PR Futurist | Stuart Bruce | Purposeful Relations - 🚀 PR Futurist | #60 | Flipping PR Futurist | 2024 Election trends | Are you utilising the tech you invested in?

Welcome

Good morning 🌅. It's flipping good news that you don't have to wait a whole fortnight for your fix of PR Futurist. You can subscribe now on Flipboard for daily updates!

We've also got some AI news (of course). Next year is set to be exciting in politics with both US and UK elections, an expert predicts the megatrends (guess what, one of them is AI).

As an AMEC Summit newbie, our Tim Bailey shares his impressions of when he and Stuart got to go to Miami baby. Not a bad gig at all!

It's a shocker that most teams aren't using the technology they've invested in to anything like its potential. What more should your team be doing?

Karen Marshall

News

New AI in comms practice

We've been making some tweaks to the Purposeful Relations website. One of the changes is to add a specific page on AI in communications and public relations. It's not a new service as we've been using and advising on AI in comms since at least 2015, but it does make it easier for potential clients to understand.

The launch of ChatGPT last November and the associated hype has created an explosion of interest. We're getting enquires every week from prospective clients needing either practical advice on what to do about AI for communications and public relations, or just wanting training, or for me to speak at an in-house or external conference.

Stuart's most recent talk on AI in communications was to the global conference for the communications and marketing team of one of the world's largest defence equipment manufacturers.

The image is 'Explainable AI' by Alexa Steinbrück from the Better Images of AI website and is licenced with a Creative Commons licence CC-BY 4.0

Karen Marshall

Can't wait for your fortnightly fix of PR Futurist?

If you can't wait for your fortnightly fix of PR Futurist then why not subscribe to it on Flipboard where I flip lots more stories that I discover in in my RSS news feeds, social media and specific monitoring feeds for learning?

The main difference is only some of the stories in Flipboard make it into this version of the PR Futurist newsletter, and usually the Flipboard ones don't have the analysis (or snarky comments!).

The Flipboard app is available on Android and iOS, or you can view Flipboard on the web. Once you've installed the Flipboard app you can subscribe to lots of other great sources.

Stuart Bruce

Corporate affairs

Senior digital strategist for Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton shares his views on what to expect in the 2024 elections

Next year will see a general election in the UK and a presidential election in the USA. Often the UK political system borrows ideas from the US, but in this case both campaigns are likely to run at the same time. The US election is in November and the UK election is predicted to be October.

Teddy Goff, digital strategist for Barack Obama in 2012 and Hilary Clinton in 2016, gives his opinion on what megatrends we should expect to see. Spoiler - it's AI, TikTok and community social media.

Stuart Bruce

Data, measurement, analytics

Miami (baby!) AMEC Summit 2023 - Purposeful Relations

As a seasoned attendee Stuart has already shared his impressions of the AMEC Summit in Miami, so as a first-time attendee I thought I'd share some of my impressions and experiences.

Tim Bailey

Crisis communication

AI-generated hoax of Pentagon explosion spreads via verified Twitter accounts

As a portend of what to expect an AI-generated image of a fake explosion near the Pentagon went viral thanks to blue-check Twitter accounts. This is the perfect storm of AI-generated fake news combined with Twitter's new verification system... which doesn't verify who owns an account.

Does your crisis communication plan take account of this?

Stuart Bruce

AI, digital and social

Bluesky at night, is a PR's delight | Stuart Bruce PR Futurist

Stuart has finally got his Bluesky invite and is up and running. What's Bluesky you ask? It's the hot new social media platform from Twitter's co-founder Jack Dorsey. Its invite only status means there is serious FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). When Stuart got his invite there were only about 70,000 users.

He's written about his first impressions of Bluesky, which are favourable, despite it being early days.

If you want an invite for Bluesky, then let us know as we can add you to Stuart's ever-growing list of people wanting one!

Karen Marshall

If Twitter dies, where do we find the smart people?

It still appears that rumours of Twitter's imminent demise under Elon Musk's stewardship are premature. One reason for this is it's still where you can find out what the 'smart people' are thinking and engage with them about current issues. Most of the politicians, academics, journalists, campaigners, think tank leaders and more that I know are still just as active on Twitter as they've ever been.

