Five Trends in PR for 2018

What is happening in the world of Public Relations?

It is a revolution indeed. It is a complete change, the business has turned upside down...

The reality is that traditional media is dying, and logically Media Relations as a business is also dying. Today we all own media and we all have enormous power in our hands.

Some years ago we had a couple of thousands leading PR agencies in the world, today we have a couple of billions. Everyone is doing and needs PR - from the accounting companies to the show produces. Everyone has absolute direct access to their customers. We are not simply waiting for consumers to be influenced by traditional media only. We have the power in our hands – social media.

It is a different business in a different world. In 2018 it will be much more different even.

Here are the Five Trends of PR in 2018:

1. The MERGE between the three main elements of modern public communications - advertising, the digital and public relation will continue to exist, and the big fight now is who will be the leader of the future united business. I strongly believe it will be Public Relations, as it is obvious that nowadays clients care and need third party communications services for two main reasons – Reputation Management and Crisis Management. This is what we are specialized to do and it is only us who can do it as professionally as it should be.

2. The world, now more than ever, needs leaders – politics and ideologies on their own do not work anymore. In the Public Relations business, the leadership issue used to be an issue, as we were always accepted as the "people in the shadow". But now being LEADERS is the next trend in the modern PR business. We have social media in our hands, we are already the Opinion Makers, not our clients. We must be true leaders with knowledge, with positions, with arguments, with our faces and names and to speak weather on behalf of our clients, or together with them... In the day to day experiences in the office, PR professionals should not be simply executing tasks given by the client – we should be advisers and consultants, and insist on our professional knowledge.

3. In 2018 fake news will continue to overload all our devices. One of the greatest surprises in the modern PR is that no one expected this, although we should have... If some 3 billion people own media in their hands, of course, we can expect that many of them will misuse it. The third most important trend in the modern PR business in 2018 is ETHICS. Does that mean that we were not ethical until now? Not at all, but we now live in a completely new world and ethics is a critical part of our business. We not only write texts for news, but are producing and publishing them, and this may lead to huge misunderstandings if PR practitioners do not work ethically and professionally. Every word and number that we state, no matter if it is on behalf of ourselves or our clients, must be in accordance of highest ethical standards.

4. My recent practice and travels worldwide demonstrated that we - unfortunately - cannot gather, work with and analyze data, but this is the future modern Public Relations. Until now we used to work with databases and some lists of contacts, and that was all. However, data now is already BIG DATA and we must have teams to analyze it and use it to guide our decision-making and advise our clients on the most effective engagement practices depending on facts. Moreover, my opinion is that practitioners should continue paying attention to small databases and every-day information (data) that they have access to, as it can still lead them to proper decisions.

5. The world is now full of information, full of opinions, fake and real, data - big and small. People become confused – both PR experts, clients, and readers – people are constantly bombarded with hundreds of thousands of messages and often miss what is important for them. Therefore, our main task is like never before to target the right audience and make it easy for people to understand the message. The fifth trend for 2018 is, of course, SIMPLICITY. PR practitioners should try to find the simple, understandable and attractive way to describe their messages to the target audiences, to the clients and to the team that they work with.

Last but not least, and maybe trend number six, or even perhaps number One – today, owning media, having direct access to audiences – clients will need FIRST CLASS service, but paying economy class fees.

Maxim Behar
CEO & Chairman of the Board
M3 Communications Group, Inc.
at the PRilika Conference, Belgrade, December 2017