How the power of technology will shape the PR business in the coming years

Authored by Ganapathy Viswanathan, independent communications consultant.

The technology buzz has been around in the PR space for over last two to three years with everyone talking about AI and ML. While everyone is talking about AI and ML and its profound impact on PR one is not sure ifeveryone in the business is able to leverage the technology tools to the best of their advantage. One of the other reasons that technology is giving the desired boost and encouragement to PR professionals is the rapid penetration of internet and social media, which today is the real time go to platform channel to create that rapid awareness and visibility for the various narratives.

The year 2024 will be revolutionised by these advanced technologies as we will see data collaborating with technology tools to give some great analytics which can be used in culling out insights for your PR campaign. If approached properly with the right tools and talent the AI and data analytics can dwell deeper on your insights and help in spotting your audience behaviour and predict their trends and preferences. With the help of these behavioural study brands will be able to hyper-personalise the content across a spectrum of audience. Here the targeted messaging will also help in reducing your media wastage and cost and you will be able to attain quality reach.

Data and insights will play a major role and are going to be very critical in drawing forceful PR strategies. Innovation and strategic storytelling with strong narratives backed by technology will help in crafting very focussed messaging. Which is where we may see the role of ML and AI coming into play to help in leveraging the data used more intelligently. So, technology will be crucial for agencies to gear up and get their talent in place to meet the client demands. Clients will expect more insights, sharp messaging and data driven audience profiling to reach the right audiences.

Today, with technology you are be able to craft your messaging and automate your press release dissemination, managing social media which helps the PR professionals to avoid some of the mundane operational activities. Instead, they can now focus more on the client’s requirements and be more proactive in providing some strategic inputs for the brand and add value to the campaign management. More importantly technology will play a pivotal role in managing social media where you need to fight crisis and as we all know these days crisis erupts fast and spreads fast. With real time engagement happening more intensely the need of robust technology tools should be provided for the teams to closely monitor the news happenings.

Here are my thoughts on how one can leverage technology:

First and foremost, you have to scale up the skill sets in your organisation. Continuous training and mentoring needs to be imparted to use the available technological tools.
Investment in manpower goes without saying andgetting the right skills who have the aptitude to learn and grow with the organisation is a must.
Get your client into confidence on your technology skills so that he will be able to trust you and collaborate well and get the best out of the agency.
Clients must respect the agency efforts and encourage the agency both in terms of giving the right brief and also remunerating the agency well in bringing and using technology.
We can talk about technology endlessly but what is more important is to have the latest in technology and keep updating the same.
While technology is a great enabler one still needs to bring and think on ideas which will what will drive innovation and differentiation to your communication strategy.
There will be plenty of data that will be floating but it is that knack to leverage this data using technology is what is important. Will therefore need the right talentwho will be able to read and understand data very well.
The influencers world is growing and they are becoming more important ambassador for many brands. They should also be well versed with the latest technology to bring speed in real time engagement.
I would also recommend a strong IT team in the organisation to collaborate well with the PR professionals so that there is minimum glitches and down time on the tech aspect.
Even on the digital media front you need to be well equipped and staffed so that your technology ideas can be seamlessly executed.

The digital disruption has forced many organisations both at the agency and client end to be beefed up with technological solutions. The future as they say will be driven by technology a lot and hence adapting tonewer technology will be top on the agenda for companies to move faster and give the best business and strategic solutions to clients. Today a brand reputation hinges a lot on online media and that is where technology will come to play a lot. And actually, the advent of technology has now put PR into a different pedestal to deliver a lot more that will help clients to safeguard their brand reputation and bring in more intense engagement with their audiences.