Applying changes in the way we communicated in 2020 to our 2021 plans

There is much to look forward to this year.

One item on my list is a return to teaching. After an eight-year hiatus due to my business demands and several years of travel, I’m making the time to revise and run an introduction to public relations class at UNH Manchester.

Updating an eight-year-old syllabus and assembling course material in a field that has experienced enormous change over this time period has required taking a completely new look at how to present this content. As we kick off a new year and happily leave 2020 in the dust, I wanted to share some of these reflections from this exercise that I think are relevant to the business community from a communications perspective going forward.

First, in 2020 there was so much discussion and debate about the effectiveness of online learning as it became the new norm. I created this introduction to PR course back in 2007 and always taught it in person. The format for many courses at UNH Manchester is a three-hour, once-a-week class. As you can imagine, the students don’t really want the instructor to drone on for that amount of class time, and it must be broken up with guest speakers, video and in-class projects. Fast-forward to this spring, and the course is required to be online.

Zoom and video meetings and classes are here to stay

Migrating the class to an online platform is not nearly as onerous as I thought. Since many of us have spent hundreds of hours on Zoom and similar programs in 2020 and will probably continue to do so at some level going forward, the platform is not intimidating. Also, PR examples and case studies play well with video and multimedia. Last, pulling in guest speakers is much less of a burden on them. There is no travel time, and distance is irrelevant. Like many activities in 2020, some are not conducive to a fully online format — like virtual happy hours — while others are.

Classes like this, as well as many of our meetings and conferences we had to travel to, are well suited to an online format. This amounted to a lot of “found time” in 2020.

BTS 2020 - Version A for 2019 Holdings Add to that the cost savings and the positive effect less travel has on the environ- ment, and the trend to do more of our business and learning through video is probably here to stay.

Second, the view of what public relations is continues to shift or really mutate. Often confused with media relations or marketing (media relations is a subset and marketing is not), PR encapsulates numerous methods of communications designed to influence behavior and cause a certain action. The goal of PR has not changed, but the tools certainly have. Consider that TikTok was unknown to most in 2019 and now has more than 800 million active users worldwide.

Public relations encompasses more forms of outreach these days

One of the blogs I subscribe to, called SpinSucks (not a big fan of the name), uses the PESO model to describe public relations. PESO stands for Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned media. It incorporates many elements not traditionally considered as part of PR. It’s a holistic model that pulls together paid social media; earned media; shared media including organic social, partnerships and community relations; and owned media such as search engine optimization. This model represents some new thinking regarding PR. It’s one that I will bring into the classroom and that organizations need to now consider as part of an overall communications strategy.

The third large shift in this updated syllabus is content. We’ll cover the history of PR, ethics and some classic case studies, such as the Tylenol poisonings from 1982 and the Exxon Valdez disaster from 1989. How different would the reporting on these events have been in today’s 24/7 news cycle with instantaneous posts on social media and streaming video on Facebook Live? How do we know if what we see online is true? How do we counteract what we know is false? A five-year-old textbook would miss the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, Covid-19 and Tom Brady leaving New England for Tampa Bay. The world is rich with case studies occurring every day that can be incorporated into a class. The lesson here is we need to constantly update our communications strategy to reflect the times.

In summary, preparing to teach again by creating a fresh and relevant syllabus and tying it to speakers that can highlight personal case studies to complement in-class learning, is a great exercise in recognizing the continuing changes we’ve seen in public relations. If your organization is still operating with a communications plan that reads like a 2012 textbook, 2021 might be a good year to update it to reflect these new times.

Matt Cookson is president and CEO of Cookson Communications in Manchester.