What is the role of PR today?
I’ve been asked this question a number of times in the course of the past year, during job interviews, in conversations with a career counselor as part of the wrap up to my MBA program and in social settings.
In my opinion, the foundational role of public relations has not changed. It is still very much about amplification and relationship-building. But what has changed dramatically in the past five to 10 years — is the how and the who.
There was a time when being a good writer lent itself to being a good PR person. All you had to do was capture a reporter’s interest quickly by writing a punchy three-second intro to a press release, and the reporter was sold. Or perhaps you focused on storytelling — writing a fantastic pitch about how your client was solving a problem that could change the lives of that media outlet’s readership.
Sure, you still had to hit the phones to follow up on pitches, but that was no more challenging than days spent as a journalist, calling sources and fact checking. And for many of us who got into PR as former journalists, the transition to PR seemed relatively seamless. We were strong writers, and that got results.
But everything has changed, hasn’t it?
Being a good PR person isn’t reliant on being a good writer. In fact, as more and more agencies evolve into integrated marketing and transmedia branding, there’s a greater presence of content teams who are phenomenal at generating compelling content for any and every audience and platform. There is an expectation that the PR pros will secure media coverage, but also will make client stories trend on social platforms and go viral for months on end. (And frankly, the order of things is now reversed — first, we have to make a story trend and go viral, then the media coverage will follow.) But in truth, a lot of that responsibility falls to the experts in SEO, metrics and analytics.
So what does that mean for the PR person who has built their own personal brand on being a good writer?
For those of us who have been in communications and public relations for 10+ years, hopefully, we have remained students of our craft. Hopefully, we haven’t held on for dear life, defending the need for press releases and peppering the public relations plan with deskside meetings.
Being a PR person today means bringing in other skills we learned as reporters, specifically the skills we used to convince people to go on record and share information — in other words, building trust. Trust between our agency and the client. Trust between the client and its customers.
As a PR person, we build trust by being the experts on our clients, their brand, their operations, their stories, their industry, their customers and consumers. And based on this knowledge, we advise and coach. We identify needs and develop solutions — for social or traditional media training, for the development of a corporate responsibility policy, for new communications channels and much more.
PR has always had a leading role in protecting brand image. Consider how you would build trust with a new client with the goal of the client allowing your agency’s content and digital team to take a responsive and spontaneous approach to social media. Developing some agreed upon basic guidelines such as brand voice and acceptable topics would be important. So would developing a shared understanding of the brand’s values and beliefs. Protecting a client’s online image is critically important to building and preserving trust — being a collaborator with digital, content and account services teams in this realm is vital.
Our role of building trust comes into play in every thing we do as PR practitioners. Relationships. Amplification. Conversations. Engagement. Thought leadership. We are building trust not by writing a one-page press release about our client. We instead build trust by gaining and sharing knowledge. We take the data, business insight, business intelligence and consumer sentiment, and we orchestrate strategies that amplify or redirect the results. We do not work in siloes. We are in many ways, the chief of staff for our clients. We know everything that so we can plan for anything.
In this role, we are at the table from the onset of planning for every campaign, having an intimate knowledge of the vision, tactics and goals thereby putting us in the position to assist should anything go wrong (crisis communications) and in a position to run with every success (thought leadership and amplification).
We spend our days building and strengthening relationships with those who will help shape and amplify our client’s messages — those in our own industry and theirs, their customers and consumers, bloggers and vloggers, strategic partners that share values, and of course, media.
We must be the biggest fans of our clients and our agency teams, strengthening the client relationship in support of our content, creative, marketing and advertising counterparts which ultimately provides our clients with a cohesive, integrated program that builds trust.
The role of PR today is often proactive in planning and reactive in implementing.
That’s not to say it doesn’t help to be a good writer — but what our clients need is to know that someone is watching out for their brand, their messages, their voice, their customers and has the wherewithal to guide them to seize opportunities and navigate through challenges.
How do you explain the role of PR today? What skills do public relations professionals need to most effectively serve clients? What tactics deserve more or less of a PR person’s time? How can PR work more effectively as part of an integrated approach?
