The public relations sector is changing daily. Technology is one of the most powerful forces at work in this transformation.
Technology is accelerating change at a breakneck pace, requiring public relations professionals worldwide to scurry to keep up with the latest and greatest developments.
Here’s a look at some of these technological advancements and how they’ve influenced what PR professionals do every day.
1. Artificial Intelligence and Automation
These two concepts are distinct, and one is almost ubiquitous while the other is still evolving. The tools you utilize to free up time to accomplish your actual job are where you can observe the influence of automation for PR professionals. It might be an email generated automatically from a press release or a newsletter subscription form linked to your CRM. There are a plethora of technologies available that allow you to accomplish just that and more, and are created expressly for the issues that PR teams face.
AI is one of the top 10 issues PR practitioners perceive facing the industry, according to the CIPR’s State of the Profession 2020 study. The rise of artificial intelligence and a solid 5G core network cast the biggest shadow over PR of all the technological shifts currently happening. As opposed to automation, the goal of AI is to develop systems that can accurately duplicate a human’s speech, thoughts, and actions. According to Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, people will see an increase of ‘cognification’ over the next thirty years, with AI systems infiltrating every part of society. Machines will understand the public mood in real-time by utilizing millions of gigabytes of data, producing natural and intelligent content, and customizing it to audiences in a highly targeted way, all without the need for human participation in the PR business.
2. Big Data
The rise of big data is another trend that is inextricably linked to the rise of AI. Big data encompasses a broad range of complex data that may be mined for insights by businesses. Consider the following to put the growing volume of data into context: 90 percent of the world’s data was created in the past two years, at a rate of 2.5 quintillion bytes every day.
People today increasingly demand organizations to know them and adapt to their likes, needs, wants, and preferences with every transaction and every engagement. Despite the fact that big data is the solution to this problem, most businesses have yet to find out how to use it to better understand their customers.
As a result, AI systems that can sift through vast volumes of data and deliver highly targeted information to users will become increasingly important in PR. Though only large digital businesses like Facebook can deliver material tailored to their consumers’ likes and dislikes (ads and articles) today, this trend will be widespread in PR in a few years.
3. Email
Despite predictions that it would die out in the mid-2000s, email has continued to be a mainstay in the PR world throughout the last decade. Even though email has witnessed minimal innovation in recent years, people may anticipate several developments that will maintain email at the forefront of public relations.
With email, a business can increase personalization. PR workers will be able to send highly specific emails in a truly personal way with a better ability to arrange unstructured data.
Email has so far been unable to support HTML5 components. An email will still not load as quickly as a web page since it does not contain video or interactive elements. However, you may expect to see a breakdown in the barriers to interaction once you see these “highly clickable” components in email.
Email will also become more automated in the future. In reality, emails containing trigger actions like “welcome, thanks for subscribing” have already started to follow this trend. One should expect more AI-generated emails as big data is leveraged more effectively and machine capabilities in natural language processing improve.
