PR is dying.

So really the two topics that we're discussing so far are (1) the definition of PR and (2) how social media is changing it.

First up, based on the information I've absorbed below PR is: kind of like advertising, largely focused on events, unpaid space, comms management, “spin", mass communication and relationship management...wow! Truly, this industry is an enigma wrapped in [as Bianca said] an identity crisis. Can you imagine for a moment what kind of turmoil the world would be in if other industries/professions were so convoluted? no economy would have ever gotten off the ground.

Traditional PR is fighting for it's life, the market has changed it's just not enough anymore. But why has it survived this long? Audiences began changing well before the introduction of social media into the arena. PR has survived so far because it has been changing parallel to the market and the audience for decades. In recent years though the changes in the audience have been occurring at an exponential rate largely because of the tools of mass communication that social media makes readily available to the individual.

I therefore do not think that it's a case of "Putting the public back in PR" - that implies that at one point the public and PR were entirely separate, which is simply not true. This topic could be better framed as "Can PR keep up with the public?."

The fastest medium used to be Radio, but now anybody can communicate to a mass audience faster than a Radio Station by using twitter, facebook or one of the many other easily accesible online social platforms. In order to survive PR MUST keep adapting to changes, it must follow the market, and follow the audeince or it will become extinct.

Part of the reason that there is no single definition of PR is that many common PR skills can be used in non PR contexts, which broadens the number of tasks that can be done by a PR professional and ultimately convolutes/dilutes the profession further, and you can only dilute something so far before the flavour becomes washed out entirely. When you hire a PR professional you’re hiring someone that will confidently say, “I haven’t done that before, but I’m willing to give it a go” to almost any new task given to them. Core PR activities like media relations, event conception and staging and stakeholder relationship management are now only a small part of what PR professionals do. The role of a PR professional has now expanded to be part practitioner and mostly consultant.

The point of difference that must be noted between a practitioner and a consultant is that practitioners do the ground work (writes strategy, press releases etc) where as a PR consultant [a much broader role] can use core PR skills to analyse a client's existing communiqué (advertising, marketing collateal, internal comms etc.) and make recommendations based on experience and applied knowledge.

Based on the above thoughts, perhaps PR could be better defined as simply the outsourcing of applied confidence and communicational competencies?

Original thoughts & ideas by Dave Goodfellow.