I love spending time with smart people. I learn a lot, and the conversation somehow makes you smarter, kind of like listening to Mozart. That's how I feel when I talk to Melvin Yuan, who recently joined us as lead for our Digital Strategies Group in Asia. WE has a long track record of infusing digital strategies into our client work, and globally we've centralized those capabilities into the DSG.
Talking to Melvin recently made me realize three things in succession about the state of our industry as it relates to digital:
- The term "PR" is increasingly inadequate to describe what our industry does anymore. Up until the late 90's, PR was predominantly a one-way, one-to-many conversation, but now that the "P" in "PR" has become the medium, the game has changed, and we need a new name to define what we do. The PR industry, which rose to prominence from 1900 onwards, needs a new identity. This is well understood and not new.
- Digital Strategies, or any other number of practice labels such as "interactive", "social media", etc. is simply a refinement of our craft, and should not be overblown or ignored. In five years' time the labels will drop away and everything we do will be digital in one way or another. The infusion is already happening but the hype can be distracting. It's essential to bring it down to results, to define the end goal. It's our job to help ourselves, and certainly our clients, navigate this realm as it continues to evolve.
- The lines are blurring between marketing and PR and advertising and online and interactive. Certainly over 70% of the work we do for our clients in Asia today is no longer pure communications. What this means for independent firms remains to be seen. Do conglomerates that own subsidiaries in the different disciplines have a distinct advantage? Or will the tax of integrating these companies actually slow them down, even prevent them from reacting nimbly to how the industry is evolving? That remains to be seen. I work for an independent firm but I don't think my mind is made up yet.
But like I said, talking to folks like Melvin makes for pretty interesting discussions. Do visit his blog if you can.