The transition to digital is occurring at an accelerated pace. Going forward, what is going to be the role of digital in PR and the way brands and agencies will adapt to the present within the new normal?
The consumption of stories online is increasing with each passing day. Earlier, we relied on reading newspapers every morning to understand what happened the day before. However, now we are becoming news on the go because it happens from multiple news websites. People also ask social media platforms like Twitter, where they follow various known personalities or news platforms of their interest and obtain updates on them every minute. Another interesting thing to notice is that various media publication houses have suddenly turned their interest to online and are creating digital properties for pushing news online. Large publications have started online platforms specific to varied sectors/ beats like Human Resources, BFSI, Technology, etc. These platforms became much larger lately as they garner the attention of these belonging there to specific sectors and also because the news published on these platforms may or might not appear in a medium.
Hence, I think that digital is extremely crucial going forward as we see online playing an honest complimentary role today for traditional PR mediums like print and it’ll only continue to grow. At the top of the day, with the assistance of technology and therefore the world becoming smaller, the news is some things that are consumed almost every minute. Today, there are apps like Inshorts, Dailyhunt, which have made news in a more consumable format as per your interest. Hence, it’s something that brands certainly got to keep a track of. In fact, tons of brands are tracking their online news presence vis-à-vis their competition to make sure that PR metrics aren’t just limited to print, but online also, primarily because the reach of online is nearly unlimited then is its time period, unlike a standard platform like print.
AI and technology are going to be the sport changer within the coming years, especially within the area of knowledge. What are your views on this and the way are agencies and makes gearing up to face this new challenge?
I believe that AI (AI) features a great distance to travel and tons must be wiped out in order for it to be a game-changer for the industry. Currently, news tracking platforms use AI and ML for tracking and analysis. Crawlers are getting used effectively to know whether the target website is carrying news of a specific organisation or not. However, tracking and analysing the news in a medium still requires manual intervention on where precisely the article is positioned, images within the article, mention of the corporate name within the story, calculating CCM, etc., then formulas and algorithms inherit the image. Image recognition software is helping with this, but they’re limited to English and few commonly spoken Indian languages. it’s yet to expand to the whole gamut of languages of our country, which are important to understand the reach of a brand in ‘Bharat’, that is, the semi-urban and rural parts of the country.
Follow and connect with us on Facebook, LinkedIn&Twitter
