“Do we embrace modernity, ditch the recent legacy of publicity and mature into a strategic management discipline?”

The fundamental shifts in the media and technology over the past decade present contrasting futures for all professionals, agencies and communication teams. Do we embrace modernity, ditch the recent legacy of publicity and mature into a strategic management discipline? Or do we stagnate, lose our relevance and ultimately become extinct?

Digital and social have provided a means to influence publics through third-party earned influence, to use a variety of media and networks to engage with publics on behalf of the organisations. This is public relations, or twoway dialogue, in its purest form. Creating public relations and communications agencies or teams that can deliver this is a slow-burning evolution. It is however a journey that I firmly believe we must all embark upon.

The challenge, as with any business transformation, is how you tackle organisational changes while limiting the impact in terms of organisational or financial performance. I’ve proposed four transitions to enable this evolution.

The first stage of the journey is to consider where traditional media relations programmes can be modernised. This doesn’t require radical change to the workflow, systems or processes within an agency or communication team. Instead technology is used to enable practitioners to work smarter and offer new services.

We must also consider that in a fragmented media environment, influencers aren’t just journalists anymore. They can be anyone with a network or community of their own.

The skills required for influencer relations are more sophisticated than traditional media relations as we make use of the data and insights available via the internet. Planning tools are required to identify influencers in a given market, and you need to be able to convey your message and story using different forms of media and content, including video and photography.

The third stage is the development of communities around an organisation in a twoway form of engagement. In my view, this is the most significant opportunity for modern public relations practice that we’ve had in more than a generation. In this way, an organisation seeks to build reputation and engagement not only through third-party influence but also directly via its own media and social forms of media.

The application of social media in public relations needs to start from a fundamental position, and should always start with a plan to enable insights to be drawn from data to inform campaign strategies that are aligned to organisational objectives. This shift is one that requires teams to be reorganised and aligned with the planning function, and demands new skills to be added to existing teams.

Finally – whenever an organisation creates a new channel it will very quickly be discovered by publics or audiences as a means to engage with the organisation.

Promotional social channels quickly become hijacked by customers wanting to call out customer service woes. Public relations expertise no longer falls solely within the domain of a communication team but is required within every area of an organisation. This is part of the ongoing shift in organisational communication that removes the line between external and internal stakeholders.

Organisations are moving beyond the tactical use of social media, to embed social technologies into their business processes to enable communication, collaboration and insight into customer, employee, supplier and partner behaviour.

This is open business and it is impacting every area of organisational design. This is social business; this is the future of public relations.

Stephen Waddington is European digital & social media director at Ketchum and CIPR president