1. A hard rain’s going to fall on PR and measurement.
Combine the Polar Vortex, Sharknado, and The Perfect Storm and that’s what will hit the traditional public relations profession this year. Thanks to better response rates, “Native advertising” (i.e., paid content that is disguised as earned media – what we old timers considered advertorials) is sucking up ever larger percentages of advertising budgets. This comes at a time when PR people are working diligently to create better, more interesting content that earns a place in the reader’s mind, and ideally generates an increased trust between brand and consumer. The trouble is that it will be increasingly difficult for the consumer to tell the difference.
2. PESO and POE are doomed.
By this time next year the concept that anyone can differentiate between what is Paid, Owned, and Earned will be considered a cute anachronism. It’s hard enough to do anyway on mobile devices and no one under 30 even cares.
3. Sentiment Analysis will die and be reborn as chatter analysis and will be just another data point in your big data stew.
There is no doubt that text analysis is getting ever more sophisticated. But increasingly brands are realizing that computers are pretty dumb about what constitutes positive and negative, and pretty smart about tracking specific phrases or trends. In reality, traditional sentiment analysis can be shown to correlate pretty well with movie ticket sales and stock price but not much else, and certainly not much in the B2B world.
The smart companies will use computers to track conversations and correlate that data with the rest of their consumer and marketing data to figure out what phrases and/or topics actually drive purchase or action.
4. We’ll tune in, then we’ll drop out.
Companies using big data to insert themselves in customers lives will find themselves shut out of those lives. While millennials seem to be immune, for the rest of the population the increasingly obvious and creepy attempts by brands to insert their products in our daily lives will turn off a large percentage of the buying public and drive people away from Facebook and its ilk. Of course, millennials have already abandoned Facebook. (I was recently told by one of my favorite 19-year-olds: “I only post things to Facebook that I want you to read.” Twitter are you listening?)
5. The divides will not conquer.
The political divide, the digital divide, the urban/rural divide, the generational divide… The reality is that much of these divides live mostly in marketer’s heads. Thinking of the world in terms of demographic, geographic, technological, and chronological differences is an easy way to approach selling stuff. But real life just isn’t that easy. To quote my father yet again,
“If we can put a man in orbit, why can’t we determine the effectiveness of our communications? The reason is simple and perhaps, therefore, a little old-fashioned: people, human beings with a wide range of choice. Unpredictable, cantankerous, capricious, motivated by innumerable conflicting interests, and conflicting desires.”
—Ralph Delahaye Paine, Publisher, Fortune Magazine, 1960 speech to the Ad Club of St. Louis
In today’s communications environment these capricious, cantankerous, and unpredictable people are constantly surprising us, whether it is in our Facebook feeds or in their responses to disaster or a reaction to one of my chicken stories. 2014 will be the year when huge strides will be made in analyzing data and learning from it. But it will also teach us that all the data in the world can’t get past the notion that humans actually prefer to be unpredictable, cantankerous and a bit capricious.
6. Guidance and career counselors will need to learn the words “data” and “statistics.”
I once asked Daniel Schorr what form of media he would go into if he were in college today. He immediately answered, “blogs and online.” I’m a former journalist myself, but if someone asked that question of me today, I’d say, “data mining.”
Unfortunately, the “jobs of the future” that high school and college students should be preparing for aren’t even in the vocabulary of most career advisors. If you want a job in journalism today, you need to become a data journalist, someone who can mine data for clues and stories. If you want a job in the non-profit sector, you’re better off studying statistics than sociology. If you want a job in PR, your best route might be through market analysis or business, not English. Visual artists today have huge opportunities in turning data into visual stories, but no one is telling them to take a statistics course. With luck, the recent grads who are filling these jobs today will pass the word to their alma maters. ◊
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