Just like the rest of the marketing industry, PR has changed a lot to keep up with the technologies that have reshaped society over the past twenty years. The internet gave us a globally connected network, while social media made it simple for all consumers to share information on that network, and mobile phones put that incredible power into our hands whenever and wherever we need it.
Public Relations has existed as a discipline for at least a century. Organizational leaders have long understood that managing how their company is represented in the media significantly impacts its reputation, which is directly linked to its bottom line. Before the internet, an organization’s reputation — and consumer buying decisions — were influenced by advertising, media coverage, and word of mouth. PR’s role in this equation was to secure positive media coverage for the organization and its products by nurturing relationships with journalists and media outlets. But then came social media (meaning “media for the people”), which allowed anybody to publish content online and build their own audience with very low barriers to entry. Suddenly, the balance of power shifted, and new roles within organizations were created to address how the ability to influence had been disseminated to the masses. While some have argued that the rise of social media has diminished the need for conventional PR activity, we believe the opposite is true. As new technologies and consumer behaviors have changed the face of the marketing industry, there’s never been a greater demand for the skills offered by PR professionals. This report will explore the vital role PR skills can play in the modern marketing mix and make the case for greater investment in the discipline. For in-house professionals, we want this guide to give you the confidence to think bigger about your role and the possibilities of what an internal PR function can do for the business.
What Skills Do You Need to Work in PR?
In the new attention economy, brands compete more than ever to cut through the digital noise and get their message to relevant audiences. While tactics and channels may have changed, we argue that the traditional skills of PR professionals are perfectly suited to this task. When people talk about Public Relations, typically, they’re referring to Media Relations. In most (but not all) cases, the bulk of PR work is focused primarily on encouraging the media to publish positive stories about a business, or limiting the extent of negative publicity. This means that the traditional core PR skills include:
With a new generation of online influencers challenging the dominance of traditional media companies, and social media channels enabling brands to speak directly to consumers, people started asking the obvious question… If anybody can be an influencer these days, why do we still need to build relationships with journalists? Especially since all journalists are on Twitter, and you don't need a PR professional to fire off a tweet at them. In fact, why can’t organizations just build their own social media presence and go directly to its audiences? However, there’s a danger associated with this train of thought. Charlotte West, Executive Director of Global Corporate Communications at Lenovo, says, "The rise of social has given us the opportunity to reach and engage with our key audiences more directly than ever, so in principle, it has been a good thing. That said, the growth of influencers is having a negative effect on our work, given the power is too one-sided. It’s become an industry in itself, and brands are paying talent obscene budgets for what are often very limited contractual obligations.” West continued, “We need to move to a more balanced approach of looking at how we build true earned advocacy with multiple stakeholders, not only focusing on paid influence, and moving those paid influencer budgets back to comms where we can have a more sustainable, meaningful, and measurable impact." Again, this point highlights the fact that although the channels organizations can leverage to engage audiences have changed, the skills required to manage them tactfully and effectively are the traditional skills of PR professionals. With over 4.26 billion people using social media and spending an average of 2.5 hours a day interacting with social content, there’s never been a more opportune time for PR practitioners to leverage their core skills in the new digital arena. In the next section, click on one of the doors to explore how PR professionals can apply their skills to in the realm of Influencer Relations, Community Management, Content Marketing and Viral Marketing.
The ability to build and maintain relationships with key journalists.
The creativity to develop stories that will be of interest to the media.
Strong and persuasive communication abilities to pitch stories and angles.
A deep, ongoing understanding of the media landscape and news agenda.
The Changing Face of PR
Created more opportunities for PR professionals
Created fewer opportunities for PR professionals
QUESTION 1
Yes
No
Please take a few moments to answer the following questions about your experience of how social media and influencers have changed the work you do as a PR professional. We’ll share the results of this survey with the industry before the end of this year, and we really appreciate your participation.
Do you feel the rise of social media has:
QUESTION 2
Is the term “Public Relations” still an accurate description of the daily work most PRs professionals now do?
QUESTION 3
Do you feel that managing relationships with journalists and securing positive press coverage is still the most important part of your job as a PR professional?
QUESTION 4
Do you think the rise of social media influencers has, overall, been positive for the PR industry?
QUESTION 5
Which of the following social media activities do you perform as part of your PR role?
QUESTION 6
Does Influencer Marketing/Influencer Relations form part of your regular work as a PR pro?
QUESTION 7
Does Content Marketing form part of your regular work as a PR pro?
