The Future of PR in a digital world

Hi there, my name is Jamie Galloway and I’m the Central Office of Information’s (COI) Director of Digital Media. For those of you who don’t know what COI is, have a look at www.coi.gov.uk

Like Ross Sleight and others before him, I was invited by BIMA to talk about something digital to a gathered audience in late January. We got a pretty good turn out at Vasco & Piero’s on Poland Street but maybe that was something to do with the end of January blues, a good supply of wine and a chance to chat rather than hear me! For those of you who were not there and want to see how it looked through the eyes of an attendee, take a look at Steve’s blog.

As it was the evening and I’d been at work all day, I decided to steer the subject away from my usual role at COI towards something that I’ve been thinking about and researching for some time as part of a course that I’ve been undertaking. That subject is PR.

Working in digital we are often thinking about integration with other areas from either a client or agency viewpoint - and it’s clear that we all have different perspectives (see Ross’s blog for insight). I’ll start by generalising and saying that much of the current focus is given to the integration in digital between media and creative as well as the integration between ‘traditional’ media and digital media. I don’t profess to have the silver bullet solution for these issues and I am not intending to marginalise them, however, I do recognise that such a focus leaves PR out in the cold and I don’t think that’s right.

The first thing that I wanted to say in terms of integrating PR and digital is, as a first point of call, for you to consider talking to an expert, set up a meeting with a PR colleague and see what they do and how they approach it. My next posting will focus on what I think PR people are good at and then we’ll move into it’s future and how this links with digital.

Apparently, I have to do 10 of these but I may run out of steam before then. I’ll take a prompt from any response / chat / dialogue / posts that readers may want to submit and see how we get along.