Rob Brown - CIPR Scotland AGM

Lets start by looking at the recent past.

2005

Ten years ago…

Ten years ago…

2005-2014

The last 10 years

2015

Digital PR

is Dead

I first made this assertion at a talk at

an event called ‘Freshtival’ in 2013

12 views through conventional channel

3420 views via social media

I’d disproved my own argument

Published Last Week

(Wiley 2013)

“Digital PR is Dead?

That isn’t a chapter that’s a tweet”

ROBIN WILSON

General Manager PR, Social,

Experiences at Spark PHD

Wellington, NZ

Forrester: “CMOs have to overcome the

divide between digital marketing

and brand marketing”

Everything has a digital aspect

Digital PR is just PR

Social Media is no longer new

Some aspects require specialist expertise but that’s true of PR in general

Digital communications shouldn’t be seen as a specialism

Understanding digital channels doesn’t require special expertise

Passed the 50% adoption rate four years ago months ago

Television isn’t just on television anymore

Consumers talk back

News breaks via social channels

Circulation figures are in decline

There are fewer newspapers

Digital is mainstream

…as of 2011

The Telegraph – 2 March 2011

Though it’s reach and impact was still a little misunderstood

How new is the new communications environment?

Tom Standage

Journalist and author

Graduate of Oxford University

Science and technology writer for The Guardian

Business editor at The Economist

Published in:

• Wired

• The New York Times

• The Daily Telegraph

Author of five books, including The Victorian Internet.

Tom Standage’s analysis of impact of The Telegraph

Newspaper & telegraph companies established alliances that allowed reporters to send breaking stories back to the office.

There was speculation that the telegraph would lead to the downfall and of the printed press.

This reduced the impact of geographic borders.

The development of the telegraph led to a compression of time and space.

The speed at which information reached audiences was dependent on the transport used to disperse that information.

Information overload

If they were to remain successful, merchants had no choice but to adopt the telegraph.

With this came the disadvantage of an overload of information

With the introduction of the telegraph the pace of business interactions greatly increased.

Information from foreign associates was received once or twice a month.

Prior to the telegraph, business had been conducted on a local level.

Businesses began to seek ways to capitalise on the instantaneous flow of information.

Sounds quite familiar doesn’t it.

If digital is just an evolution and all

communications is now digital

there is little point in using the

word. Digital communications is

just communications.

SXSWFrontier news from the Digital Wild West

What I learned

Facebooknative video shared far more than embedded.

Almost nobody trusts

Facebookwith their

data.

Facebookkeeps data for only 90 days

Google keeps it forever yet more people trust Google

than Facebook.

Most talked about

launches Meerkat and

Super

But…

This is now a stable market

Super is unless

unlikely to succeed where

Google+ failed

Twitter moved to restrict the

impact of Meerkat within

days

The immediate future

PR will rediscover

broadcast media

The ‘digital’ orthodoxy about television

Eight million

watched live on

YouTube

Few TV channels

carried the jump

Red Bull wasn’t just

the sponsor

TV isn’t necessary any

more

Call the Midwife had over a million more viewers than

the jump

Baumgartner’s audience was

global

A better comparison with broadcast would

be a global event

Olympics audience saw 900 million tune

in globally

TV can still reach more people than online delivery. In some cases by a factor of 100+.

Data will become more of

a PR commodity

Data is more

available

Surveys are a bit old hat

Data is news

Valuable PR asset

LinkedIn will become a

major player

Over 350 million users

The LinkedIn universe may only be 600

million

It’s a very valuable universe

End of Spin

The proof is out there…

If you want to know how many people work at an agency and what the staff turnover is like it’s on LinkedIn.

If you want to know about their performance over the last couple of years a free search on Company Check will give you a pretty good idea.

If your agency tells you your campaign website had 10,000 hits last month, Alexa will tell you if its true

One final prediction….

…although its not really about PR

Subtitles in foreign

language TV series will

get bigger

Prime Minister can you tell us why the

subtitles are so much bigger in the second

series?

[email protected]

@robbrown