Prepare for the golden age of PR
Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) president, Shane Allison, argues that PR and communications is entering a ‘Golden Age’ – and that all communicators need to do to embrace its potential is think more commercially.
For many industries, the 2023 outlook is, shall we say, a little bit uncertain.
Not so for Australia’s communicators.
In a long running trend that accelerated through the pandemic, the influence of our profession grew and transformed. We went from having the ear of the CEO on critical reputation issues, to being trusted advisors on a depth of business issues, helping to navigate the uncertain times that we face as Australians, keeping our staff engaged, communities safe and organisations thriving.
Good points here, particularly about the importance of attempting to tie communications activity and outcomes as closely as possible to business objectives and delivering commercially measurable return on investment.
As communicators, we need to challenge ourselves how we can most effectively use our skills and knowledge to contribute to the bottom line (and be recognised as doing so), addressing key commercial or organisational challenges.
A key component of this needs to be implementation of a sound, widely accepted methodology for measuring and validating the role played by earned activity and coverage in assessment of an audience/customer journey and decision-making and their perspectives/opinions about an organisation or issue.
‘Fractional’ measurement of this kind would attribute appropriate value to the multiple touchpoints in this process, which will generally include, but is not usually limited to, media coverage achieved by an agency or in-house communicators, or both.
This would allow us to meaningfully ‘unbundle’ and assign value to the multiple activities which are components of reputation/perception and commercial outcomes.
Organisations would more effectively be able to assign value/contribution to communications/earned media alongside other activities such as advertising, customer acquisition/retention/re-activation marketing, community outreach, and so forth.
As a working journalist this piece is a bit of a lightbulb story – it explains why so many pitches are tuned to the client’s goals, not readers’ needs, why access journalism that hands ‘exclusives’ to soft media has become the norm, and why agency staff largely resort to spray and pray and almost never work to proactively develop relationships with media.
Outcome, channel, tactic? Shouldn’t you decide who you are communicating to/with before you ‘outcome them’?