PR Futurist | Stuart Bruce | Purposeful Relations - 🆘 PR Futurist #52 | EU spaffs €387k on the metaverse

Welcome

🆘 We need YOUR help with the world's first CommTech research

We've partnered with PRovoke, ICCO, WCFA and four leading communication technology companies to launch the world's first global study into how public relations and communications professionals use technology. We need your help to fill it in and share it with colleagues.

As an incentive everyone completing the survey is entered into a prize draw to win a pass to next year's PRovoke Global Summit. To give you an idea of the calibre of speakers one of this year's keynote speakers was former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

This is the last edition of PR Futurist before Christmas. It's a bumper one with stories on everything from AI media training and a big new report on TikTok journalism to why blogging is still big and the EU splurging €387,000 on a metaverse party that nobody came to.

Last, but not least we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, wherever in the world you might be and however you might celebrate.

News

🙏 World's first global survey into CommTech and PRTech

Purposeful Relations is conducting the world's first global survey into the use of technology by public relations and communications professionals, both in-house and in agencies.

We've partnered with PRovoke Media, ICCO (International Communications Consultants Organisation) and the WCFA (World Communication Forum Association). The research is sponsored by NewsWhip, PressPage, PRophet and Stickybeak.

Everyone who completes the survey will be entered into a prize draw to win a pass to the PRovoke Global Summit 2023.

Please help us by completing the survey and asking colleagues to do so. Thank you.

Karen Marshall

How to use ChatGPT for PR and communications

Have you had a play with ChatGPT yet? If you haven't then give it a go and see just how good it is at answering your questions and writing copy.

In this article Stuart looks at how PR and communications professionals might be able to find practical uses for it.

Tim Bailey

Corporate affairs

As easy as ESG?

It seems a day can't go by without a reference to ESG. But how much of it is hype and how much of it is real? I'm constantly frustrated by public relations and communications people jumping on the ESG band wagon. Even worse are those that disparage CSR (corporate social responsibility) and dismiss it as a greenwashing or meaningless publicity stunts.

The truth is ESG isn't better or worse than CSR, they aren't even the same thing. Both are used and abused by so called PR professionals who should know better.

In this long read article PRovoke's Arun Sudhaman takes a sensible, well researched look at what it all means.

Stuart Bruce

Get in touch

🎄📫Before you go - get it touch and Merry Christmas

Stuart and Tim would love to talk to you about how we can help you! If you've been intrigued by our musings then we're available this week and next to book a free chat to talk to us about how we can help you get ahead with your public relations and communications in the new year.

Merry Christmas from us all at Purposeful Relations 🎄🎅🎁

Photo by Les Anderson on Unsplash

Karen Marshall| Purposeful Relations

Data, measurement, analytics

Purchase intent as a measure of PR success

In a perfect world a PR and communication measurement framework would enable us attribute PR activity to actual business impact and the holy grail for the attribution groupies is linking it directly to sales.

Get real. It's never going to happen because it's a dumb idea. There will always be multiple factors at play so attributing what role every single factor played is never going to be possible. Even big data won't solve it as no system will know for certain what happens inside someone's head when they make that decision.

Even setting sales targets as a PR objective makes questionable sense as the communications can easily make someone aware of something and to want it, but it doesn't mean they will buy it.

That's why one of the metrics that interests me is desire to purchase. Good comms can make someone desperate to own or do something, even if they can't buy it or do it.

This is an interesting Institute for Public Relations article on purchase intent as a measure of PR success.

Stuart Bruce

Photo by Ken Lawson on Unsplash

AI, digital and social

CNN's Max Foster feels like a TikTok ambassador for news

I've long been a fan of Max Foster on TikTok. He's an adept user of the platform by delivering serious news in short snippets using many of the styles that TikTok users are familiar with. There are other good media and journalist TikTok accounts, but many of them are more personal type accounts, behind the scenes style or just fairly straightforward news, not particularly adapted for TikTok.

If you are a corporate communications professional exploring how TikTok can be used for serious messaging and engagement then Max Foster's account is a great place to start looking for inspiration and ideas.

Stuart Bruce

EU aid dept spends €387k on metaverse party, but nobody turns up

This story was published in early November, but it wasn't until late November that this bizarre event got wider attention when both Politico and the Guido Fawkes political news sites ran it.

I suspect the reason hardly anyone attending is because nobody knew it was happening. I actively follow this space (both the metaverse and EU comms) and missed it. I was even proactively researching government use of the metaverse as part of my preparation for delivering the Future of Communications masterclass in Dubai.

It's a good example of why the detail matters. It appears a digital agency was hired to do the build, but nobody thought about the communications and people.

Stuart Bruce

Research and reports

How publishers are learning to create and distribute news on TikTok

For a while now I've been advocating the use of TikTok for corporate communications and public affairs. Too often corp comms professionals look at it disdainfully dismissing it as just young people, crazy dances and music memes. While all three are true, it's no longer what TikTok is about.

