PR In The Second Decade: 2011 & Beyond

As we complete the first ten years of the century and plough (literally) into the crisp, virgin snow of the next decade, I use this year’s events to inspire my top five predictions for the industry over the next few years.

1. Wiki-up and smell the petroleum. Having witnessed the abysmal PR flop that was the BP crisis, and the complete dirty laundry airing that is the ongoing Wikileaks scandal, even staunchly immovable megalithic companies and ex-public sector dinosaurs will wake up to the fact that hardened arrogance is no longer a survival strategy under withering online global consumer criticism. Result: further investment in reputation management PR, channelled to those with a successful record of online engagement, and even the most b2b orientated companies seeking consumer PR expertise. This may see the break up and overhaul some old established PR agencies that until now have relied on these huge clients for fees and are yet to grasp the digital thorn properly, merely adding social media elements to traditional PR plans. Potential next victims of a PR disaster black hole: Rolls Royce for failure to address consumer concerns over their engine problems, Eurostar (again) for this week’s handling of biblical waiting queues in arctic conditions.
   


2. Video on Demand, or else. The BBC has gone all MSN Video this year, with everything from instant eye witness coverage of failed terrorist plots in Sweden to a soundless three minutes of video showing a boring snow covered driveway in dullest suburbia. Youtube has become the great visual library of the world. Even PR Week has hauled itself into the digital age with frequent online video. PR agencies will have to fight for this slice of marketing budget against battle hardened digital marketers from Silicon Roundabout. Better get on with it (or hire said digital marketers). People like pictures, preferably with a pumping soundtrack and a comments section at the bottom. For the attention deficit teenagers with Playstation thumb who are the adult audience of the next five years, there is no other way to communicate.
   


3. Eds, you lose. Despite an imminent implosion of the Liberal party and the break up of the Lib-Con pact, the Labour party fails to get any meaningful messages out to a broader audience due to its rejection of the PR tactics adopted to great success by New Labour, instead returning to its ‘core values’. Ed Miliband resigns his post and David steps in, but nobody remembers who he is anymore. Continued infighting in the face of huge global events make them look even more out of touch.
   


4. The Matrix: Recorded. We’re already speaking to robots on the phone to pay our bills and listening to them on the buses and trains to announce our stops. Well, Gartner predicts that by 2015, 10% of your online friends will be non-human! While this may be exciting news for fans of the replicants in Blade Runner, the comms challenges in terms of identifying your audiences and building online communities could be immense. Couple this to the idea that most of the services you use will be hosted externally, in ‘the cloud’, then its easy to see that information control, privacy and a knowledge of what is real and what isn’t will continue to become bigger issues in future PR debates.
   


5. Chinese take away. China plays the long game. In many ways China has the ultimate PR machine in that, while it can mobilise 200 people to say the grass is green to a Western audience eager to trade with it (while patting itself on the back for ‘standing up’ for human rights), China can simultaneously mobilise another 400 people to say the grass is most definitely red to Communist allies. In China’s view, (its version of) Communism is propelling it to world leadership. Why change now? Since Burson Marsteller and Xinhua News formed China’s first PR consultancy in 1984, the industry has experienced healthy growth, comparable to other leading growth sectors. Cameron’s tricky balancing act of convincing the home audience of representing Western values while simultaneously making trade friendly overtures to the Chinese leadership will be one that many businesses will follow. Consumers will put greater pressure on businesses dealing with China and, equally, the growing number of Chinese state owned businesses wishing to trade in Europe and the US. This will create more jobs in both the East and West.
   

There’s lot of new challenges as well as immense opportunities ahead for PR people. I hope you all have a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year and good luck for 2011!