Agile PR

PR has evolved: It used to be all about having, then selling the idea. Now it’s about telling the story in a compelling and believable way.

Nowhere is misinformation more of an issue than during times of disasters, natural or otherwise. If you are old enough to remember 9/11, a time before social media took hold, you will remember the false stories and disturbing visuals that added to our collective panic

Today’s CEOs are not only chief executive officers but also chief reputation officers, tasked with being the face of their corporations and weathering the tempests that swirl all over social media and spiral into a funnel cloud at alarming speed.

e. Among the hundreds of millions of people eyeballing the Internet every day, there are bound to be a few who have a particular interest in a given brand, industry, CEO, or public figure. All it takes is one or two of them to spot something iffy, and suspicions can spread and snowball, with even one discovered fib causing a flurry of distrust and bad press. The stakes are too high to allow for loose interpretations of the truth.

They can invent characters, places, and events that don’t exist in the real world, as long as these inventions tap into emotional truths at some level. I

So with all that background in mind, where is PR headed?
Writing on Forbes.com, PR pro Robert Wynne places the industry at a three-pronged fork in the road. He likens these three paths to the American class system, with what he calls traditional PR (heavy on media relations) as the shrinking middle class; social media PR (especially DIY or “Let’s hire a 19-year-old intern”) as the lower, poorest-paid class; and advocacy PR, which he positions as just short of propaganda, as the fat cats at the top.4

The challenge for PR agencies now is that we have to be multitalented, diverse, and versatile but also nimble, efficient, and agile. As anyone working in the industry can tell you, that means piling more and more hats onto your head, from copywriting to social media campaign management to partnering with influencers and many more.

Like many other industry watchers, Holmes mentions brand journalism, which is rapidly becoming a big deal. That means not hiring former journalists for their storytelling abilities and then expecting them to stay positive and on message but encouraging them to actually act and think like journalists. Brand journalism isn’t just telling good stories but also identifying and researching those stories—and that means giving brand journalists full access to clients so that they can use their skills to home in on positive news that can reinforce a brand and negative news, ideally in time to help clients address those areas of reputation risk before it goes public.

The public relations landscape, its expectations and ethical standards, its tactics and anticipated outcomes, and even its basic rules look nothing like they did five years ago—and little like they did five months ago. Like all industries, communications is evolving at the speed of light. (Or, as Fast Company put it, “faster than an out-of-control science fiction character.”1)

StoryDoing—a concept originated by creativity and innovation expert Ty Montague—takes the notion of storytelling up a step: It exposes the simple truth that actions speak louder than words.