This month in PR (October 2024)

Here's our editor's pick of content highlights from October starting with reports and publications and moving onto individual shared content.

Two publications

The second edition of the annual Global CommsTech Report from Purposeful Relations in partnership with PRovoke Media focused on artificial intelligence and came with a warning.

In such a fast-moving environment the lack of AI policies and AI training means the public relations and communications sector risks getting left behind as it did with search engine optimisation and social media.

The top actions recommended are:

1. Develop AI policies: ‘Your AI policy should be empowering and enabling to emphasise what colleagues can do, not what they can’t.’ (You may find our Briefing on AI policy and governance useful).
2. Embrace AI skills: ‘Everyone in your team needs to become AI literate, from the most senior leaders to the new starters.’
3. Address AI challenges: ‘AI isn’t just tasks and tools but must be integrated into your communication strategy so your organisation can implement AI ethically and effectively. It’s about a social licence for AI.’

The report mentioned the public relations sector previously getting left behind with social media. Perhaps it’s not too late to catch up. This month the CIPR’s Crisis Communication Network published its best practice guide Crisis Communication and Social Media.

As Co-Chair and PR Academy course leader Chris Tucker writes:

Social media has ushered in a new era of crisis communication. Or has it? Certainly, the speed and reach of social media has had a profound impact. We used to talk about the ‘golden hour’ following a crisis when an organisation could gather its thoughts and choose how to react. Today we are more likely to be aiming for a response within 15 minutes and then keep up a pulse in terms of updates, sometimes several times a day.

However, there is another perspective. Social media does in no way do away with the basic principles of good crisis communication. Putting the victims at the heart of everything we do and everything we say, whilst exhibiting ‘the five Cs’ (Concern, Clarity, Control, Confidence and Competence) in our messaging, whatever the channels we use to get those messages out, remains key. And, of course, good crisis management will always involve good stakeholder management.

So the guide walks through a five-step process (Mitigate - Prepare - Ramp-up - Manage - Recover) exploring the role of social media at each stage.

Profession

• Anne Nicholls: Why do people find it so hard to understand what we do in PR? (4 October) ‘Many people reared on the culture of marketing find it hard to revert to non-sales language, devoid of superlatives, when writing press releases.? As we know, PR is a much more nuanced and complex business. Much activity happens behind the scenes, such as advising the CEO on how to handle bad news or forging relationships with communities – which, again, makes it hard to explain what we do.’
• Scott Anthony: All British cinema is propaganda (15 October) ‘Film came of age with the modern state. From the outset, the ability to blend fact, fantasy and fiction into novel and attention-grabbing forms made it the perfect medium for propaganda. It should be no surprise that the story of propaganda – like the story of the British state – has always been embedded in the history of British film.’

Sustainability and ESG

• Natasha Plowman: ESG: real change or risk management? (10 October) ‘Too many are spending disproportionally more on reporting ESG than on innovating and adapting. ESG has become a risk management tool looking backwards than something to drive positive impact for the future.’

Politics and public affairs

• Sam Knowles with Sir John Curtice: 5 Essential Election Trends You Can't Ignore in 2024 [podcast] (30 October) ‘The big difficulty with conducting exit polls in the UK - which is pretty much unique to the UK - is that we do not count the results of our elections at the level of polling stations. Any exit poll is going to be done on a sample of polling stations; it’s therefore impossible to know whether any sample of polling stations is or is not representative of the country.’
• Paul Holmes: PRovoke Media Endorses Kamala Harris For President Of The United States (27 October) ‘Public relations is only truly valuable in markets where people are free to make their own decisions (about where to work, which products to buy, which candidates to vote for), and democracy can only function properly with free and open communication that enables people to make informed choices.’

Internal communication

• Katie Macaulay with Monique Zytnik: Beyond words: A blueprint for more impactful, immersive IC [podcast] (9 October) ‘Where we are right now is the start of the fourth industrial revolution, which has the metaverse, blockchain and AI. They’re the characteristics. And the way we communicate is much more experiential. We don’t have a model for that, and this is what I’m offering [in the book], a model that incorporates these new techniques to help us make sense of it and choose wisely when we create our strategies.’

Celebrity

• Mark Borkowski: I work with celebrities. After Liam Payne’s death, can’t we treat them as humans and not gods? (22 October) ‘The trouble is, once you’re in the public eye, reclaiming privacy is a near-impossible task.’

Digital, media and AI

• Catherine Arrow: Blank Canvas or New Masterpiece? OpenAI's Models in the Frame (10 October) ‘For public relations and communication professionals, AI continues to reshape our working world so I’ve gone in at the deep end to surface the ways we can make them work for us.’