By Gini Dietrich
On the fifth day of Christmas, Spin Sucks gave to you… five communications trends, four free webinars, three strategy games, two Crazies secrets, and the PR win of 2014.
How clever are we to get the stuffy old, SEO-laden communications trends aka predictions in here in a fun way? Yay for my content team! They came up with the idea. I just have to execute.
So let’s see if I can do it.
Eleanor Pierce already wrote the social media predictions (and some were quite funny, if you missed it when it ran originally) so I was asked to do something else.
Given my expertise and the fact that this is a PR blog, I give you the five communications trends for 2015.
Communications Trends for 2015
- Conversion of media. Julie Hong, the community manager for Talkwalker, emailed me the other day and asked me which of the five predictions she had listed did I think were viable. One was the conversion of media and that’s what I chose. No big surprise I would choose the integration of the four media types (my beloved PESO model), but 2015 is the year we will see more and more integration and the lines become even more blurred. Which leads us to the second communications trend.
- Paid media affects traditional PR. This may be in the form of paid amplification (think Outbrain or Sprinklr), sponsored content, native advertising, or sponsorships of influential blogs. In 2015, all communicators should be working with their media buying friends and colleagues to add paid media to their owned and earned media efforts.
- Old ideas become new again. We’ve stopped doing things such as deskside briefings, large events, direct mail, commenting on blogs, engaging on the social networks, and surprise packages via overnight delivery. Those tactics will become new again as communicators focus more time on finding the right solutions instead of what’s new right now.
- Communications teams (internal and agencies) will evolve. No longer will those who are integrating the four media types or using data to prove their investment or measuring their efforts directly to sales be the oranges in a sea of apples. Communications teams will begin to figure out the future is all of those things, and their competitors who still focus solely on publicity and events will die a slow, long, painful death.
- PR technology becomes a must, not a nice-to-have. The communications industry will become more accountable to drive their efforts through data. Those who don’t figure out how to become a profit center instead of an expense will die that slow death I mention above. Companies such as PRTech and Google will help you get there, but you have to take the bull by the horns now. I mean, right now. Use your holidays to start your education because it’s imperative this happen for everyone next year.
So there you have it. The five communications trends of 2015.
What would you add?
photo credit: Shutterstock