” of a brand. It’s made the whole area of reputation management much more complicated, not least because there is so much more to manage now.

There are two possible reactions to social media within an organisation: social media as bolt-on channel; or as a strategic platform for customer engagement.

In using social media as a bolt-on channel, an organisation transfers the communication techniques that it has used with its traditional audiences, typically the media, and supplements them with a sprinkling of social media. You can spot these organisations everyday on Facebook or Twitter spewing out content with little or no engagement.

In contrast the strategic approach to social media recognises the opportunity that it offers a business to put its customers at its heart.

I took issue with Huntworth’s Lord Chadlington who said during a Q&A following his keynote on the previously day that “the PR industry was not good at digital”. Speak for yourself Lord Chadlington, speak for yourself.

There’s a turf war going on, no doubt. PR agencies are competing with ad agencies and digital agencies for budgets. It is time for the industry to stand up and be counted. Otherwise we’ll almost certainly lose out as we did with search marketing.

The identification of a community and development of content to engage with that community in a participative relationship, whatever the media, is an editorial process.

This is the PR industry’s ground. We need to claim it.

If you think you’ve got what it takes please email me, or write to me with your CV answering these two questions: what should Speed be doing as an agency to ensure that it continues to maintain a modern proposition to PR; and second, what might be your contribution in helping us attract fantastic clients?

Our graduate programme comprises a 10-month programme based on five modules, each of which is led by different member of Speed’s management team. At the end you’ll present back to the Speed board about what you’ve learnt and the skills you’ve acquired.

You’ll be supported by a line manager and a mentor. Salary starts at £20,000 depending on prior experience, and you’ll be eligible for the bonus scheme, gym, and pension once you’ve completed your training.

The deadline for applications is 13 July. We’ll shortlist eight people and invite you to join us for a Speed Graduate Apprentice day later that month, where you’ll be put through a series of group tasks and a one-on-one interview.

Have a browse around our web site to find out more Speed and read these blog posts that we’ve written in the past about tips for getting your first job in PR.

• Slidedeck: how to get ahead, and hired, in social media
• Guest post: Eight top tips for graduates looking for a PR job
• What makes a good (Speed) graduate PR recruit?

During the session we discussed how the media industry has changed during the last three decades and the impact that this was having on the PR profession, and we explored how digital techniques were starting to be used by the PR industry to disintermediate traditional media.

This generation finds print shifting to online and giving way to social media, broadcast in rude health and a music industry that has an uneasy relationship with its consumers. It is more likely than any other generation before it to create, curate, publish or share its own media.

I set each the interns a piece of homework. I wanted them to create a diary of their media habits for a single day. The results are a wake-up call for any media owner.

Confessions of media addicts
The individual diaries read like confessions from a media addict self-help group. These young consumers spend most of their waking hours consuming countless sources of media, across multiple formats, often simultaneously.

“My media consumption starts the moment my alarm goes off on my phone; whilst I have my phone in hand, I check Twitter for the daily news.  I then go to Facebook and quickly have a look at what everyone is up to,” said Hayley Chow (@HYMChow).

Social media may catch the early riser seeking updates from a network of friends but Generation Y and Z remain avid consumers of traditional media. But their consumption is difference to any previous generation. Titles are grazed online rather than read in print.

“[I read] a variety of newspapers, usually The Guardian, but I’m not averse to picking up a tabloid or The Metro and […] I visit The Daily Mail website for celebrity tat. I read magazines, typically music or fashion, or some hip amalgamation of both. This is […] online rather than offline due to cost,” said Lynsey  Martenstyn (@Martenstyn).

Content, serendipity and contribution
As social media becomes an established media category in its own right and all media becomes social the generation that has grown up during this period is concerned about the quality of the content rather than the originator per se. How many times have we heard at media conferences that content is king?

“I follow countless blogs, Twitter accounts, download Apps and check music blog aggregator HypeMachine and fashion blog aggregator Lookbook daily,” said Ms Martenstyn.

Serendipity plays a strong role in the discovery of content for Generation Y and Z as they click from link-to-link following a story and its sources across the internet.

