Public Relations Trends

The trend of public relations activities moving to the web has finally come to full fruition. Today, most public relations firms spend more time, as they get more bang for their buck, promoting their client's needs online. We can expect this trend to continue far off into the future, the pendulum shift has occurred. Okay so, I'd like to talk about this for a few moments if I might.

Soon we will see a reemerging trend where public relations firms have reached all of the folks they possibly could on the social networks, but they will realize that they are still missing a good percentage of the population. Therefore they will use new tools, and strategies to reach these folks.

Coincidentally, as of the writing of this article there was a very interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal on February 11, 2012 by Carl Bialik where he asks in the title of his article; "Tweets As Poll Data? Be careful That," and in the article he states;

"Public opinion researchers' jobs has never been easier, or never been harder, depending on how you look at it. Reaching people by phone and convincing them to answer a 20 minute call is a bigger challenge than ever. At the same time, hundreds of millions of people are voluntarily broadcasting their views via twitter, Facebook and other online tools."

Further, many corporations recently have made severe mistakes attempting to promote their activities online, only to find a minority of discontent go viral on them, causing them to cut short their public relations efforts, as they ended in a fiasco perhaps, even diminishing their brand name more than ever in such a very short period of time. Suffice it to say, there are some online public relations firms who do an incredible job, and understand the Internet quite well, but beware.

Not all of these PR firms are the same as those of the past, meanwhile PR companies are challenged by small startup firms, and former executives and laid-off personnel in the public relations space who have decided to start their own companies working out of home offices. This has caused a significant drop in the amount of fees these types of companies can bill their clients for - we should expect this to continue.

If the name of the game is to put something up which is trendy, noteworthy, and has viral ability - then many of the older firms will be running redline against the one-person operations who catch a lucky break and get their clients the 15 minutes of fame they need to feel good about spending money on PR campaigns. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and watch these trends as they fold in the future. Just so you don't miss any, you might wish to subscribe to my articles.

Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on Business Issues. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net

No comments:

Post a Comment