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Leveraging Emerging Technology For The PR Industry

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Vaibhav Suri,  Sr. Vice President - Products & Business, Yatra Online Vaibhav is an experienced Sr. Vice President Products & Business with a demonstrated history of working in various eCommerce segments like travel, mCommerce and product startup industries

Welcome to the exciting age of information – a time when your message can be transmitted, understood, misunderstood, loved, hated, and lost in less than time than it took you to read this sentence. For those in the media industry, and particularly the public relations industry, this poses a strategic challenge. After all,it is only by effectively managing information, can individuals and organizations build successful relationships with their partners, groups, and stakeholders.

Public Relations agents deal with situations that can make or break their client’s brand and ultimately lead to a loss of public interest, or worse, a loss of trust in the brand. Now it is possible to interact with the audience in real time, sharing the same message across multiple channels at remarkable speeds. But every day, organizations and individuals face serious problems that can lead to the misrepresentation of their brand and create distrust amongst their audience and agitating a polarized audience.

And despite technology making large-scale impact an easier & cheaper goal to accomplish, it is also riskier since reversing actions in the digital world is a near impossibility. This means that a single mistake can undo a brand just as quickly if they do not understand the power of the technology they wield.

Digital Fluency in Marketing/PR
In the early 2000s, Brand Managers really had to push themselves if they wanted to make an impact with their audience. With new digitally enabled communication channels like social media and emails, the nature of communication has changed, making this task far easier. In the last 10 years, digital is the default channel of communications for many demographics and this trend is only growing. As a result, companies have invested considerable time andeffort transforming their skills and capabilities in order to leverage the benefits of digital. However, despite this shift the CMO Insights on the Journey to Digital Agility 2017 report shows that, only 17 percent of marketers have full digital fluency.

The challenge here lies in understanding the idea of ‘digital fluency’, which is the ability to have a holistic understanding of digital technologies and know-how to deploy them to achieve business outcomes. It entails the ability of a marketing executive to not only intuitively understand the right tool for the right job, but also understand the underlying implications of how these tools impact their strategy. Modern marketing and PR organizations need to be equipped with people who possess this ability to think digitally just as they would be fluent in the language of their homeland. Today’s marketers live online and they need to be digitally fluent.

Emerging Technologies
Only when businesses have a solid conceptual understanding of technology then only they can generate internal innovation. Consider, for example, the rise of two major technology terms - Artificial Intelligence(AI) & Machine Learning (ML), oftentimes treated as interchangeable concepts by the business world. However, AI is a wider concept that entails the creation of autonomous machines, while ML is the use of AI towards specific data-based self-learning. The differences while minor are significant when it comes to business applications.

Application of Emerging Technologies
In order to build mutually beneficial relationships, the PR industry can now turn to AI, for a more targeted outreach, while ML can help perform routine tasks, thereby allowing PR agents to focus on other aspects of business.
1.Faster and more accurate social listening - ML can analyse vast amounts of data,using deep learning technology, and can improve upon early insights as they are fed more data.

Welcome to the exciting age of information – a time when your message can be transmitted, understood, misunderstood, loved, hated, and lost in less than time than it took you to read this sentence. For those in the media industry, and particularly the public relations industry, this poses a strategic challenge. After all, it is only by effectively managing information, can individuals and organizations build successful relationships with their partners, groups, and stakeholders.

Public Relations agents deal with situations that can make or break their client’s brand and ultimately lead to a loss of public interest, or worse, a loss of trust in the brand. Now it is possible to interact with the audience in real time, sharing the same message across multiple channels at remarkable speeds. But every day, organizations and individuals face serious problems that can lead to the misrepresentation of their brand and create distrust amongst their audience and agitating a polarized audience.

And despite technology making large-scale impact an easier & cheaper goal to accomplish, it is also riskier since reversing actions in the digital world is a near impossibility. This means that a single mistake can undo a brand just as quickly if they do not understand the power of the technology they wield.

Digital Fluency in Marketing/PR
In the early 2000s, Brand Managers really had to push themselves if they wanted to make an impact with their audience. With new digitally enabled communication channels like social media and emails, the nature of communication has changed, making this task far easier. In the last 10 years, digital is the default channel of communications for many demographics and this trend is only growing. As a result, companies have invested considerable time andeffort transforming their skills and capabilities in order to leverage the benefits of digital. How ever, despite this shift the CMO Insights on the Journey to Digital Agility 2017 report shows that, only 17 percent of marketers have full digital fluency.

The challenge here lies in understanding the idea of ‘digital fluency’, which is the ability to have a holistic understanding of digital technologies and know-how to deploy them to achieve business outcomes. It entails the ability of a marketing executive to not only intuitively understand the right tool for the right job, but also understand the underlying implications of how these tools impact their strategy. Modern marketing and PR organizations need to be equipped with people who possess this ability to think digitally just as they would be fluent in the language of their homeland. Today’s marketers live online and they need to be digitally fluent.

Emerging Technologies
Only when businesses have a solid conceptual understanding of technology then only they can generate internal innovation. Consider, for example, the rise of two major technology terms – Artificial Intelligence(AI) & Machine Learning (ML), oftentimes treated as interchangeable concepts by the business world. However, AI is a wider concept that entails the creation of autonomous machines, while ML is the use of AI towards specific data-based self-learning. The differences while minor are significant when it comes to business applications.

Application of Emerging Technologies
In order to build mutually beneficial relationships, the PR industry can now turn to AI, for a more targeted outreach, while ML can help perform routine tasks, thereby allowing PR agents to focus on other aspects of business.

1.Faster and more accurate social listening-ML can analyse vast amounts of data, using deep learning technology,and can improve upon early insights as they are fed more data.

2.Determining share of conversation - Twitter conversations fed into a deep learning network can produce filtered tweets and determine the share of conversation on different topics ranging from healthcare to foreign policy.

3.Finding a common thread between polarized groups - Many organizations and businesses are built on polarization, with specific interests and political leanings. Deep learning algorithms can be used to determine language overlap between polarized bubbles.

4.Crisis Management - ML can be used to monitor tweets that propagate a rumour and also predict the rumour’s truthfulness.

Some of the above have been part of the work that Andrew Heyward, Visiting Fellow at MIT Media Lab’s and his colleague have done as part of the Laboratory of Social Machines.

Rethinking PR
There is no doubt that the future of the PR industry is bound to see an increase in the way technologies impact brand efficiency & reach. For organizations this can range from devising new use-cases for voice-based searches to designing completely new ways of communicating their brand’s stories. This is why leveraging today’s technology is n’t enough.

There is a critical paradigm shift that is primed to take place in the PR/Brand Marketing space, and it will be led by technology innovations. The PR industry as a whole has to look to the future, to the emerging arenas of media to truly understand how they will adapt going forward. For those who do, the future is filled with possibilities, but for those who don’t, they will share the same fate as Block buster Video did in the face of Netflix. Which one do you want to be?