“My consumption of media doesn’t have a structured habit; it’s more fuelled by a constant desire for information. Usually this focuses around the arts, politics and culture; but this isn’t definitive. A breaking news event could end up in a […] corner of Wikipedia, researching something arbitrary,” said Ms Martenstyn.

The compulsion to contribute and share is strong, and whilst the Taylor Bennett interns are undoubtedly a motivated bunch, they are by no means atypical.

“My daily media consumption sees me having Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts, a blog and a BlackBerry. Everything I do and have done is available for everyone else to see, without me even realising. [Each] update I make is potentially reaching 500 people,” said Abdul Aleem (@blablablaPR).

Music is served from a personal collection on a MP3 player but new sources online are quickly uncovered when that tires.

“When my iPod becomes inadequate, I’ll go to the site that is YouTube, and search for the song I want,” said Ms Chow.

Net generation
This is the internet generation like none before. It is savvy to issues of privacy and sees little but opportunity and benefit from active online participation. Mr Aleem has already setup his first internet business.

“I got into my current PR internship thanks to the internet. I make t-shirts […] and sell them online thanks to the internet,” said Mr Aleem.

“People will only see what you want them to see – no one is stopping you from changing your privacy settings. [I believe that] the good outweighs the bad a few times over,” he said.

Challenge for media owners
Thanks to the Taylor Bennett interns for being such willing participants in this exercise and giving their time so freely.

Here’s the challenge that they have inadvertently set out for media owners and the PR industry in attracting, let alone earning, the attention of Generation Y and Z. How do you engage with an audience that has no particular loyalty to any media brand, and is consuming so many varied media outlets in a variety of formats?

I first crossed paths with Sheldrake in the late nineties and early noughties when we were both principals at rival PR firms and chased each other around tech parks in Cambridge and West London in pursuit of business. Since then we’ve worked together as part of the CIPR Social Media panel and created CIPR TV, working with markettiers4dc.

Sheldrake quotes Speed’s Steve Earl and myself in the book, as well as my daughters on their influences and networks. And so after a nudge and encouragement from Neville Hobson recently to have a crack at podcasting I was delighted to catch up with Sheldrake to record this interview.

We spoke about the emergence of the influence professional. If you are reading this blog you are almost certainly an influence professional and part of the influence industry. He calls on the PR industry to grow up by adopting management discipline and models.

“Not measuring PR smacks of professional incompetence. Anyone that says PR can’t be measured just hasn’t investigated it in a professional manner,” said Sheldrake.

But there are no easy answers. Sheldrake sounds a note of caution. “There is no universal answer for measurement. Every business must define its own metrics,” he said.

In researching and writing the Business of Influence, Sheldrake has himself been influenced by the Balanced Scorecard, a business performance management tool, and proposes his own model called the Influence Scorecard as a means of measuring of influence.

Sheldrake is a Chartered Engineer, a founding partner of Meanwhile, the venture marketers, a director of Intellect, the UK trade association for the tech industry, and director of 6UK, a government backed non–profit to promote adoption of the new Internet protocol in the UK.

If you enjoy the interview you might want to check out the book on Amazon or the accompanying web site and you’ll find Sheldrake on Twitter @sheldrake.

You can download a MP3 file of the interview by left clicking on this link with you mouse and selecting ‘save as’.

For the past week I have been immersing myself into the world of PR at Speed, a forward thinking agency that recognises that the PR industry needs to modernise. I’ve with the consumer PR team who have taken the time to teach me about their day to day lives and responsibilities.

Speed has some high profile clients with high demands and what I have seen at Speed in terms of creativity and hard work for delivering results has been impressive. Lesson number one, PR is hard work and requires long hours.

PR vs SEO
As a social media and SEO consultant at SiteVisibility, a Brighton based digital marketing agency  my role focuses on building relationships, creating brand awareness and managing brand reputation online.

We focus on writing and publishing content that is relevant and engaging with links back to our client’s sites. This is all part of running a successful social media and SEO campaign and as I have now learnt is essentially what a successful offline PR strategy is about. Unbeknown to me I have been ‘doing’ online PR as part of my social media strategy without ever learning about PR in the traditional sense.

