By Chris Lee

One of the marketing industry’s biggest marketing groups, WPP, recorded positive figures in August, pointing to a global recovery in the advertising, PR and marketing sector. The company says new media now accounts for around 28 per cent of the group’s revenues.

But the PR industry faces serious divisions when it comes to social media, according to one major UK-based PR agency that NMK talked to this week. Steve Earl, managing director of Leicester Square-based Speed Communications, believes that the rapid march of social media on the PR landscape has divided PR into those that “get” social media and those that don’t, in turn forming social media knowledge “ghettos”. NMK asked him where this leaves the industry.

What are the key differences between ‘traditional’ PR and online PR?

There is just one big difference: the media and how the audiences consume them. Conventional media is an intermediary and, to varying degrees, trusted as an information source. Social media is direct to the people and a two-way street, but the lines blur when conventional media content is dragged into the mix. For PRs though, the big difference is that media change is forming ghettoes - those who get digital, and those who don't. In the future you'll need to either understand and work with both, or look for a new job.

Have many traditional PR agencies been left behind? If so, what can they do to catch up?

Yes. To catch up they should make modernising their businesses to address media change a top priority that runs through their people development, client retention and business development. And if any dinosaurs bury their heads in the sand over digitisation, they should be put permanently out to pasture.

What sort of mind-set changes will public relations officers (PROs) have to adopt going forward and how can they restructure their organisations to accommodate that?

PR, as we knew it, is in its death throes. The practice of managing reputation has changed forever. Brand reputation still has a powerful influence on sales and word-of-mouth endorsement. But the editorial world in which we operate can now extend its tentacles to the likes of fostering and retaining relationships, often directly with customers. PROs need three things: the ability to deliver influence across all media channels (media expertise), an understanding of how influence builds across this fragmented media landscape (planning nouse) and extreme agility (clients and agencies working to overcome the old excuses that it can't be done in that short amount of time).

WPP has attributed a lot of its good figures to new media - what sort of mix do you need to provide a ‘full service agency’ nowadays?

WPP is probably saying that because it needs to look as modern and digitised as possible. It's a statement that may mask the facts. The truth though is that no-one knows what mix amounts to full service these days, and no-one can truly know for the future. Media change is a breakneck pace - my best guess is that conventional and social will come together to provide more personalised types of media that work across all ways of delivering the content. Full service is no longer necessarily the Holy Grail - the focus has shifted to understanding how consumers will consume changing media and how brands will gain influence, then delivering that with the greatest potency at the best cost.