As discussed earlier in this book, PR, as an industry, is experiencing a branding crisis. Often PR practitioners must defend themselves and the industry before they can “sell it.” PR has joined (for reasons discussed previously) other industries prone to continuous criticism: the auto industry (especially sales), real estate financing, and the perennial whipping boy, law. Our job is to adapt to the new world of influence, teach others around us, and, in the process, do a little PR for the PR industry. By doing so, we can fix the very things that spiraled PR into a state of crisis in the first place.

If you polled those decision makers responsible for managing communications strategies about how they characterize PR, the following common themes would undoubtedly emerge:

It’s a pretty powerful list, and we’re all guilty of contributing to it at some point in our career. The problem is that enough of us have made so many public mistakes that we have collectively earned strikes not only against ourselves, but also against the entire industry—over an entire century without any form of PR for PR itself. Some of us have even personally been dragged into the public square for ridicule and commemoration of everything that’s wrong with PR. Chris Anderson’s posting of the individuals whom he deemed as PR spammers is only one of many examples that hurts, seems unfair, and is an unfortunate reality. (For more information about such blacklisting, see Chapter 6, “The Language of New PR.”)

PR didn’t feel the need to change until it had to, for survival, and now we’ve reached a point where we have no choice but to transform or become obsolete. It wasn’t until Social Media that we took notice of the blaring voices of those who so adamantly oppose PR (because of what we supposedly stand for and represent). In turn, it wasn’t until these past few years that PR could respond in its own defense with an equally widespread and powerful campaign. And as we defend ourselves and our industry, we will learn more about how to improve our own practices and reputations.

We now have incredible potential to regain credibility. At the same time that we’ve hit an impasse, we’ve also reached an inflection point where we can learn and globally demonstrate our reinvention, and unveil and reinforce our new-and-improved focus on true Public Relations and service. We must commit ourselves to change things for the better, and, in the process, to recruit people to join the revolutionaries. It’s up to us to stand up to our critics. In doing so, we must acknowledge our errors but also demonstrate that our collective efforts to change things for the better are, indeed, improving the dynamics of conversations between our communities and those influencers who guide them.

No longer will we fall prisoner to outdated forms of communications, expectations, and measurement. We will lead the charge for a more democratic process of sharing information and learning from our engagement. By doing so, we will create channels for two-way (and more) dialogue. We will also be able to create an infrastructure and process for assessing the valuable feedback we receive, and also for implementing the changes necessary to create more customer-driven products, services, and communications strategies.

Yes, we have hurdles to jump. Yes, we have much to learn. Yes, we will make mistakes. But you are here, learning along with us, contributing to a new, more knowledgeable, and influential class of communications professional. And this is only the beginning. For the first time, let’s document our challenges to create a self-improvement checklist. By doing so, we can expedite our progression from practitioners into leaders and PR champions.

Web 1.0 + Web 2.0 = New PR. What started with the introduction and proliferation of the Internet in the 1990s continues today with the interactive dynamics powering the latest incarnation of the Web. We’re merely witnessing the beginning of something that will have a much greater impact and continue to transform the very fabric of how we communicate with each other. And in the process, the media industry, marketing communications, and new influencers will find more in common than those groups have found individually during the past decades. Each will now orbit around an axis defined as “we, the people.” The balance of authority and power is migrating back to the center, and we have to earn the attention of customers and their loyalty by integrating into our own practices the languages, cultures, and tools they use to communicate and share with each other.

The future of PR is already underway, and it’s defining who we are and what we choose to represent. Yes, it’s about what we choose to represent (not what we have to or are told to do). We’re empowered to make decisions that serve our best interests in the long term, as well as the interests of those companies that need our help. If you don’t have room to grow within your organization because management chooses not to believe in or conform to the new era of conversations between company executives and those who represent important communities, perhaps your ambition and talents will be appreciated elsewhere.

But the future of communications and PR is inspired and powered by so much more than intentions and conviction. A true transformation is taking place that completely redefines our role. And it fuses the “best of” multiple disciplines that span everything from Web marketing to customer service to market analysis. The shift from passive, top-down, and reactive PR to proactive, hands-on, participatory engagement absolutely requires us to embody everything we represent. We must escalate our involvement, understanding, and passion to symbolize and present our knowledge in a way that’s both credible and helpful. What do we have to gain by doing so? Simple: We, too, can become media. The smarter, more empathetic, and active we are, the more likely we are to become influencers.