This week has given me a fascinating insight into what traditional PR is about, how the industry is changing and where social media and SEO fit in. Brand and reputation management is no longer just off line and must also focus attention on the online and embrace social media channels.

Social marketing
The real challenge for PR agencies is managing the shift from a one sided flow of information with consumers to a two way dialogue that centres around consumers needs and interests. With social media, consumers own the space and dialogue flows both ways.

Companies must be prepared to listen to what their customers are saying and respond appropriately.

Changing media, changing PR
After catching up with Stephen Waddington, Speed’s managing director, I understand that the PR industry is undergoing many changes.

One of these being the way the social sphere has changed the way news stories are approached and journalists are contacted. A journalist is just a likely to pick up a story from someone Twitter as they are to be sold it in from a PR agency which requires a more creative approach to getting stories published.

The most important thing I learnt is that successful PR centres around building strong relations with the media and journalists. I also gained an insight into the skills required to be able to utilise the information you have about a client and package this in a way that creates an interesting and engaging news story.

That old story called measurement
Another interesting insight from my week at Speed is that, PR in the traditional sense differs to my experiences in online PR within a digital agency in that, it seems to be lacking in the quantitative measurement associated with SEO campaigns yet to me, the two should fit closely together.

I take it for granted that I have always worked with Google analytics as a part of SEO campaigns and tracking web traffic is a daily part of the job. What I didn’t realise is that currently digital agencies are in many cases the only ones utilising this valuable and free tool.

Google analytics allows you to measure where traffic to your site is coming from and when. It allows you to see which sites are driving the most traffic and which keywords are successful in sending traffic to your site. Therefore, if a PR or advertising agency is running a successful campaign you would expect to see an uplift in branded keywords sending traffic to your site.

What this means is more people are typing your brand name in to Google. Consequently, an increase in branded search signals a greater awareness of a brand name and consequent change in behaviour to want to visit this site. Agencies should be taking the credit for this but many are not measuring it.

Speed is a forward thinking agency in that they have already recognised and addressed the way they do business and  have embraced social media and built it in as part of their strategy, something many PR agencies are still not doing.

To find out more about my experiences of online PR and social media follow me at @jo_morley or read my blog.

Microsoft’s Simone Schuurer has written up an excellent summary. Here’s my deck and a summary of my presentation.

In the last five to ten years digital marketing has reached a place where keywords and inbound links assume more importance on a web site than the actual content and audience.

We’ve filled the web with content and links in a bid to game search engines. It’s a game where the brand with the largest search budget and the smartest agency wins.

Search for car insurance and you’ll see what’s happening for yourself: highly competitive markets for pay per click and millions of natural results packed with brands vying for the top slot and web spam.

This isn’t a failure or search engine marketing. It’s being incredibly successful. But it is a failure of search engines.

But there is plenty of evidence that search engines are fighting back. Strengthening their algorithms and taking action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.

Shift to social
In the last five years we’ve seen the rise of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. But there are lots of others focused on niche communities. These are built from trusted friends.

And for brands they are powerful. You’re far more likely to trust a plumber or electrician that has been recommended to you by a friend, than one you find online.

I believe that we’re entering a new era of digital media: the discovery of brands and products through the recommendation of friends in our networks who share links.

Already brands are reporting that they are receiving more traffic via Facebook and Twitter than via search for targeted campaigns.

But I think we’ve yet to see the real power of social media. That will come when our personal networks are overlaid on today search results.

Search meets social
Google now uses retweets as a signal for both organic and news search and Bing does the same although it also incorporates the social authority of a user.

But for a real look into the future scratch the surface of the deal that Bing announced with Google in October called Facebook Instant Personalisation. Bing is incorporating Facebook ‘like’ into its search algorithms.

In future when I search for a film or restaurant results will be prioritised according to the opinions of people in my network.

In future when I search for the film or restaurant on Bing I’ll have the option to prioritised the results from Facebook where your friends have talked about the film.

