This year in PR (2023)

With the exception of a few holiday weeks like this one, on each Friday in 2023 we published a roundup of noteworthy content (#ThisWeekinPR). Each piece of content was chosen by our editor as interesting or as useful (following the golden rule of social media content: ‘be interesting. And if you can’t be interesting, be useful.’)

So each piece chosen was a qualitative vote in favour of that content.

Now, after 49 weekly entries and 1597 pieces of content, we can quantify all of these individual votes and name the year’s most prolific content creators.

We chose a ‘pic of the week’ to illustrate that week’s content from 30 different people. Here’s the ranking of those whose photos were chosen more than once:

Pic of the week appearances

• Tony Langham: 6
• Mandy Pearse: 5
• Ann Pilkington: 5
• Alex Woolfall: 3
• Mike Collins: 2
• Kevin Ruck: 2
• Stuart Thomson: 2

Our photo to illustrate this year-end is a stunning picture that tells its own story, but I’d like to add a further biographical explanation. Laura Skaife-Knight used to appear regularly in previous years when she was a director of comms for an NHS Trust. She’s no longer in that role, and so has not featured this year. Since April 2023 she’s been chief executive of NHS Orkney. While in theory comms leaders should be well placed to take on the role of organisation leaders, in practice there are few examples from the public or private sectors that I can think of (it’s perhaps more common in the third sector).

So to the numbers. I try to limit people to one appearance per week, but there are some who consistently produce quality content week on week. Here are those who appeared 10 or more times in the year.

Total content appearances in 2023

• Stephen Waddington: 40
• Ben Smith (PR Moment): 35
• Amanda Coleman: 33
• CIPR (inc its groups): 30
• Dan Slee: 30
• Stuart Thomson: 29
• Emma Drake: 27
• Jenni Field: 25
• Neville Hobson: 23
• Maja Pawinska Sims: 21
• PRCA: 20
• Stuart Bruce: 18
• Advita Patel: 16
• Scott Guthrie: 15
• MHP Group (inc MHP Public Affairs: 14
• Mark Borkowski: 13
• David Olajide: 12
• Paul Sutton: 12
• Andrew Bruce Smith: 11
• Dan Holden: 10
• Rachel Miller: 10
• Frankie Oliver (PR Week): 10

There’s a pattern to these names and numbers (some fit in more than one category). There are the veteran bloggers (Stephen Waddington, Amanda Coleman, Stuart Bruce among them); there are the prolific podcasters (Ben Smith, Emma Drake, Paul Sutton and Frankie Oliver among them); there are the LinkedIn commentators (Andrew Bruce Smith, Mark Borkowski) and there are publishers and journalists (Ben Smith, Maja Pawinska Sims).

That suggests one of the social media and content trends of the year. While podcasting is not new (Neville Hobson started almost two decades ago), it seems to have reached a new peak in 2023. LinkedIn has also grown in importance as X (formerly Twitter) has declined.

Indeed, there’s a sense that we’re witnessing the endgame for social media, to be replaced with private messaging services such as WhatsApp and that other repurposed channel, the newsletter.

This is not the place for a review of the themes of the year (AI is sure to feature in 2024). But looking back at the entries reminds me of the shock when I heard that Francis Ingham had died in March.