QUESTION 8
Who do you believe PR/Comms should report to within your organization?
QUESTION 9
Thinking about the future of PR, which of the following do you feel is most likely?
QUESTION 10
Do you feel social media influencers are now more important than journalists for PR activity?
Thank you!
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Do We Still Need PR?
Click through any of these doors to explore some of the in-demand marketing activities that require the skills PR people already have!
Thank you for taking the time to complete this survey, we really appreciate your participation. We’ll report on the findings of this research soon.
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Not changed the level of opportunity for PR professionals
I post PR related content on the company’s social media channels
I create a wide range of content on the company’s social media channels
I respond to people’s questions and comments on the company’s social media channels
I work to grow the audience size of the company’s social media channels
I produce regular analytics reports about our social media performance
I manage paid social media content for my company
Yes, but only organic (non-paid) influencer relations
Yes, organic and paid influencer relations
CEO
CMO or Head of Marketing
Individual Business Unit
Other
PR will continue as a distinct profession
PR will be absorbed into the wider marketing function and no longer exist as a separate discipline
PR will evolve into a new discipline more focused on social/digital
Yes, they are more important
No, journalists are still more important
They are equally important
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As we’ve seen, the rise of social media wrought changes across the world of media and marketing, with PR experiencing the sharp end of that upheaval. But that change shouldn’t be seen as a negative thing for the PR industry. Yes, the landscape is more complex now, and the days when media relations made up the bulk of PR’s responsibilities are over. But new opportunities have arisen. So many of the new marketing tactics that have become the norm, because of social, are perfectly aligned with the core skills of PR professionals. And don’t forget that there is still a great need for traditional PR activity. Even with the boom in influencers and the changing nature of online media, traditional print, online, and broadcast media is still going strong. Businesses still need to build and manage relationships with those journalists, and a great piece of coverage in the New York Times or on the BBC still carries a lot of weight. Old school PR is far from dead. Darryl Sparey, founder of London based PR agency, Hard Numbers, and a Fellow of the UK’s PRCA (Public Relations and Communications Association) summarizes, “Over the course of the last two years, as a result of the pandemic and lockdowns, marketing investment in things like events and outdoor advertising declined, and investment in PR, digital marketing and influencer marketing all increased, as brands needed to still reach their target audience. It will be interesting to see what happens next, and if more marketing spend returns to areas that businesses haven't been able to invest in over the last two years.” Whether you’re an in-house PR exec looking to expand your remit and build your career, or you work at a PR agency that wants to offer wider services to win more business, there are more options than ever available to you.
Conclusion
— Margaret Carpo, VP at Clarity, an NYC headquartered global comms agency.
How Has Influence Changed?
The rise of social media and online influencers has created new opportunities and challenges to navigate. PR professionals have always had to wear many hats and manage diverse projects and stakeholders. It is difficult to do it all, which is why clients need more support. If your agency doesn’t have the expertise in-house, then clients will find it elsewhere, hence many PR firms have evolved.
— James Bell, a Partner at Portland Communications, a specialist communications and public affairs agency
The addition of social media and influencers has been a very welcome addition to the PR comms mix. Through these channels, we are better able to amplify PR campaigns, increasing reach, longevity, and value for our clients.
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Influencer Relations
What is Influencer Relations?
An influencer, in the most commonly used current context, is somebody who has a large, engaged social media following of people who trust their opinions and advice. Some influencers don’t focus on a specific niche but simply share content on a wide range of lifestyle topics. Others may be more tightly focused on a particular subject, such as gaming, cooking, personal finance, craft and DIY, or literally anything that might attract an audience of interested consumers. Just as people have always looked for magazines or websites that are relevant to their interest, they now seek out influencers on social media. And brands which operate within those areas of interest can benefit greatly if they are recommended by popular influencers. So, Influencer Relations is simply the practice of building and managing ongoing relationships with the public personalities that matter most to your brand’s customers. Claire Lawson, a Director with Impact Porter Novelli based in Dubai UAE, says “While influencers can be a great asset, it is important that PR professionals ensure best practices are being implemented for successful campaigns. Influencer selection is key to ensure they align with the brand’s values, and we avoid transactional relationships and inauthentic content.”