Facebook Instant Personalisation was launched in the US in October. We’ve yet to hear when it will launch in the UK. It doesn’t take too much of a stretch of the imagination to consider the like function being complimented by retweets or links sharing. This may not be the future of search but its heading in the right direction.

Online search isn’t going anywhere as a means to deliver traffic and sell. But I think we’ll start to see the balance of power start to shift from SEO to social media optimisation.

Exploring its potential I believe will be the next wave for digital marketing.

They’ve all been invited to join us for a Speed Apprentice Day in March, where they’ll get their teeth stuck in pitching for a dream client, get to grips with social media tools and create content for a range of different audiences.

What made these applications stand out from the rest? It wasn’t necessarily the use of social media in applications, although that’s a sure way of getting attention. In short it was creativity and passion.

Sifting through the 70-odd applications we received, we were impressed with the effort people had gone to make their application stick out – a video, e-book, personalised website, crossword and mock-up newspaper interview were some of the stand-out documents we received.

Secondly, a real passion to work at Speed and raw enthusiasm to have a career in PR made us sit up and take note.

If you’re a PR grad looking for a job in the PR industry this year Ben Cotton maintains a useful list of graduate schemes.

Snow, Wikileaks, FIFA, The Ashes and X Factor have meant that PR-led stories have been sixth down the running order before you start.

The best tactic is the align PR pitches with one of these big stories in a bid to newsjack. Veteran PR man and Barry Leggetter suggested this tactic on CIPR TV this week.

“I always think like a newsman when I see snow. […] The only way past the weather block for PRs is to piggyback on top of it,” he said.

Creative approaches are key to getting coverage. We’ve had some success at Speed with stories about working from home, online shopping (snow) and security (Wikileaks).

72 Points’ Harriet Crosse suggests that while newsjacking can work in a crowded news agenda a contrary approach can also deliver ink.

“Sometimes doing something completely different can give you a much bigger show,” she said.

The North-East has itself been a place of incredible innovation in media business models during the last 18-months and the hunt in Rothbury for Raoul Moat made it the location of one the biggest news stories in Britain this year.

The Northumberland Gazette was the first regional newspaper to trial a paywall. Josh Halliday, a former-student at Sunderland University and now journalist at The Guardian, was one of the first individuals to explore a hyper local media model with his SR2blog.

And the Trinity Mirror-owned Journal in Newcastle has pioneered a network of hyper local blogs throughout Northumberland.

The presentation content abridges much of the Social Summer series that the CIPR has been running in London each Thursday evening since early June.

Thanks to Sally Keith, Sally Pearson and Laurel Hetherington for organising the session.

The letter sets out how she was mistreated by Mission in its efforts to engage with her on behalf of its client, Nokia, as she prepared for a half marathon. You can read it for yourself on Muireann’s blog along with a developing conversation between bloggers and PRs in the comments – and apologies from both Mission and Nokia.

Muireann took a risk with her personal reputation in singling out an agency and a brand but the response has been overwhelmingly positive.  I caught up with her this afternoon to find out what the PR industry can learn from her experiences.

Her message is simple: respect bloggers, treat them as individuals.

“I wanted to start a conversation but I’ve been surprised by the scale of the response. Bangs and a Bun is almost three-years-old and gets 25,000 views per month; I’ve had 14,000 alone today,” said Muireann.

“Agencies and brands take bloggers for granted. There’s an inherent attitude that ‘they’re just a blogger’… a name on a list, whereas bloggers invest a huge amount of time and effort in their blogs. In my case I was training for a half marathon and didn’t know if I had a place,” she said.

Good blogger relations is about understanding blogs and developing relationships. It cannot be a mechanical process. A cut and paste email approach simply won’t work. Yet that is a commonplace approach according to Muireann.

PR practitioners need to take the time to read the blogs that they are targeting and understand a blogger’s motivations.

Related articles

• Commonsense prevails at bloggers vs PRs meetup (speedcommunications.com)
• Nokia screws blogger due to marathon PR failure (econsultancy.com)