PR Futurist | Stuart Bruce | Purposeful Relations - 📰 PR Futurist #33 | Digital transformation for PR and comms | Measurement tech will have biggest imapact on comms

Welcome

🎆 And we're back

The reason you've not heard from me for a while is because I've been working on launching a new business. We are finally live and PRovoke has done a fantastic news story on our launch. It's also an opportunity to relaunch That Was The Week That Was as PR Futurist, which is also the title of my blog (which I've published since 2003 when it was one of the world's first PR blogs). We're going to start by publishing it every two weeks as it allows us to be more selective and reflective in choosing the content to share. The next issue will be in the first week of the New Year.

Stories for PR Futurist will come from both me and Tim Bailey, the co-founder of Purposeful Relations. If you spot something you think should be included, then please let us know. If you find PR Futurist useful, then please forward it to friends or colleagues who you think might be interested, so they can subscribe.

Let me know what you think and get in touch if you've any questions about Purposeful Relations. We're here to help.

News

Purposeful Relations provides digital transformation consultancy for in-house comms and PR agencies | PRovoke

A huge thanks to Maja Pawinska Sims for her excellent news story covering the launch of Purposeful Relations in PRovoke. We're already working on some very exciting digital transformation and communications measurement projects. We have some capacity for new clients from February, so get in touch to see how we can help you with digital transformation for your communications, public relations and corporate affairs.

Corporate affairs

Woolworths links reputation score to executive bonuses | Financial Review

Australian retail giant Woolworths is introducing reputation as a key metric to determine senior executive bonuses. The reputation metric replaces a widely used retail metric of sales per square metre. The company will use an independently calculated reputation metric from RepTrak. As more companies start to use ESG, reputation and other non-financial performance metrics, there is a need for consistency and independence in the calculation and reporting.

Research and reports

Global PR agency heads predict measurement and analytics technology will have greatest impact on the PR and communication industry's future

Global PR agency heads predict meaningful measurement and analytics technology will have the greatest impact on the PR and communications industry’s future, according to the 2021-2022 ICCO World PR Report. The technologies predicted to have the greatest impact on the industry in the future, are measurement and analytics (21%), followed by research, insight and planning (18%). This is more evidence why in-house comms team and PR agencies need services like CommsTransform™ where Purposeful Relations can help them make sense of this space.

CommTech tools

PRophet 2.0, innovative approach to challenge media database companies

PRophet is designed to predict media interest, story sentiment and spread before you pitch. This should help PR professionals to hone the pitch and identify which reporters and outlets are most likely to cover it.

We spent an interesting hour with Andrew Meranus of PRophet who gave us a preview of its 2.0 platform. The major takeaway was the expansion of coverage outside the USA, to include Europe. It is still English language only, but the addition of podcasts and a partnership with PeakMetrics make it a service worth evaluating. Pricing may be a factor, so we look forward to seeing some solid impact case studies in the next few months.

AI, digital and social

CNN's Max Foster does serious news on TikTok | Press Gazette

I've been arguing for a long-time that corporate communications and public affairs professionals should be thinking about TikTok. It's not just teens dancing to trending music, but has some serious people and organisations doing serious stuff adapted for TikTok. One of my personal favourites is CNN London anchor Max Foster who has wracked up an impressive 432,000 followers - more than ten times his Twitter followers - and an average of 20m views per month.

CommTech newswatch

Bill Gates predicts metaverse will host most virtual meetings in a few years | CNBC

Meta's Mark Zuckerberg put metaverses in the limelight when he renamed the Facebook holding company Meta and announced a big move towards creating a metaverse. But Facbook/Meta isn't the only company making a play for the metaverse space as Microsoft has already Mesh to bring the metaverse to Teams. In a year-end blog post, Bill Gates predicted the use of the metaverse to replicate being face-to-face with co-workers, even while working from home.

Busting the AI hype bubble | Sifted

This article backs up what we've found when analysing PRTech tools. The market is awash with products and services using AI hype, but in reality using very little actual artificial intelligence. Here an investor explains how many startups claim they are AI-driven when in reality they aren't. One of the services Purposeful Relations provides is cutting through the hype to identify the PRTech, CommsTech and MarTech tools that can make a meaningful difference to your communications and corporate affairs.

Media montioring and sentiment analysis company Signal AI raises $50M | TechCrunch

Media monitoring company Signal Media rebranded as Signal AI and is continuing to raise money to invest in 'intelligent' monitoring to provide insights from more data sources. The media monitoring space is crowded and competitive with lots of players growing by VC and angel funded acquisitions, including big players like Cision and Meltwater. The media intelligence market is estimated to be worth $4.5 billion per year. Purposeful Relations aims to help clients invest their money wisely when buying these services.

AI argues for and against itself in Oxford Union debate | BBC

The Oxford Union has been the scene of many great debates. The most recent of which was the Megatron LLB Transformer AI engine arguing against itself on the motion ""This house believes that AI will never be ethical."