The PR industry has grown faster than the GDP of most countries for several years now - why?  I’d argue that this growth is directly linked to rise of social media.  By social media I of course mean blogging, wikis, podcasting, social networking sites etc.  For years most PR agencies were tied to the editorial agendas of the various forms of media.  In other words to get their views across they had to convince some editor to write about it or record it.  Thanks to social media all that has changed.  Today, corporations can write their own news stories, record their own interviews and provided the opinions expressed make some sense, people will start to pay attention whether the content appears in traditional media or on a site like YouTube.  In other words the limit on PR is no longer defined by the media but by the real quality of the content a company can create.

I believe we are still in the early stages of the changes the PR industry can expect.  I would not be shocked to learn that within a couple of years every company will have a blog and that almost all its news will be broadcast through that blog either as a written or broadcast entry.  Indeed, just as today we expect every company to have a web site (and we are often suspicious if they don’t), we will expect every company to have a blog.

Of course if every company has a blog, then the critical part will be how that blog is maintained and this is where PR has a huge opportunity.  Blogs, regardless of the content types used (Video, audio or the plain old written word) are designed as a way of having a dialog with the people your business or organization is connected to.  If you post a news item or an opinion piece from an executive within the company and then simply ignore the feedback these items get then you are likely to annoy customers and you are of course missing a huge opportunity to build a relationship with your audience.  PR agencies have spent decades helping companies develop responses to all manner of situations, who better to help guide a company’s voice in the world of social media?  Let me repeat that – who better to help guide a company’s voice in the world of social media? 

Even the world of online advertising, which has been the darling of the marketing world in recent years, can’t help in this area.  Coming up with slickly thought out banner ad campaigns that cleverly link to the searches people make is of course helpful but when a debate is raging about your company’s product they quickly become decorations rather than participants.  You only have to look at the popularity of TripAdvisor.com to appreciate the power of public opinion.  It used to be that be a hotel could get away with having nicely shot photos that disguised the building site next door.  Thanks to TripAdvisor people now get to see the tide marks in the bath tubs, hear how good or bad the concierge is and of course whether there is a building site next door.  Customer reviews are becoming the norm on all manner of ecommerce web sites.  How a company deals with this is of course potentially the difference between a great or disastrous quarter.  I would contend that it is areas like this that offer such a huge opportunity for PR.

My last observation on this topic (for now) is how social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are changing the world of PR.  These sites offer the chance to build or destroy communities in an instant.  MySpace in its early days was famous for making bands an overnight success, almost without a record label getting involved.  Today, every major artist keeps a close eye on the relevant communities within such social networking sites to make sure they are keeping fans connected and that their images are not going the way of Britney Spears.  Of course high profile consumer facing brands or personalities are easy to associate with the rise of these sites.  But these sites have just as much relevance to more obscure communities.  Indeed if anything they are more helpful for organizations trying to reach niche audiences.  Quite simply, thanks to the way these sites work, interest groups coalesce around topics, making it relatively easy for relevant businesses to find them.  As any direct marketing guru will tell you, finding a niche audience is almost as hard as convincing them to do something.  Imagine therefore that as a software company you want to reach the software development community to explain the benefits of some new API.  Would you run a banner ad, try direct mail or create a dialog using a form of social media?  I think you can guess what I think the answer is.