It's mainly the PR/technology/social media chattering classes in the media and on Twitter that are dissing Twitter. Much of the criticism appears to be a dislike of Musk and his politics as it does the reality of the discourse on Twitter. The influx of the far-right appears to be much more of a US phenomenon than in the UK, or indeed elsewhere in the world.

The PR/tech bros think that because US political Twitter is nasty that it's like that everywhere. In the UK I don't see much of it. In fact, none unless I make the effort to find it! About two thirds of Twitter's users are outside of the US bubble.

Stuart Bruce

Prompts for communicators using the new AI-powered Bing

Microsoft is the big tech company that's leading the charge when it comes to AI, leaving Google and Apple stumbling in its wakes - on technology, practical implementations and ethics.

You'd therefore expect Microsoft's Chief Communication Officer, Frank X Shaw, to have some insight into AI's implications for professional communications and public relations. In this article on the Microsoft blog, he shares suggested prompts and examples of how AI can help with media interview prep, media coverage snapshots, social media inspiration, headline generation and FAQ generation.

Stuart Bruce

'Friendly' social media app Nextdoor’s CEO on sexism in Silicon Valley

Great piece on Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar who although now one of the few female CEOs in Silicon Valley is originally from Northern Ireland. Less than five per cent of the top 150 public tech companies in Silicon Valley have women as CEOs. She talks about what makes geographic community-based social media platform Nextdoor different.

Stuart Bruce

AI from 20,000 feet

In response to the statement this week that AI could lead to an extinction level event for humankind, the popular BBC radio series^ Inside Science hosted a discussion to test the assertion.

Prof Emily M. Bender from the University of Washington along with Dr Stephen Cave, Director at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) provide interesting perspectives. Prof. Bender is the co-author a critique of Large Language Models (LLMs) which coins the term Stochastic parrot to describe how services such as ChatGTP work.

While we as communicators may not need all the linguistic insight of the paper we certainly need to understand the flaws in the tools we are rapidly adopting into our day-to-day practise.

^ Apologies if you cannot access the programme, it's not always clear what countries the BBC allows to access different programmes.

Tim Bailey

Research and reports

Gartner research into use of marketing technology (MarTech)

The real headline for me isn't the one Gartner used but that CMOs are investing in marketing technology (MarTech) that their teams aren't using. Our experience is you'll find the same in public relations and communications. Most teams aren't even using their existing technology at anywhere near now they should be to get the maximum benefit, let alone exploring and investing in new technology.

Stuart Bruce

CommTech tools

Bill Gates says, Pi, an under-the-radar startup could be a big AI winner

I'm an early adopter, but Inflection's Pi app was even under my radar until Bill Gates talked about it. I've only had a quick play with it so far and was impressed. It started by asking me about my day so far so I said "Black coffee and watching Succession." It then began quite a good conversation about how it might end, the motivation and personality of characters, and the actors portraying them.

It was engaging enough that I actually participated before eventually asking it if it could also help me with work. It asked about my priorities. One of which was editing an article. It asked me the subject and if it could do any research to help me.

I used the web interface as there is only an iOS app and not an Android one yet. You can also use WhatsApp to talk to it.

Check out Pi and let me know what you think.

Stuart Bruce

Communities

Build community with new Microsoft Teams features

Microsoft is one of the tech companies that recognises the growth of online communities. It has released new updates to the free version of Microsoft Teams to allow you to create communities from scratch, create and host events, and get notified about all important activities.

Tim Bailey

CommTech newswatch

PRophet Partners with PeakMetrics to Combat Disinformation and Misinformation Using Advanced AI Technology

As the story above about the Pentagon fake news image shows, fake news is becoming an ever increasing problem. Misinformation and disinformation are something that every corporate communications leader needs to be ready for.

Predictive AI news platform PRophet has strengthened its relationship with media monitoring firm PeakMetrics to help fight disinformation and misinformation.

Stuart Bruce

We'd love you to drop us a line

We pride ourselves in being early adopters and being at the forefront of what's happening in digital comms and comms evaluation. We know you might not have the time to, so let us help your team use the tech you've invested in to its full advantage for you, your team and your company - it makes sense, we'd love to meet up!