Social media is not the future of public relations - storytelling is.

Quite a few articles and blogs have recently veered very close to suggesting that the decline of newspapers means the so-called "traditional media" are no longer relevant to the business of public relations.

In fact the most evangelical pundits have no hesitation in declaring bluntly and without reservation that “social media is the future of public relations.”

They argue that because everybody has such easy access to technology we are all potentially online publishers, so every one of us has the power to have an impact on the reputation of a brand. In this view the traditional media, a category in which they include all  publications printed on dead trees such as news and popular magazines, along with radio and TV, have been relegated to a minor link in the chain of communication with the public.

They go on to say that public trust in the reliability of what they read in the traditional media is now so low a large proportion now prefer to seek their daily information and entertainment on social media.

They argue that “communicating through traditional media allows for very limited engagement with the party receiving the message,” so PR professionals have had to step in front of the curtain to engage directly with the people their clients are trying to reach through social media.

Now, I think social media are a vital aspect of an overall PR programme.

But the suggestion that sending out short burst, high impact, largely visual content on social media is the only thing that really matters in PR is misguided. That’s not public relations - it’s advertising. Historically advertising creates a thin, wide veneer of awareness while PR’s power comes from its ability to place longer-form material “unpaid” into publications delivering much more depth and credibility.

In my view the core of public relations is creating and placing persuasive messages - storytelling - on behalf of our clients. The choice of which channel we use to communicate those messages comes after we have fashioned the master narrative. So the future of public relations will be dominated by people who can create and tell the right kind of stories really well. That’s definitely not “everybody.”

The “decline” of the traditional media is more complex than it looks.

People who say social media is the future often quote the statistics showing that between November 2012 and November 2013, CNN's ratings among 25-54 year olds dropped by 59 percent and MSNBC’s by 52 percent. But this fails to notice that their rival Fox News’s numbers were going in the other direction at the time.

It is true that since January 2001, the total circulation of the UK’s ten national newspapers (the number of copies printed on dead trees) dropped by 43% from 12.06 million to 6.89 million copies a day according to Audit Bureau of Circulation.

But when you add in the new readers that newspapers are attracting on the web, tablets and phones the figures are going in the other direction. On this measure The Guardian comes out top with 7.95 million and the Daily Mail on 6.83 million, for example.

Yes, conventional papers are struggling to get readers to pay for online news. But they are not losing influence. In fact many traditional newspapers are growing, not declining. They are merging with social media and becoming global players. They are increasing their hold on readers’ attention because the audience still regards them as prime sources of the best content.

Some argue that new online news outlets will eclipse the original players. The American internet news company Buzzfeed has certainly doubled its UK audience in the past year to 20 million. But total that is easily outshone by the 47 million unique visitors to the website of the most “traditional” of all broadcasters, BBC Online…and the fact that the BBC now enjoys a global audience of 265m people a week – the highest in its history.

So, far from being squeezed out by new social and web based formats, the traditional media remain overwhelmingly the generators of the content that keeps the worldwide media machine turning over.

What about the claim that social media is now the key provider of information?

Well, a Pew Research Centre Study looked at where the news comes from in today’s media. It found that print publications are first with new information 50% of the time, followed by local TV, specialist media, radio and then, right at the bottom of the table, new media sends out just 9% of the new stuff.

So in fact social media would be the Marie Celeste (an empty ship) if it someone somewhere was not writing riveting articles, taking decent pictures and shooting great video for it to copy and repeat.

Research also challenges the idea that a lack of trust is undermining the traditional media providers. In reality the Public Broadcasting Service UK Trust report showed that 64% of adults regard TV as the most trusted news outlet, 58% picked radio, 38% newspapers, 25% magazines while Facebook and Twitter were trusted by 15% and only 9% of people questioned relied on blogs.

So while blogs, Facebook and Twitter fulfill other roles such as community, opinion, immediacy and gossip, when it comes to trusted sources of information and insight, TV and radio still come out on top.

In practice, public relations people know this. Getting a few retweets for a message is gratifying, but it doesn’t mean many people have definitely seen that message.

But a favourable article in a respected media outlet with a strong brand acts as a powerful third-party endorsement. The Chartered Institute of Public Relations found that 78% of those working inside PR agencies still deal with the mainstream media, despite the rise of Twitter and Facebook.

So my prediction is that “traditional” media such as good newspaper, magazine and broadcasting brands with reputations built over decades will adapt and survive - because they have a tradition of producing excellent articles.

The future belongs to the skilled producers of good content - the storytellers.

paul@honisterpr.com

www.honisterpr.com