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5 PR and social media trends for 2011

| Posted on: 11.15.2010 | Category: PR, Social Media

It’s that time of the year that everyone starts to make new year resolutions and plan for the year ahead. So before the rush comes in (and because I hate Xmas and much rather look forward to new year) I’ve put down my views on what trends will have the PR and social media industry hot under the collar in 2011.

1) Measurement

AVEs are slowly but surely becoming resigned to the big coverage book in the sky. Due to the fact that social media is pretty much a given on any PR campaign now and the sheer number of measurement tools around, we’ll start to see PRs really start to get their heads round metrics, what they actually mean for their clients and what social media success actually looks like. The growing appetite for numbers will mean more newsdesks and newsrooms that will help measure how well releases perform.

2) Location, location, location

Foursquare was really starting taking off when Facebook Places dropped on us. While there haven’t been many campaigns around that have tapped into location-based tools, the fact that smart phones are a dime a dozen means it’s only a matter of time before there’s a ‘check-in’ element to PR campaigns. We’re already seeing initiatives around geo-fencing starting to take hold and I’m sure we’ll see more of these.

3) Closer collaboration with other marketing disciplines

The debate over who ‘owns’ the social media space as raged for a while now. In my experience however, the best brand social media campaigns are when every marketing discipline (PR, marketing, advertising, customer service) all work together. As social media programs become more mature, we’ll start to see a lot more collaboration within these professions.

4) Blurring the lines behind paid and earned media

This is a controversial one. The essence of PR as always been of earned media ie communicating a client’s message well enough to convince an independent trusted voice. Social media has changed that slightly. It will become more ‘the norm’ to offer some sort of compensation (financial or otherwise) to brand advocates. This is one trend that traditional PRs and clients will particularly struggle with.

5) Social search and the social graph

Just as PRs started to get to grips with SEO, Facebook and Bing introduced the concept of social search and the social graph.(This is a great app that highlights social graphs by the way) In my opinion, this is really encapsulates the essence of what PRs are good at – building relationships. In 2011, I believe the smart PRs will use start to help their clients get on the road to achieving social media ROI using social search.

Anything I’ve missed?

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  • Gijs Moonen

    Great post.
    You might have missed the role of (online) influencers in the near future. In my opinion, influencer marketing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influencer_marketing ) will become more important for PR in the near future. We already see the massive effect of blogposts about products or brands, this will even get bigger as bloggers, 'fans' and communities will keep growing.

  • http://thefuturebuzz.com AdamSinger

    Great thinking here Eb. I’d also add a further embrace of owned media and a greater understanding of how to take advantage of it (perhaps this fits into point 4). I think there needs to be a strategy fleshed out between how paid, earned and owned work together. Ideally a company can embrace paid and earned in a way which grows their own channels. Consider Google – their company blog has more subscribers than most daily newspapers. When they write something, the rest of the industry reacts and they are able to go direct to consumer & media (and gain all the media exposure they want, organically).

    Not saying paid and earned don’t have a place — they do. But owned is a really powerful thing, perhaps even moreso for companies who aren’t Google and don’t have the same amount of leverage with media.

    • http://ebtwopointzero.wordpress.com/ Eb Adeyeri

      Couldn’t agree more. Problem is recent times has been convincing some companies to invest time and money in building owned media channels. I think this mindset is changing however I think for many expectations will need to be managed in the first instance ie companies expecting to get millions of subscribers within months of setting up a blog

  • Troyroaster

    All I know is that Fresh roasted fresh ground French roasted coffee would make everything in 2011 better

    check http://www.lcroastery.com for a video of the roasting in action.

  • http://twitter.com/RobmDyson Rob Dyson

    Nice – agree with all of these key themes. Location is something I’m particularly interested, especially in terms of my field in Voluntary Sector PR. I’ve penned an article in The Guardian on this very subject: http://bit.ly/dUWiro

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