In light of the current economic downturn, what new opportunities do you see for public relations professionals, either in agencies or working for corporations? Here are the answers from two of our Inner Circle leaders:
Answer by Jim Bowman, The PR Doc® “We now have an unprecedented opportunity to add quantifiable value to the businesses we serve.”
- A recent Advertising Age article [http://budurl.com/pvaf] assessed the human carnage in communications professions wrought by the current recession:
- 65,100 jobs lost in advertising and media in 2008, 18,700 of them in December alone
- Media companies (newspapers, magazines, broadcasters) eliminated 41,000 U.S. jobs, or 4.6% of staff, from the time the recession began in Dec. 2007
- Advertising agencies and marketing-services firms cut 24,100 jobs, or 3.1% of staff
- Across all professions nationwide, job loss stood at 2.6%
There were gains in related areas:
- Marketing consulting added 2,200 jobs
- Public relations added 1,200 jobs
- Internet media companies added 5,400 jobs
Given the fragility of the global economy, it is not safe to extrapolate those numbers through the remainder of this year. In fact, there is growing evidence of cuts coming in PR. But at this point in time the numbers seem to say marketing consulting and public relations are more than holding their value.
Mash up the data some and the clear message is that traditional media are declining, while new, Web-based media are on the rise. For discerning public relations professionals, it should be clear our profession is changing simultaneously.
Agency and corporate PR people who cling to the old ways – i.e., see the Internet as simply a new channel for reaching journalists – are likely to be among the first casualties. Conversely, those who skill up for the new marketing and PR reality will be in demand.
Work with journalists, certainly, but take advantage of the opportunities online PR affords to reach customers directly and interact with them. When I write news releases for my clients, I write first for their customers; journalists are a secondary target. My favorite way of pitching journalists is a brief, but highly focused and personalized email with a link to a multimedia release.
I agree in principle with nearly everything David Meerman Scott set forth in The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Anyone serious about a public relations or corporate communications career today should own the book and refer to it often.
The emerging profile of public relations professionals includes working as nimbly in the online world as among the bricks and mortar; writing search-engine-optimized copy as well as print and broadcast styles; learning to do key word research and writing for search engines as well as human readers (hint: there’s a lot more to it than peppering a release with anchor text links).
Traditional PR will not go away, but it is being irrevocably altered. Incredibly, many traditional PR people I talk with in agency and corporate jobs still don’t get it when dealing with the realities of online PR. Some dismiss it (big mistake) and some fear it (equally big mistake).
Embrace it. We now have an unprecedented opportunity to add quantifiable value to the businesses we serve. Instead of boxes of clippings we can generate traffic to Websites and measure the results in terms CEOs and CFOs understand – sales leads, new customers, and reputation indices, to name a few.
Answer by Barbara Puffer, Puffer Public Relations Strategies: Lifelong learning is essential. If you have kept up with the profession, the people who need you — who want to pay you for your services — will find you.
“Very unpredictable and changing times” has been the mantra during many periods in my long career. At those times, public relations professionals have been relied upon to manage critical information and to strategically use research and words to turn the tides of crises.
Today’s economic downturn and related turmoil is an exciting opportunity for communications professionals that have kept abreast of and adept at the latest trends of the profession. It’s a time when all of one’s networking relationships, education, and experience can be maximized for the most effective approaches.
I remember a now-retired colleague from Union Carbide telling me as a young professional that a prepared communicator doesn’t need to worry about “crisis communications” as a singly-defined area of expertise. He emphasized that all crisis communications is best tackled with a base of solid communications research, planning and practice that effective communicators should have been using all along.
To tap a familiar cliche, lifelong learning is essential. If you have kept up with the profession, the people who need you — who want to pay you for your services — will find you. Continue learning and using all technology available to you, read and stay informed, and know your colleagues in the profession. It’s a small world out there.
