A few years ago, as AI was beginning to make its presence felt in the wider workplace, I have to admit I was cynical (also known as concerned for my job!) – primarily because words are the tools of my trade, and I was understandably concerned about the impact on my industry.
Today my mindset is completely different.
Indeed, it is a tool that I use daily. It’s not replaced me. But it has massively increased the versatility and scope of what I can offer. Whereas before I was concerned that companies would simply be able to run PR and social media campaigns through AI, thereby eliminating my own input. The reality is that there is more demand than ever to ensure the quality and consistency of the work is achieved.
The more I understood the agility of AI, the more I realised that to take campaigns further and higher, it needs to be manipulated by someone who knows what they are doing within the application of a PR campaign.
We are inundated with the need to fill space with content. When I first started in the PR game 35 years ago, we had print media and broadcast media. It may have been split into B2B and B2C, but you learnt your niche and excelled accordingly.
Over the last decade or so we have had an explosion in media channels. All of which need their own unique application of content to make it viable and relevant. Today, if you are not doing all of the following, you risk opening up space for your competitors to step in, because they will definitely be there!
Social media | Trade press | Websites | Email | Newsletters | Advertising
Every single one of these platforms combine together to strengthen your own online presence and make you more easily searchable by your own target audience. The opportunities are endless, and it needs a strong and focussed approach to make sure those opportunities are not missed. That needs to come from somewhere, and it needs to be coordinated.
PR plays a significant role in leading that coordination in the tone and quality of the information that is relayed. As long form content, it gives you the space to evolve ideas and deepen ideas and explanations around your product or service. It can set the course of thinking, highlighting relevancy and impact. A PR strategist will lay this out with genuine authority, ensuring that your tone of voice and brand identity remains strong and recognisable, setting you apart from your competitors. After this, AI can play its role in repurposing the information into bite sized chunks for sharing across other platforms. But it needs quality control
VAST PR has always prided itself on the quality of the work it sends to the trade press – strong stories, balanced debate, cited examples, ‘considered content’, rather than fluff and puff. We are adept at sniffing out what it is that makes a story different and exciting and then crafting that into a narrative that relates to the target audience. It is this pursuit of excellence that lays the foundation for all work going forward, even if it is generated through AI.
If you feed AI bulls**t, it will feed out bulls**t.
When it comes to content, you need to feed in excellence to bring out the excellence.
The way in which PR distributes articles and stories may have changed significantly since I first started, but the foundational importance remains – the quality of the written word. AI will never replace that human element, and a good PR practitioner will ensure that quality remains the driver behind verything, whether AI generated or not.