Business Benefit
The biggest lifestyle influencers can have audiences that extend into the tens of millions, so when they endorse a particular product or brand it can have a huge impact on sales, as well as giving an overall reputational lift. But it’s not always about the sheer size of their social media following. An influencer who is laser-focused on a particular niche (say, vegan confectionery for example) might have a small audience that is highly engaged with that topic. A brand which operates in that space could have a high degree of confidence that an endorsement would reach exactly the right audience. Lawson adds “Influencer selection is key to ensure they align with the brand’s values, and we avoid transactional relationships and inauthentic content. Co-creation is preferred, to craft engaging, exciting material that delivers on the brand’s objectives while remaining true to the audience of the influencer. Finally, proper measurement is crucial to ensure KPIs are hit and success can be demonstrated. Used properly, influencers can be a great channel to achieve further awareness and mass reach for brands.”
How PR Skills Align with Influencer Relations
This is almost a no-brainer. The parallels between Influencer Relations and conventional Media Relations are huge, and it makes perfect sense that PR people should be handling it. There are some differences that PR people need to understand, however. While journalists undoubtedly have influence, they are not the same as social media influencers. Journalism is a specific profession which is bound by legal and ethical obligations, and in most cases journalists undergo formal (or at least on the job) training. That’s not the case for social media influencers. The rules of engagement for the two groups are different. In most cases, a journalist would not expect payment or any other kind of incentive to write a story about a brand, and in fact it would be considered highly unprofessional. But in the influencer marketing world, it’s much more common for positive coverage to be incentivized either informally (e.g. by offering free product samples) or through a formal commercial agreement.
of marketers surveyed said they planned to increase their spend on Influencer Marketing over the next 12-18 months.
61%
Source: Inmar Intelligence/Social Media Today survey of 300 marketers in 2022
Meltwater’s Influencer Relations platform is designed to streamline every stage of influencer campaign management. We make it easy to identify the most relevant influencers for your brand, and to authenticate their audiences so that you don’t fall prey to influencer fraud. We have a custom built CRM system, specifically created for managing influencer marketing campaigns at scale. This not only simplifies the day-to-day operations of influencer marketing, but has measurement and ROI tracking baked in, which makes it easy to constantly optimize and improve your campaigns.
Influencer Relations: The Meltwater Advantage
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The popular brand, best known for its home drink carbonation systems sold around the world, gets a lot of attention on social media. With so many people talking about Sodastream it’s hard to reply to everybody, so the brand wanted to engage the most influential fans in its community. Sodastream uses Meltwater to track which of its content and messages are resonating with audiences, and to easily identify the strongest voices amongst all those conversations using the influence ranking system. The team then engages those influencers with “surprise and delight” tactics, such as sending gifts, to show appreciation for their support. This in turn drives more conversations and strengthens relationships with the brand’s most vocal and influential fans.
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Community Management
What is Community Management?
Most brands these days use social media to communicate with their audiences to some degree. The job of keeping those channels updated, growing the follower base, as well as moderating and responding to comments is called Community Management. At its most basic level this can simply involve making occasional posts on Twitter or LinkedIn, while some big consumer brands run highly sophisticated social media programs across the full spectrum of channels, including:
Why would businesses invest the significant resources required to do community management well? The simplest way to look at it is that every single person who follows a brand on social media has opted-in to receive regular marketing communications from that company. According to the latest research, the average user spends almost two and a half hours on social media every day, so those brand followers have opted-in on a channel where they are highly active. Studies have shown that people trust brands’ social media channels more than advertising. This might not make immediate sense, since in both cases the brand controls the message so there’s no reason why one channel would be more trustworthy than the other, but people seem to judge social media communications as being more authentic than ads. Hopefully, it should be obvious that this channel is incredibly powerful. No matter what kind of size of business, having a group of people who have proactively consented to hearing from you is very useful. The brand can directly communicate with these customers easily and cost-effectively, whenever it wants to. It’s better than email because it’s more immediate and engaging, and it’s better than advertising because you can be sure the people you reach have already expressed an interest in the brand. Over time some of those people could be converted to customers, and even those who never buy from you can be helpful in spreading your message to a wider audience.
How PR Skills Align With Community Management
In a sense, community management is Public Relations in its purest form, because it involves communicating directly with the public at scale, on a highly visible platform. There’s a lot involved in community management, but at its heart is the ability to represent a brand in a professional, consistent manner, under a wide range of circumstances, including any potential comms crisis. Nobody does this as well as PR.
US adults now spend an average of 95 minutes on social media every single day. This figure consistently increases year on year, and it’s essential for brands to have a presence in social channels.
