By Flora Haslam
The news of a radical restructure for a global PR firm is continuing to get attention months after it was announced, so I thought I’d take another look.
While I’m all for change, I’m just not convinced this is a good idea. Yes, as an industry we need to evolve – we still hear stories about PRs building campaigns that consist of writing press releases and calling journalists afterwards to ‘follow up’. Clearly this is a woefully outdated practice and anyone still doing this should, frankly, be ashamed of themselves. But generally speaking, the agency world has moved on – our key influencers have changed, and we’ve changed how we communicate with them.
For most agencies, Facebook strategies, Twitter and Google Plus are an integral part of the day-to-day work we do, and I’ve personally always been a big proponent of incorporating social media campaigns into the work the PR team is doing. Not just because it means PR agencies retain more of the budget(!), but because the team that is ingrained in what a client does, is going to be able to do a much better job.
Yes, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to find people who are sufficiently multi-skilled that they can come up with ideas, pitch them effectively and keep clients happy, but that doesn’t mean we should give up. More importantly, I can’t see this as a positive for career-focused PRs. Do people really want to spend their days as ‘connectors’? Isn’t one of the attractions of agency work the variety? And how does this affect future career progression?
Indeed, the top five skills identified by recruitment consultants as crucial for a successful future PR career include social media skills, experience of integrated campaigns and commercial acumen. Simply put, the need for multi-talented PR professionals is not going to go away anytime soon.
Let Flora know what you think a PR pro's skillset should be @florahaslam.
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