✅ Five situations where management calls for public relations expertise
Your week ahead in management, media and public relations
How do you get the opportunity to operate at the highest levels within corporate communications or public relations practice?
In a handful of situations, the function is elevated into management within an organisation. Management recognises that it needs to access the necessary skills and expertise to support decision-making and operational execution.
The COVID-19 pandemic was an example. Senior practitioners joined emergency response, resilience, and management teams to help manage the public health emergency, changes to supply chains, stakeholder relationships, and changing working patterns. The situation is slowly reverting.
In a 2009 study, Prof Dr Shannon A. Bowen identified five situations within organisations.
✅ Organisational crisis - A crisis often opens the door for practitioners to advise management, though this tends to be short-lived, as in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic.
✅ Ethical dilemma - When the organisation faces an ethical dilemma, management may turn to public relations to resolve it responsibly. Ethics training is critical for practitioners to fulfil this role. The impact of artificial intelligence in organisations and geopolitical issues are a live example of this issue right now.
✅ Credibility gained over time - consistently providing sound advice and correct analysis can slowly build the credibility needed for inclusion, but it takes many years.
✅ Issues high on the media agenda - when the organisation deals with an issue attracting significant media interest, the public relations function is often called on to manage the issue. Societal problems make this an emerging opportunity for practice.
✅ Leadership - in exceptional circumstances, practitioners take on a leadership role that grants them authority and autonomy as part of management. This requires governance expertise, decisive judgment and counsel.
I would recommend that practitioners who want to advance and elevate their contribution to management recognise the opportunity presented by these situations to assert their expertise.
There is a note of caution that explains why public relations practice experienced a pandemic bounce. The management role of public relations is often temporary and reverts as soon as the situation passes. Exploring how it can be sustained is another post for another day.
Have a great week ahead.
Research
👪 PARENT PATHWAYS: A research project at Birmingham Business School explores how social networks and social capital at work may contribute to diverging career trajectories for mothers and fathers after parenthood in the UK public relations sector. A PhD researcher, Anna Atkins, is seeking parents to participate in online interviews about their careers, parenthood and social networks. Source: Anna Atkins.
💼 JOBS IN PR: A new Wadds Inc. data project aims to improve the quality of data about the UK market for corporate communications and public relations by compiling a monthly Jobs in PR newsletter. The project will create a dataset to help understand the industry's employment market and answer questions about its relationship with the economy. Source Wadds Inc.
Industry
👥 INCLUSIVE HIRING: Inclusive recruitment is crucial for breaking the cycle of systemic exclusion in the public relations industry. While the importance of diversity is generally acknowledged, adopting genuinely inclusive practices remains elusive due to cultural issues and the associated time, effort and costs involved. Source: Elephant in the Room.
Social media and platforms
ℹ️ DATA CONTROLS: Solid, developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, aims to give individuals control over their data by storing it in private Pods. It is being piloted in various sectors in Belgium, such as recruitment, healthcare and media, to give users the power to decide which applications can access their data. Source: BBC.
📉 SOCIAL SLUMP: Brands see lower engagement rates on most platforms in 2024 with TikTok engagement dropping by about half. They adapt by varying their posting frequencies and leveraging effective post types such as Instagram Reels and hashtags to improve engagement rates. Source: Rival IQ.
📣 LINKEDIN TRENDS: LinkedIn is investing in journalism and news content working with more than 400 publishers globally to help optimise their posts and grow their audiences on the platform. It allows publishers to monetise content through advertising partnerships, newsletters, podcasts, and video. Source: Axios.
🔍 SEARCH AI ASCENDANT: A study which analysed 100,000 keywords across 20 niches found that Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE) significantly impacts search results with 64% of the analysed keywords either having an SGE answer or a Generate button. Google Maps, Quora and Wikipedia are the most linked domains in results. Source: SE Ranking.
Media
📺 DIGITAL SHIFT: Talk TV will cease broadcasting as a traditional television channel in the summer and move solely online. The decision comes because the network struggles to attract viewers on its linear platform, whereas many video clips perform well on YouTube. Source: BBC.
👎 FAILING MEDIA METRIC: Social media engagement is not a reliable indication of news readership, with less than 1% of article traffic coming from social media. The correlation between social engagement and readership is slightly higher for politics, sports, and crises, but is still limited, suggesting that social media engagement is not a predictor of interest: Source: Memo.
📉 PROFITS PLUMMET: Reach, the UK's largest regional publisher, reported a 5.4% decline in revenues and a 9% drop in profits for 2023. CEO Jim Mullen defended the cost-cutting measures, which included losing around 300 editorial roles while highlighting the company's editorial achievements and its increased use of AI in its operations. Source: Hold The Front Page.
🫥 TRANSPARENCY TUSSLE: National media home affairs editors accused the Home Office of using the release of the Sarah Everard report to "bury bad news" about immigration and asylum. The journalists claim that the Home Office released a series of critical documents and reports late on 29 February. They have requested a meeting to discuss potential improvements to the situation. Source: Press Gazette.
I'm giving the keynote about aligning internal comms and management at the CIPR Inside Summit on 19 March. My thanks to CIPR Inside co-chairs Katie Marlow and Rebecca Williams for their kind invitation and for building what promises to be a brilliant event. Please come and join us.
Thank you to the following members of the House of Marketing & PR community of practice for sharing and debating stories covered in the newsletter over the past week: Anna Atkins, Alan Morrison, Rohan Shan, Andrew Bruce Smith, Sudha Singh and Sarah Waddington CBE.