95 mins
Source: Emarketer Social Usage Survey 2021
Meltwater’s enterprise ready Community Management platform helps keep your social channels under control. It was designed to work at scale for organizations which need to manage multiple brand accounts across all the leading social media platforms, in many different markets. With role-based dashboards, configurable workflows, and built-in measurement and reporting facilities, our Community Management platform is built for collaboration, even across multiple in-house and external teams. Meltwater is trusted by some of the world’s biggest brands to manage their global social media footprints.
Community Management: The Meltwater Advantage
Integrated creative and media agency, 360i, delivers value for clients by creating high-impact digital content that engages and grows their online communities. But the agency realized that it kept running into a similar set of challenges when doing this. Firstly, conventional approvals processes are simply too slow for the digital age. Content often needs to be created and published quickly to react to fast moving events, and waiting for stakeholder sign-off means that it often loses impact by the time it can be published. Secondly, reporting was taking up too much time. While the value of understanding social media performance was clear, the amount of time it took to gather and analyze the data was disproportionate. 360i solved both of these problems with Meltwater Engage, our social media community management platform. Engage streamlines approvals and publishing processes across different teams and organizations, and fully automates measurement and reporting. This means 360i can focus on creating great content and building communities for its clients.
Doing this at scale, for a large national or global brand, demands a lot of resources. A constant stream of fresh, engaging content must be created and optimized for all channels, including copy, images, and video, as well as interactive formats such as polls. Comments from the community need to be constantly monitored and assessed to decide whether they need to be responded to, or removed if they are inappropriate, and with large communities this in itself is a full time job. The world’s biggest brands can have tens, even hundreds of millions of followers just on one social media channel, with entire global teams dedicated to managing them. Conversely, if the community is small, or even non-existent, the challenge is to grow it somehow. Building an online community from scratch is extremely difficult and can take a long time to deliver results, so it requires a long term commitment of resources.
The point of a brand social media channel is to speak directly to the public. Typically, only authorized executives are allowed to speak publicly on behalf of the brand after they’ve been extensively media-trained and coached on the appropriate messaging. So why should social media be any different? The people responsible for a brand’s social channels should be strategic communications experts.
Strategic Communications
Successful social media communities require a lot of fresh content. It needs to be on-brand, but the real challenge is that it also needs to be engaging, not overtly salesy. Where many brands fail is by posting a lot of material that is indistinguishable from advertising, but what PR can bring to the table is expertise in creating content that is specifically designed to meet the needs of the target audience.
Storytelling & Content Creation
The key elements of community management align closely with PR skills:
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter
TikTok
YouTube
LinkedIn
Forums
Review Sites
Content Marketing
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is not a particularly new idea, brands have been creating content to attract the attention of customers for a long time. In 1900, the Michelin Guide to restaurants was originally published for free by the French tire manufacturer of the same name, to encourage consumers to drive motor-cars more in search of a good meal. These days, however, Content Marketing is even more important, as a huge number of businesses vie for limited consumer attention. There are many different types of content, designed to work at different stages of the marketing funnel, from broad attention grabbing material to create awareness of the brand, right down to very focused informational pieces that help consumers make their final purchasing decision. Depending on the type of brand, content can be entertaining, educational, or useful.
Content Marketing helps businesses succeed at all stages of the customer journey. It can increase visibility at the awareness stage, improve conversions throughout the marketing funnel, and then strengthen ongoing customer loyalty, upsell opportunities, and word of mouth recommendation. Great content makes it much easier for brands to move from having a purely transactional relationship with their customers, to a more involved relationship where the customer engages with the brand more often.
How PR Skills Align With Content Marketing
Content is not advertising. Its purpose is not to directly make a sale, but to keep the audience interested and engaged, and to increase long term trust in the brand. To create this kind of content you need to know how to craft stories that will capture and hold the attention of any target audience. You need great communication abilities, and media production expertise, which could include anything from plain copy to PDF eBooks, photography, videos, infographics, podcasts, even interactive digital media. This magic mix of message and medium know-how is bread and butter to the PR department, they’ve been doing it for decades. It’s hard to make the case for any other discipline taking charge of content marketing in an organization.
of marketers who use content marketing expected to maintain content budget levels throughout 2022 compared to the previous year.
