The Only Constant is Change

Public Relations. It’s my job. It’s what we do for a living and makes payroll for 60 people here. I even have a post graduate degree in it. So for my inaugural post it seems fitting to muse on how PR is in the throes of a major transformation – a hot topic orbiting the blogosphere.
 
The fact is PR is evolving, but the essence of what its trying to achieve will never go away. We help people and companies deal with change.  For 15 years, I called Horn Group a PR firm. But a funny thing happened a couple years ago. Companies wanted less traditional PR (publicity) and more things like demand generation programs, search marketing, and social media strategies. Not so coincidentally, a lot of our traditional print media started to disappear. Our audiences are different and the ways we reach them have changed. We had to find new talent to help bridge the gap between traditional PR and web communications.  With the democratizing effects of social media, and the emergence of a world in which an independent blogger can have a greater impact than the Wall Street Journal, PR becomes less about influence and more about participation and advocacy. Our work today has to be more intelligent and thoughtful because its impact is immediate and profound. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you will be exposed, immediately.  We are still helping companies communicate but the rules have changed and the stakes are higher. 

Marcel Goldstein said “In the next 10 years, PR will either be gone or transformed into a completely different profession.”  I believe there will always be a need for a communications function that helps companies further a business goal, get the word out, build awareness, you get the idea.  PR is morphing into something wonderfully new and challenging. PR and other elements of the marketing mix are converging into one discipline. We may end up calling it something else too.  This is such a great opportunity to reinvent ourselves within a broader platform. And it will definitely be more valuable to our customers.

Change is a funny thing though. It makes a straight line all twisty and curvy.  It makes people uncomfortable.  We know we ultimately have to embrace change and assimilate into our environment. Those that embrace it first are the ones we tend to follow.  As communications professionals we are change agents and our jobs are to make change work for others.  But sometimes I think we resist change as much as the next guy. Our business is changing, and that can be scary, no doubt. This is a “good” scary because it’s such a great opportunity. Regardless, the price of resistance to change is failure.

If we could just watch ourselves in our own movie, we could see how change plays itself out and we wouldn’t have to waste so much energy and time navigating its effects.  Doug Rushkoff author of Get Back in the Box, Innovation from the Inside Out, makes some really great points about how innovation causes change, and then he talks about how people and companies deal with that change.  The point is many can’t and they deal with it the wrong way. Most of the time, companies put together new infrastructures and visions and missions and product lines and task forces and consortiums, rather than looking inside themselves at what they do best to adapt.

But I digress. We are the first ones who need to be the change agents of our own business to adapt to what our markets require.  And as communicators we need to continue to explain the effects in terms others can understand and give useful examples of how it can work for them. We have to talk about it correctly and honestly, and hopefully other people will talk about it. And we need to use new media to reach people in different places. Communication isn’t spin or hype, it really doesn’t need to be. When done correctly, it works, it’s the truth, not something that is twisted or otherwise embellished.

That is a huge responsibility. I think sometimes our industry takes it for granted.  The next iteration of our business has the chance to stand on higher ground. I encourage our leaders to rethink their practices from the inside out and take risks.  We have the chance to push the reset button here. When we come out the other end of this, PR will still serve its fundamental purpose, it’ll just be different. So let’s get on the dime and do it right.

Comments

[Maggie]

I am working on a paper for one of my communications classes at Southern Methodist University and was hoping to get some tips from you on how you get press for your clients. If you get a chance and could email me at [email protected] or blog me at mmjohnson.blogspot.com I would really appreciate it. Thanks

[Gary Goldhammer]

Sabrina, thanks for a straightforward, honest and thoughtful post. I hope you know that you are one of the very few agency principals out there who "gets it," in my opinion (your former boss, Richard Edelman, is another one by the way). Can you come out to Orange County, CA, and wake up some of the agency folks out here? :-) Seriously, thanks for sharing your thoughts and I hope you keep blogging!

[sabrinahorn]

Thanks Gary,
I do think we are in the midst of a major transformation of our business, which is a convergence of traditional PR, new social media and advocacy work, as well as visual branding tools from the marketing communications world. And yes, Richard does "get it". It scares me that so many of us dont.