Tuesday 27 December 2011

Week 6 ::Six Facets of the future of PR::

By:  Suria binti Mohd Sidin  2009854728



Public Relations have their own problems called as PR problem. The science and art of PR is about influencing perceptions. PR is just personnel who build good relationship between organization and clients. PR build perceptions of the world around them based on the inputs received. Those inputs include traditional media, daily experiences, conversations, interactions and others. Today PR entails being involved with every aspect of how people encounter information and make sense of it. It is far more about being engaged in the flow of messages through an intensely networked world than it is about formal communication. The traditional domain of PR is swiftly changing.

10 years ago very few people had a personal email account, mobile phone or internet access. The graphical web browser with which we spend so much of our lives interacting didn’t even exist until late 1993. Today, the nature of how information and messages flow and people build perceptions of the world in which they live is entirely different to how it was just a decade ago. There are 6 facets that our rapidly changing world will influence future PR industry

1.Client Expect More
Clients have become vastly more demanding in their dealings with their professional services providers. Clients are seeing their PR agencies and marketing peers as readily replaceable commodities. This makes it very easy for the client to replace them. The future belongs to those firms that can successfully engage their clients in true knowledge-based relationships that are based on deep mutual knowledge, and a high degree of collaboration in achieving outcomes.

2.Media is Transformed
Mass media will never disappear. Societies are bound together by having a common reference point to discuss and engage with. Yet at the same time, media is fragmenting into a multitude of channels and perspectives.

3.Business is a conversations
Consumers are people, and they expect to be treated like people. Companies also happen to employ people. It is extraordinary that companies have always chosen to communicate with the formal, stilted, self-promoting language of the press release and corporate brochure. Organisations must enable human conversations, between the humans that work for them, and the humans who buy from them. While this is fraught with challenges, there is no question that customers will flow to companies with which they can have human interactions, and move away from companies that persist in presenting unassailable formal corporate faces to the world.

4.Information flows in every dimension
Information flows from organisations and their agencies to the media and on to the masses. Now information flows in all directions. News Corporation bought the social networking site MySpace in July 2005, because that is where information is now flowing. PR has traditionally been rooted in the world of words. While that will remain important, the new skills required to play in a world driven by other media forms will be critical.

5.Transparency is a given
Do not expect to be able to hide anything. The old catch-cry of ‘information wants to be free’ remains true, and now it has the means to escape. In this world PR is not about hiding or manipulating the truth it is about providing access and being open. Know and expect that the truth will come out. The only way to gain trust, to be credible, is to be transparent. It is an immensely challenging shift to make. Yet those who do not truly believe this will soon find a day when their credibility and livelihood disappears.

6.Influence Networks are at the heart
As mainstream media becomes an ever-smaller part of our information input, organisations need to understand and get involved with the influence networks that really form decisions. People form opinions and make decisions primarily from the input of the people around them that they know well and trust. PR will become largely about how to identify, access and influence the key influencers either individually or by understanding how influence networks are structured.

No comments:

Post a Comment