TikTok is now packed full of useful, learning and serious content. Just under half (49%) of major news publishers in the UK are now creating and distributing news on TikTok. It's a similar story in many markets around the world.

This Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report is an impressive study on how publishers are learning to create and distribute news on TikTok. It's a great source of ideas and inspiration for how your media relations needs to account for this and for what you could be doing on TikTok.

I also made a quick TikTok video pulling out some of the key points from the report. Check it out and please subscribe to me on TikTok as in the New Year I'm planning to practice what I preach and start using it a lot more.

Stuart Bruce

Blogging is still big and we've got the numbers to prove it

Too often blogs are dismissed an 'old school', but the reality is that long-form content works. It doesn't matter if you call it a blog, an article or thought leadership.

This report is based on US data, but what you can learn from the findings is just as valid and applicable in other markets around the world.

Tim Bailey

B2B brands shouldn’t fear rejection, but being unknown

There are probably more similarities between B2B and B2C marketing than there are differences. The fundamentals are the same. Too many B2B brands are too conservative because of their fear of the consequences of getting it wrong. Usually, this fear is misplaced.

For brands across both consumer and corporate audience it is about driving familiarity of who you are, what you stand for, and what you have to offer.

Marketers can’t control brand rejection, but they can elevate awareness, so B2B brands should take charge of the levers they can pull to make their brand stand out.

Stuart Bruce

Professional practice

India to host Global Alliance's World Public Relations Forum 2023

One of next year's biggest PR events will be in India on 21-23 September in Chennai. The World Public Relations Forum 2023 (WPRF), the flagship global conference hosted by the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communications Management (Global Alliance), will take place alongside PRAXIS, India's largest public relations summit.

It looks set to be an amazing event and all credit to my good friend and Purposeful Relations advisory board member Amith Prabhu for pulling this off.

Stuart Bruce

Communities

Online community trends for 2023 from community experts

McKinsey declared online communities to be the 'big idea' for communications in the 2020s so what do online communities look like in the immediate future? Michelle Goodall, chief marketing officer, of community platform Guild has written a bumper guide to the online community trends of 2023.

She asked many of the world's leading online community experts for their predictions and compiled them into this bumper long read article.

And yes, as you might have guessed Stuart Bruce was one of those experts she spoke to alongside Evan Hamilton (HubSpot), Christie Fidura (Salesforce), Edu Giansante (Wix), Tamara Littleton (The Social Element), Jack Richards (Talkwalker), Darryl Sparey (Hard Numbers), Blaise Grimes-Viort (Is The Answer), and more.

Tim Bailey

Discover new Communities in Microsoft Teams

It's another week so another big technology company adding community management features to its platform. This time it's Microsoft which is going big on adding community features to Teams.

Interestingly, it's not the business version of Teams that you're probably already familiar with, but the personal version. Microsoft sees it as a way to make online communities easy to use and effective for groups like recreational sports clubs, parent teacher associations and even small businesses.

The sheer amount of money being invested in community management features clearly shows that big technology companies agree with McKinsey's prediction that online communities are the 'big idea' for the next decade.

Stuart Bruce

As online communities like Discord grow, can brands use them to ‘enter culture’?

Marketing magazine The Drum has noticed the growth of online communities and offers this take on the opportunities and dangers for brands.

You'd expect me to say this, but I'm not convinced that marketing people are the best people to let loose in online communities. Ultimately successful communities are about relationships - between members and with the community owner or facilitator. The clue's in the name that this is better done by public relations professionals who aren't driven by the crude sales metrics of marketing, but instead are focused on improving reputations and relationships for business impact.

Stuart Bruce

CommTech newswatch

PRophet brings AI speech coaching and media training to the PR industry

PRophet, the AI-driven PR pitch platform that predicts media interest and sentiment, has partnered with Yoodli to helps users improve media interviewing, public speaking, and communication skills using artificial intelligence.

With PRophet’s customized Yoodli platform, users will be able to receive judgment-free feedback on their performances during practice media interviews. The technology will identify trends in filler word usage, eye contact, body language, and more. Yoodli also allows users to practice for upcoming speaking engagements and provides real-time feedback during live event sessions.

It doesn't replace professional media trainers but provides a powerful additional tool. For example, Yoodli creates immediate transcripts and allows media trainers to show their clients an instant replay of speeches with actionable insights for future improvement.

Stuart Bruce

Talkwalker implements large language models - an industry first for consumer intelligence

Talkwalker is another CommTech company that we're following closely. Its latest innovation is to use AI and large language models to cut through the noise and identify community intelligence that matters.

Jack Richards, Marketing Lead, Northern Europe at Talkwalker claims it will: "enable users to get to the gist of thousands of customer support emails, reviews and CSAT surveys, as well as segmenting and categorising consumer voices on social media and online channels in a few simple clicks."

We'll be talking to Jack and taking a closer look at this in the near future as developments like this are making a huge impact on corporate communications.

Tim Bailey