Public Relations (PR) have been around 100 years and it is essentially still the same as it was in the 1920s. The crux of the profession is to help promote products / services / legislation / etc to a wider audience without overtly selling. Of course, instead of just newspapers, billboards, and flyers - today’s PR professionals have digital news, social media, and influencers.
The saying goes, “Time and Tide waits for no man.” To update it a little, one can add Technology to that list. In 1969 went from human calculators and computers the size of rooms to determine the trajectory of the Apollo moon landings. 50 years later, we have a computer that is millions of times more powerful, sitting in our pockets, and we use it to browse cute cat pictures.
What will the future hold as technology continues to hurtle forward at an ever increasing pace? How will PR, the art of the subtle influence, be different as societal norms evolve? Will anything stay constant? With a little imagination and extrapolation, we can guesstimate what lies ahead.
Micro-influencers everywhere
With social media, everyone is an influencer now. We all have followers and as we all seek more “authentic” content - the future may belong to those who have less than more. Micro influencers are typically those with less than 10,000 followers and their content is made so it stays that way. Niche user-generated content is targeted and feels more personal.
Instead of pumping insane money to get 1 X Kylie Jenner to retweet to millions, it is likely that PR professionals will spend way less to get millions of average people to share to their social circles. After all, who would more likely get to crave a bowl of spicy noodles - a stick thin celebrity who took a bite for the cameras OR your mate who definitely ate it and ordered a second bowl?
Purely digital / social “newspapers”
Print is dying and in the next few years, it will die off entirely. According to the Statista, in May 2017, 30% of those aged 18 - 29 have never read a physical newspaper. And why would they? Everything you need to know can be found online and updated to the latest second. Media outlets all have an online presence so the change is inevitable.
This will give rise to more media outlets shifting entirely to online. There will be those who just exist entirely on social media - tracking shares, engagement, comments, likes instead of traditional circulation numbers. As such, full-time editors and journalists will be replaced with freelance ones.
Full VR events
Due to the world changing pandemic, events will never be the same. Conventions and exhibitions were great ways to reach out to a targeted audience. There were events for every single interest group out there and it was a multi-billion dollar industry. Many have started small and took on hybrid models where the organisers, speakers, and key personnel still met up in person but the audience watched from their screens and networking went into chat groups
However, much of the experience was still lost, so the next step is to go virtual. Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) like GTA Online are already doing this where players from across the world interact online. Virtual conferences can allow attendees to create avatars to personalise looks, set up booths, walk up to someone else and speak “in-person”, listen to speakers, and much more. In fact, the first steps of leveraging gaming for online events has already taken place.
Just like how modern roles like SEO Strategist or Scrum Master didn’t exist 20 years ago, the next page of the story of PR has yet to be written. The only constant we can expect is that it will change.
