Just like other facets of journalism, Public Relations has gone through some transformations over the last few years. PR has moved toward thought leadership (perhaps ghost writing) and is often much less about damage control and much more about building relationships. As an article from 5W notes, PR professionals work to engage customers and to create an environment in which consumers feel connected to a brand or organization. PR as a field has grown and expanded into much more than what the average person assumes it is (including myself, when I first began learning about contemporary PR practices). A PR professional is required to wear more hats than ever before.

Moving away from simple damage control does not mean this isn’t important in the age of social media. These days, everything is instant, and everyone is a “journalist.” This means that if there is an event such as a natural disaster or a professional issue within an organization, PR professionals feel more pressure than ever to control that situation immediately (before everybody else gets to it). 

Overall, more and more, people/consumers want transparency from organizations. According to Komarketing, 86% of consumers want and expect brands to be transparent on social media. This era of PR requires honesty from organizations. This also means that organizations are required to have more control of their messages to the public (versus the early days of third-party endorsements). Organizations and companies really have to be their own entities. That doesn’t mean that paid or earned media isn’t still common, but PR professionals are especially specific about messages that they are trying to get across and have to be more careful, as anyone can post anything on social media.

Transparency does not mean that organizations have stopped trying to make money. IMC (advertorials, etc.) are common and growing in PR. However, integrated marketing is often using technology and social media to garner positive publicity. This is barebones, modern PR. This also lends to the changing face of advertising. In order to “cut through the noise,” advertisers must be smarter and more creative than ever while still making the jobs of their PR people easy. A lesson learned early in PR courtesy of P.T. Barnum: not all publicity is necessarily good publicity. The advent of the Internet has led to major leaps and bounds as far as opportunities for advertising, but it still must be calculated.

As a consumer, I prefer transparency from the companies that I buy from. I value honesty in my personal relationships, so why wouldn’t I value it in products? Of course, in my opinion, we should also be naturally skeptical and suspicious of corporations and their motives. After all, the bottom line is what counts. Would I like to believe that a major company is doing something nice just for the sake of it? Of course. And to a point, maybe they are. But in the end it is about money, and it’s important to remember that.

Because of all of this, advertisers have created a world where sometimes we don’t even realize we are being advertised to. According to an article from MDG, the average American spends 23.6 hours online each week. That’s 23.6 hours that somebody has the opportunity to be advertised to. Advertisers know this and will use it. That is why the social media landscape is saturated with advertising. Those tweets that seem like they’re from the account of a teenage girl- you know the ones- they have a picture of a necklace or something like, “look what my boyfriend bought me!” These are bots, and they are advertising. Generally, we know and recognize this, but sometimes we don’t. Companies are getting smarter, but I would like to believe that consumers are, too. We all must continually evolve with social media.

Social Media Manager Vector originally posted by Freepik via Freepik