New PR and Social Media strategies are not relegated solely to those elite early adopters who dwell on the edge. We’re bringing this knowledge and insight back to the center to empower a new generation of communications professionals. We can’t go back. The future of PR is here today. For the first time, we truly have the opportunity to put the public back into Public Relations. However, it starts from within. Everything begins with our desire and openness to step outside our comfort zones and to adapt to roles that no longer fit the traditional PR mold.

Next-generation PR professionals will exemplify a hybrid of several critical roles. These specific roles will not vanish individually, but will instead integrate themselves into best practices so that Public Relations can excel in today’s social economy. PR will relearn the art of communications, listening, and interchange, and, in the process, become well versed in not only the new rules of PR, but also the following:

Perhaps most importantly, we must also become content creators and publishers to immerse ourselves in the process of discovering and sharing information, similar to those whom we’re trying to engage. We need to get our hands dirty, and there’s just no way to do it without doing it. We gain both professionally and personally as a result. We’re consumers, too, and we will become more sophisticated in how we select and purchase products and services. Our peers will impact a wide spectrum of our decisions (not just purchasing decisions, but also the tools we use and the communities we use, join, and participate in, both online and in the real world).

As mentioned previously, we must become the people we want to reach. To do so, we must remember that our customers, influencers, and stakeholders are becoming fluent in subjects that, in the past, we might have considered our exclusive purview. So PR must now produce a stronger signal with less noise as we embrace one-on-one communications over broadcast spam, groundswells over top-down marketing, real-world benefits understood through psychographics over spin and messages to general audiences, and relatable stories over snake oil sales.

If we’re responsible for learning and integrating a new level of proactive, hands-on, outbound engagement, who’s left to listen and to document metrics?

Next-generation PR should make room for new players on the team, players who will help PR stay on track. Many organizations will hire a community manager or a community-management team along with research managers or online curators and librarians. That role will be mostly responsible for listening, trafficking, and ensuring responses and action based on the conversations taking place across the Social Web. But it’s PR’s role to engage influencers, bloggers, and media using social tools at a much deeper level. Therefore, we require our own community manager of sorts who will more resemble a research librarian (one who not only tracks relevant conversations and identifies the influencers sparking them, but also documents the metrics necessary to benchmark performance).

As you learned earlier in this book, much of this work today requires manual processes, despite our desire for more effective and inclusive automated tools. Few automated solutions exist, and we must justify and prove our ROI—especially for something so new and seemingly elusive.

Some believe that there has to be a better way to listen and benchmark. At the time of this writing, however, we have yet to see something that is absolutely comprehensive. And if we’ve learned anything in PR during the past few years, it’s that we risk complacency and laziness when the tools overautomate processes associated with identifying, tracking, and sending our stories to our contacts. In many cases, they rob us of our perspective. We lose touch with the reality of scale, human interaction, and real-world perception.

A key point is that, for PR 2.0 to fold seamlessly back into traditional PR, we must approach things differently than we have before, and new resources require sufficient financing. That money comes by adjusting existing budgets or allocating new funds. An initial audit will demonstrate the necessity. Even smaller PR agencies (as well as national and international powerhouses) will need to reengineer their financials to maintain existing services while also creating and funding these new listening and measuring roles (enabling the PR team to focus on PR). The economics work, the ROI is documented and demonstrable, and, most important, this setup doesn’t steal resources from the team that’s focused on results.

Ideal candidates are resourceful self-starters fluent in social tools, online search, measurement solutions, and spreadsheet or charting software. Firms should fill these positions with those who do not want to pursue a career in PR or marketing: Those who prefer data over outreach will help ensure that the training and results associated with these roles remain solid and vested for the long term.

As we initiate the process of traversing the road from PR 2.0 back to PR, we leave you with one last important lesson: There’s much more to Social Media than Facebook, Wordpress, Blogger, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, and YouTube.

The conversations that define our markets are expansive and beyond our reach, and are ineffective if we don’t know when and where they’re taking place. Although we’ve touched on this subject throughout this book, we haven’t yet shared with you a definitive, at-a-glance map that represents the volume, scope, and diversity of the locations of conversations grouped by their nature, culture, and focus. The communities important to you span from the popular to the specific, focusing on the interests of people from the left to the right of the bell curve, and including the chasms inherent within it.

