The PR Approach For The Digital Future

In today’s high-speed ‘always-on’ world, where everyone is scrolling through their phones and sifting through all sort of information via web or social media, it just takes a single careless moment to cause loss of industry reputation along with that of organization’s time and money.
With social media becoming a powerful medium in consumer’s hands, it’s imperative for organizations to prepare for responsible communication. In a business environment, it becomes the responsibility of the organization towards fulfilling the expectation set for its customers, stakeholders, and employees in order to keep the business environment health and positive.
The Maggi debacle of 2015, the biggest in their over-100-year old history, was averted within months because of responsible communication from the brand’s end. But most such big crises actually create a negative impact because of lack of an effective responsible communication program at the organization level.
Let’s see what could constitute an effective responsible communication program for any organisation.
Identifying the communication problem
The PR and communications professionals need to upgrade their skills for today’s digital times, in order to identify the onset of any social media PR crisis. Not just that, they also need to upskill themselves on content marketing strategies, spotting consumer trends, creative and informative video production, and social media management. They will then be able to develop social and digital crisis communication strategists to help in times of crisis or scandals.
Analysing the problem
Data,
already believed to be more valuable than oil today, is the tool for
responsible communication for PR professionals too to understand and monitor
the audience perception at all times, market trends, understanding the
successful campaigns for effectively engaging the audience and also the
unimpactful ones. The need is therefore to creatively collate and interpret
data instead of focusing on just raw statistics.
Maintaining trust with accurate
information
Organisations
need to focus more on winning and maintaining the trust of its customers with
responsible communication. With fake news and an abundance of useless
information floating all around, there is an increased need to establish trust
among the consumers. In today’s testing times, there is a need filter
information for consumers and share only accurate and relevant information
substantiated with scientific facts or statistics or expert opinions obtained
through data analysis and interpretation as explained before. The
communications professionals are thus responsible to help media (even social
media) in disseminating truthful and meaningful stories to maintain
organizations’ ethical stance.
Communicating for long-term vision
Most public communication messaging today happens myopically i.e. only addressing the current issues at hand. It should ideally not be so, because organisations’ long-term vision has a journey that needs to be addressed more importantly. Handling only short-term crises often dilutes this vision and creates a negative impact on the overall brand communication strategy, thus also impacting the revenues in long-term. A responsible communication program should always be in sync with the brand’s vision, and not just the current campaign vision.
The PR and communications industry needs to be more organized today than ever before, because in today’s digital environment, it’s inevitable for something to go wrong. A responsible communication program thus sets up a proactive plan and approach not just to crisis management but also maintaining a positive business environment at all times, by leveraging advanced technologies and increased connectivity. It will be interesting to note how the industry can adapt to these changes and avert situations that may have the potential to create negative business impact.
Source: Campaign India