Tarquin and Eloise might be right to tremble in their tassled loafers about PR’s future.

PR has long had a poor reputation for effective commercial skills. Ask a senior businessperson, or even a senior marketing person, about what the typical PR is like and the stereotypical Fulham-dwelling fast-talker is often a picture that’s painted.

It has largely moved on from that; although there are still too many all-mouth-and-corduroy-trousers merchants out there. What PR people, and prospective ones, have had to deal with in recent years is a rapid broadening of expectations about what PR can and should achieve.

The best PRs have long required diverse skills. Editorial savvy, agility, diplomacy, clear communication, commercial nous and the ability to manage people no matter how strange are some that spring to mind.

But ask a PR person whether they have all the skills they need now and for the future, and most will tell you there’s now a daunting amount of ground to cover. We are intermediaries to the media – social, conventional, unconventional – and as media has fragmented so rapidly, PR has struggled to stay aligned. Some have become real experts in one field or another: social media analysis, search, social media planning, broadcast content, user-generated campaigns. Others have looked at everything changing around them and tried to peck away, bit by bit, at upgrading all their skills across what’s now becoming required.

So what are PR agencies doing to safeguard their futures and help develop the right skills?

It’s a mixed bag. And in some cases, a pretty shabby bag. Some though are sticking their necks out with sweeping structural initiatives – Weber Shandwick has told how it plans to ’shape the future of PR’ with a dedicated multimedia production division. It underlines that content is, ultimately, at the heart of how PR delivers commercial value, and the premise of content ownership is interesting.

We need to be about far more than the delivery of words and pictures though. PRs are going to need an intimate understanding of how reputation is developed or damages in a modern media world and how that will continue to evolve. They need to understand the audiences in real detail and how best to inspire belief or action in them through editorial. They need to be commercially astute in delivering ideas, and in delivering content. They need to understand and respond to specific editorial appetites across diverse and fragmented media. And then they need to prove they’re worth paying for with a grown-up, all-seeing approach to evaluation.

We’re not there yet. But rather than frothing about just one aspect of this tumultuous change, PRs and agencies need to be bolder and broaden skills across the board to make themselves fit for the new era of PR. The bottom line is that PRs are going to need to be able to work across all elements of a more astute and sophisticated discipline.

Floppy fringes and hollow talk may struggle to cut it.

Steve is managing director at Speed. Image via RachelGraves.com.

Tags: education, skills, speed, steve earl, weber shandwick