New technology and the Web have rendered traditional public relations useless. The digitized global economy is transforming entire industries, and also the way in which consumers and the media acknowledge and handle brand messages.

1. PR has changed tremendously in recent years.
New technology and the Web have rendered traditional public
relations useless. The digitized global economy is transforming
entire industries, and also the way in which consumers and the
media acknowledge and handle brand messages.
PR is not about press releases anymore. No brand can sustain its image without media, and
today’s consumers are primarily active on social media. This makes it the first focus of any PR
officer today. Billions of people and brands communicate daily on it and no PR expert can afford to
ignore it as a conduit to consumers, bloggers, and traditional media.
The new generations of consumers increasingly
use social media to research brands, publish and
share its opinions on products, and recommend
or disparage services. Finding the right approach
to social media in terms of tone, tenor, and
language, is a creative challenge to
communicating the right message the right way
The most valuable words in PR world
Despite the complexity, however, five
valuable words are enough to
summarize the most important trends
1. Putting social media at center stage

2. 2. Targeting influencers
Although the word influencer is vastly overused, real influencers do exist in the online world
beyond any shade of doubt. There are already dozens of influencer-marketing platforms, adding
to PR people’s media monitoring challenges.
The Web enables anyone to become an influencer.
Bloggers specialize in specific industries or product niches. Software developers create fora to
scrutinize online services and apps. Consumers create review sites that enjoy millions of visits
every month. This is all influencer marketing that any PR agency should have in mind when
developing a PR strategy or performing crisis PR.
3. Monitoring media
Google News tells us that 2016
saw some 72 million news
stories published online
This makes 200,000 of them a day – and the number is
growing. Can a PR agency rise to the challenge of
monitoring this number? Can a PR professional provide
reliable reputation management service without
sophisticated media monitoring? Nope!
Media monitoring is among the top needs of those who
seek professional PR. Without thorough media
monitoring, PR is simply failing its clients as it becomes
unable to measure their campaign efficiency or hone it
in any meaningful way.

3. Gone are the days when PR firms could plausibly claim the
ability to reach everyone within a country or region.
Consumers are overwhelmed with information from so many
directions that only professional media monitoring can follow
and analyze them adequately.
This frees PR firms to direct their efforts at defined, narrow
target audiences where any brand message would resonate
most loudly and reach the greatest impact. Proper media
monitoring data allows PR agencies to spend time selecting
the channels through which the message would be delivered
to these specific groups. Snapchat users differ from
Facebook users, from LinkedIn users, from Pinterest users,
from Twitter users.
4. Narrowing and defining audiences
5. Telling digital stories
Digital storytelling will rule the world of PR in the years to come, according to research by the
USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations and the Association of National Advertisers. Some 88
percent of public relations professionals surveyed identified digital storytelling as today’s most
important PR industry trend.
As distinct from the press releases of yore, consumers and journalists expect digital stories that
are more akin to articles or other creative content. This increasingly makes flexible PR agencies
look for contributors who can both draft a compelling digital story or publish it on sites or blogs
that are not burdened with tedious corporate-style media releases.
Those are the most important trends in PR at the down of 2020 but the industry will witness even
more reshuffling with the emergence of more advanced online mediums and communication
channels.