view online:
Charticle: PR and Social Media, a Five Year View, by Steve Rubel, SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital
Five years ago this month a group of us in the PR industry participated in an online event called
Global PR Blog Week. It's hard to believe it's been five years. Bastien Beaucamp has a great rundown (
see his blog reference, below) but I love this chart he created that provides a snapshot of where we stand as an industry.
Excerpt from Bastien Beaucamp's blog, "
5 Years After Global PR Blog Week 1.0"
During the Global PR Blog week, many times it was mentioned that PR starts to replace advertising. Budgets were starting to shift. PR is becoming (we could add "digital PR" is becoming) the central point of corporate marketing; traditional and digital advertising are falling.
Simultaneously, the Global PR Blog Week revealed that there's a strong feeling that this increasing responsibility should be taken care by C-level employees, not by CEO's and board of directors. Trevor Cook said it well when he said: When he said "Put PR at the heart of the organization".
The trend of PR taking over advertising takes another perspective when you know that David Ogilvy, considered the father of modern advertising (and everything that bloggers wish to make obsolete) always considered employees of a company as "ambassadors of the brand" and "the most powerful marketing tool" for companies. By the end of his life, he was more interested in "corporate cultures" than "communication strategies".
This shift from advertising to PR can't go without a new form of PR that embraces human resources.
The last word goes to Alice Marshall reflecting afterward on the Global PR Blog Week:
“Our single most important contribution (during that event) may have been to shift our industry from the idea of controlling the message and manipulating public opinion to that of presenting the message and cultivating public opinion. This change of metaphor is crucial to successful public relations in a world of increasing transparency. Those who fail to make transparency their friend will find it a formidable enemy. We offer(ed) readers many ideas on how to make transparency their friend.”