90%
Source: Hubspot survey of 1,067 marketers, 2021
Meltwater Explore is a social listening and research tool that lets you dig into all of the topics that are relevant to your audience. This makes it easy to uncover the issues and questions that matter to them, and build a content marketing strategy that is based on real data about what your audience needs, rather than hunches. Our Consumer Intelligence tool, Linkfluence, offers smart audience segmentation capabilities, which identifies online “tribes” based on shared values, interests, influences, and behaviors, instead of simple demographics. It helps you tailor your content strategy for each of your segments, so you never miss the mark.
Content Marketing: The Meltwater Advantage
High profile current affairs newspaper, The Economist, uses content marketing to grow its readership through new subscriptions. The brand can call upon an unrivaled library of high-quality editorial content, but the challenge is to match the right content to the right audience, at the right time. The Economist uses Meltwater to create audience insights, and build a deep understanding of its online communities and their interests. Armed with this actionable data the team is able to target those audiences with relevant, engaging content.
Viral Marketing & News-Jacking
What is Viral Marketing & News-Jacking?
An unexpected side-effect of media becoming social was that when people found a piece of content they liked, they shared it with their network of connections. And those people shared it with their own networks, and so on, and so on, until suddenly millions of people around the world are watching that funny video of your grandmother’s cat. Brands soon caught on to the magical power of virality and began deliberately producing content designed to be shared as far and wide as possible on social networks. But this is a tough nut to crack. There’s little rhyme or reason to what makes a particular video or meme spread across the web, but the table stakes are that it has to be funny, shocking, or cute. Even then, there are no guarantees, and for every hit viral campaign you see, there are thousands of others that simply never took off. One of the most powerful ingredients in Viral Marketing is News-Jacking which, as most PR people know, is the practice of piggybacking a story or piece of content onto a trending news topic. Often this is done with a sense of humor, making fun of a big story that everybody is talking about.
The most successful viral campaigns can reach audiences of hundreds of millions of people globally, for very little investment. You have to pay for the production of the content, and maybe a little advertising spend to get it seen by an audience so they can start sharing it, but that’s small beans compared to what it would cost if you tried to achieve the same reach through conventional advertising channels. When it works, viral marketing offers spectacular value for money. So much so that many brands believe it’s more than worth the cost of churning out a stream of flops, so long as the occasional hit gets them trending on social media.
How PR Skills Align with Viral Marketing & News-Jacking
Much of PR is about coming up with ideas for stories that will catch the attention of journalists and, by extension, their audiences. Everybody in PR has sat in a creative brainstorming session, trying to come up with imaginative ideas for stories that will get their brand seen by the public. News-Jacking is also a longstanding PR tactic, and execs are well versed in the practice of monitoring the news agenda for trending topics that could be relevant to their own brand or client, and crafting stories that can ride the wave. That kind of creative thinking is exactly what drives viral marketing. Advertising execs might argue that they also have a strong case for taking on viral marketing, and maybe that’s partly true. But advertising creatives know that their work will always have a media budget behind it to make sure it gets seen by an audience regardless of how strong it is. PR people are more experienced at coming up with ideas that have to stand on their own merits and persuade people to pay attention, rather than simply buying their way onto the page, and that’s much closer to what viral marketing needs to achieve.
of social media marketers say that funny content works best on social media.
80%
Source: Hubspot survey of 300 social media marketers. November 2021
Our social listening platform, Meltwater Explore, makes it easy to identify trending topics and new memes quickly enough for you to respond while they are still relevant. After all, there’s no point trying to jump onto a rising trend once everybody else has already done it. By spotting these trends early, your brand can be the first to get out a response, ensuring yours is the one that everybody shares and remembers, instead of being just another copycat.
Viral Marketing: The Meltwater Advantage
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In early 2021, the popular British breakfast cereal brand, Weetabix, posted a tongue-in-cheek serving-suggestion for its product on Twitter, a picture showing the product smothered with Heinz baked beans. The stunt, orchestrated by agency Frank PR, achieved its goal perfectly. Almost immediately Twitter users began sharing the image with a mixture of horror and hilarity. Soon it seemed like every heavyweight blue-tick account on Twitter was sharing the image and weighing into the debate. Hollywood celebrities, global brands, politicians, even nation states like Israel and intelligence agencies like Britain’s GCHQ joined in the fun. The original Tweet was shared over 105,000 times, by many of the biggest accounts on Twitter. The campaign spilled over from Twitter and received international online and broadcast news coverage, as well as becoming the social media marketing case study that the whole industry wanted to talk about for the rest of the year. With a campaign budget of under £5,000 this example demonstrates the incredible power and value for money of viral marketing, when fuelled by some PR ingenuity.