Text can certainly help convey the size and range of the social landscape, but nothing quite captures and communicates it like a good visual. In 2007, Deb Schultz introduced the Social Media Ecosystem (http://tinyurl.com/4gq2ka), Robert Scoble and Darren Barefoot debuted the Social Media Starfish (http://tinyurl.com/3aekz8), and Lloyd Davis released the Social Media Snowflake (http://tinyurl.com/3v22qh) to visually demonstrate and document the rapidly evolving landscape for social tools, services, and networks. Check them out.

If you work in marketing, Public Relations, advertising, customer service, product development, or any discipline that’s motivated, shaped, and directed by customers, peers, stakeholders, and influencers, monitoring and participating in online conversations is absolutely critical if you hope to compete in the future. Having a visual map will help you know where to start listening and to benchmark audit, and it will guide you as you journey through online societies and networks.

Brian worked with Jesse Thomas of JESS3 to create a fully comprehensive social map that helps chart online conversations among the people who populate all current, active, and well-populated communities and networks that connect the Social Web. It was released as the Conversation Prism, a free tool for everyone to use and share (http://tinyurl.com/5chmt5). Brian worked with Beth Canter to contribute to a Wikispaces site that presents the information contained on the Conversation Prism in a grid format (http://tinyurl.com/6mf7wk). But Social Media is organic and will evolve as services and conversation channels emerge, fuse, and dissipate. Many will rise, many will disappear; others will merge, and several will thrive independently. Therefore, the Wikispaces site is not static. It will change over time as new channels are introduced and others wane in popularity. Appendix B, “It’s Alive!” includes that grid as it exists at the time of this writing.

As a communications professional, you need to be aware of the full spectrum of conversations, whether you’re observing, listening, or participating. You can then identify and better understand how to listen and, in turn, participate transparently. You can also genuinely understand where relevant conversations about your brand are occurring.

Because conversations are increasingly distributed, everything begins with listening and observing. Remember that many solutions attempt to automate the process of listening, but none are comprehensive. This is where Social Media becomes a bit more manual than you might have expected. As we pointed out earlier in the book, every social network will offer a search box where you can search for keywords to identify important exchanges. Doing so will help you identify exactly where relevant discussions are taking place—as well as their scale, volume, reach, and frequency. You can then chart this dialogue into a targeted social map unique to your brand. That map will visually remind your team where they need to monitor and participate.

Perhaps most important, listening and observing reveal the cultures of the very communities you might want to engage. You can observe how to communicate authentically without disrupting the social fabric of each network.

Brian has also introduced a sample conversation workflow to remind us of the extent and commitment required to engage, learn, adapt, reform, and improve our infrastructure to build relationships, earn loyalty, and grow our communities. He proposed the following conversation workflow steps, realizing that the workflow will change and adapt to individual companies and how they choose to implement the recommended steps:

As we’ve noted throughout these pages, conversations are taking place with or without you. This conversation map and workflow process will help you visualize the potential extent and pervasiveness of the online conversations that can impact and influence those who are sharing information and making decisions related to your business and brand. These tools also remind you to listen, learn, respond, and improve over time. By doing so, we believe you can grow your business and stand out from your competitors.

Remember, participating in Social Media is more meaningful when you have a deeper understanding of the social sciences, and not just the social tools that facilitate daily interaction. You want to create, cultivate, and grow relationships with people, both online and in the real world, and these relationships are defined by mutual value and benefits. In the social economy, relationships are the new currency.

This is the PR industry’s renaissance, so it is our chance to reinvigorate PR, to boost its valuation within marketing communications, and, more important, to instill trust and respect among the influencers who lost faith in our profession long ago. It’s not just about acceptance; it’s about embracing change and creating something new and valuable for your company and for your career.

Together we will put the public back into Public Relations and, in the process, spotlight the undercurrent of existing and multiplying conversations that were previously a mostly disregarded back channel. In doing so, we set a new standard for corporate communications—one that flies a powerfully visible banner that commands admiration, respect, and appreciation while exuding conviction, value, and an entirely new level of socially aware expertise and mastery.