About the future of PR

I remember the very first class of this course when Kaja compared blogging and communicating to audiences to relationship building overall. You just need to find the ways to get someone interested. With great PR future can be filled with understanding and fulfilling relationships.

For this essay I was going through many websites of PR consultants, pros and companies to see what they find important today and in the future. The magic words might be adaptation, participation, collaboration and proactive actions. Many of the instructions could be placed to some relationship site and vice versa. Almost in every site the attributes were connected to social media.

Social media technology

Social media is for sure the most spoken trend at the moment. Even though it makes me sometimes exhausted to handle it over and over again, the social media technology seems to be here to stay.

During only some years of existence the social media has gained enormous amount of participants. According to Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) social media is not an easy task for organizations and requires new kind of thinking, but the potential gains make all work worth it. I believe that Finnish PR has still a lot to do to use the social media effectively in the future. Even the platforms of today must be managed better and technology develops further all the time.

Tekes list of 15 megatrends in Finland underlines the development of the wireless technology still reducing dependence of place and time (Tekes 2009). Globally upcoming trend is the mobile social media. Pew Research Center estimates that by 2020, a mobile device will be the primary Internet connection tool for majority in the world. Organizations should also be more aware that the trend of collaborative projects (e.g. wiki contents) is leading towards them becoming the main source of information for many consumers. (Kaplan & Haenlein 2010.) Personally I think that all the media boundaries will blur more and more resulting in combined platforms and devices.

Time of individuals

Technology itself sounds a bit cold and rough, but there seems to be a human, an individual in the middle. Online every individual can share even the smallest personal experiences. The global online content grapevine is truly powerful. The importance of individualism is part of our society already and I think it will just go further. People have freedom and knowledge that enables choices.

The turbulent environment of today is filled with many issue arenas and only by participating actively the organization have a chance to be involved in co-producing the outcomes (Luoma-aho & Vos 2010). I believe that monitoring and preparing the organization to change and adapt will become more and more important tasks in the field of PR. With PR the audiences can be understood to gain their trust. The organization should be eager to know what interests the audience.

To conclude I believe that in the future PR is seen more important part of the organization as a whole and will be taken more into the strategic level of organizations. The audience is respected more and PR tasks are handled by personal touch. Communication is interaction between individuals, not feeding organization's content to mass audiences. The closer PR gets to the audience the better. So, lets build the relationships and handle future together!

Sources:

Kaplan, A., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media. Business Horizons, 53(1), 59–68.

Luoma-aho , V. & Vos, M. (2010), Towards a more dynamic stakeholder model: The role of issue arenas for corporate reputation. Corporate Communication, an International Journal, Vol. 15 No. 3, pp. 315-331.

Tekes. (2009), Megatrendit ja me. [referred: 10.12.2010] www.tekes.fi/fi/community/Megatrendit_ja_me/807/Megatrendit_ja_me/1759