This issue of The Top 20 Trends for PR Practitioners in 2012 is a great articulation of some of the trends we’re seeing and contending with in our industry. I thought I’d jot down some of thoughts I had as I read through it:
- Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and other movements like this year’s Tent Embassy are important and meaningful examples of social and political expression but they need to go a lot further
– and that’s where PR should play a role. Some of the big movements to grab media and social media attention this year, like those mentioned above, stop short at being able to succinctly communicate their agenda and their charter for change. These charters should be as clear to us as the event itself.
- Mandatory Commitment to Social Media: The update on the Qantas twitter parody story broke last week: the risk of quashing legitimate parody and expression of public sentiment is more dangerous and risky than working with your legal teams to shut it down (more on that later…!)
- On Carbon Monsters: Our challenge for now is finding experts who can actually understand the practical realities of this legislation for business and then examine how we as PR consultants can help communicate and create industry leadership platforms around this. We’re still searching…
- NBN: Text 100 has been involved in campaigns promoting super fast broadband since 1999, so we’re thrilled it’s finally arrived. This year we’re involved in some exciting research on the impact of this on Australia at all levels on behalf of one of our clients – stay tuned for the launch this year!
- The Rise of Analytics: A subject close to Text 100’s heart – and also known as the impact of ‘big data’. At its core big data means using a range of data sets including competitive information, online data such as social networking behaviours, offline data and customer information to enable a three dimensional approach to business decisions. To quote from our blog Hypertext: ”From a PR perspective the emergence of better, easier-to-use more targeted tools combined with geo-location technologies will mean data will play a meaningful role in PR activities. We’ll go beyond reach and “participation” measures such as likes and retweets and instead derive action-oriented insights from our metrics.
Measuring Digital Reputation: Nice to see Text 100’s Simon Fitzgerald quoted on this very important trend. As SiFi says: “We will be held accountable and need to display action-oriented insights from our metrics such as engagement, distribution, clicks, reach and downloads, sentiment conversion and number of leads.”
That seems like a nice note to end on. Well done Glen on a great and relevant issue!
