As someone who has become naturally drawn to anything about social media and PR and is super interested in the impacts of social media on communications (I wrote my dissertation on the subject!), I was thrilled when I saw an infographic called ‘PR Then and Now’ the other day.

The infographic illustrates how barely recognisable today’s PR industry is in comparison to just a decade ago. Technology seems to have played a significant role into this development. We no longer use fax machines, we use e-mails; we don’t wait for user’s feedback anymore, it comes directly to us all the time via social media. Do you see? Technology is in all of this.

Which makes me wonder: has technology changed the practice into a more positive direction or the contrary? Because as you can see, it is gadgets like laptops and smartphones and channels like social media that have pushed society (and PRs) towards a new type of communications – a mobile one, an always-on one. What happened to face-to-face communication? Of course, such interactions are still crucial, but we must admit their frequency has decreased massively. Is that good or bad?

Tough question, I know... And there’s no easy or straightforward answer.

Now that you've seen the interviews for my dissertation I conducted with Heather Yaxley, Shelley Fletcher-Bryant and Annie Bowden, here's the next one.

Below you’ll see the responses of Rob Brown. He has worked in PR for over 20 years and for over fifteen years held senior PR positions within three major global advertising networks: Euro RSCG, McCann Erickson and TBWA. He launched his own business ‘Rule 5’ in MediaCityUK, Manchester in November 2012. Rob is the author of ‘Public Relations and the Social Web’ and is joint editor of the forthcoming 'Share This Too'. You can check out his blog here http://prandtheweb.com/ and follow him on Twitter @robbrown.

Q: How do you think the emergence of social media changed PR? Is it a positive or a negative impact and why?

It has changed PR considerably. A core element of PR has traditional been media relations. The media has evolved and so must PR. From a structural point of view there is more dialogue and more peer to peer communication and PR must engage with and learn to influence these conversations. From a practical point of view media is generally richer and more distributed. In the past our content was mainly test (press releases) and images. No we need to consider including more video and linked content. PR people are even learning to share HTML code.

On Tuesday the CIPR (The Chartered Institute of Public Relations – the professional body for PR practitioners in the UK) released the findings of the annual ‘State of the Profession’ benchmarking survey, which examines issues around the public relations practice, budgets, skills and opinion on the future of the industry in the UK. Having gathered insights from over 1,200 CIPR members between November 2012 and January 2013, the overall results show that despite the challenging economic climate public relations practitioners have been putting successful efforts into adapting and innovating to prove the profession’s worth at the highest level.

PR practitioners have been developing new skills and undertaking responsibilities and roles, which have not been previously considered part of the public relations remit. The reason behind this lies in the efforts of PR practitioners to influence both communications and business strategy in the boardroom as the need for PR activities rises with the growing need for reputation management and effective engagement in the world of social media. This means that PRs are increasingly being involved in company strategy and planning, which is a very good sign for the future of the profession.

Some highlights:

• Moving away from the primary media relations focus and embracing new media to drive two-way conversations.
• Massive gap between salaries for men and women and gender imbalance in roles.
• Greater cooperation between departments (Marketing, HR, IT etc).
• Struggles to affect higher level business decisions (it the boardroom).
• Social media is the biggest challenge for PR practitioners, followed by crisis management, research, planning and measurement.

With the growth of digital media and the online space becoming a primary source of information there has been a serious shift towards digital communications, which have provided the PR practice with a number of opportunities. Today PR professionals have a new set of available tools to use not only to deliver messages, but also to properly engage with audiences.

Utilising social media for PR purposes has now become one of the major new tools to directly connect the business to the consumer. By making use of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter PR pros can engage and build relationships with publics. What’s more, the power of social media lies in two-way communications, which means that people are able to publish their own stories and to talk back to brands, allowing PRs to engage in a conversation. Such a dialog can be extremely beneficial, as it helps to find out what customers and other stakeholders think, believe, want and need, i.e. to perform ‘free’ research. Getting such feedback offers enormous opportunities to gather ideas and develop new products, services or stories.

With people now spending the majority of their time online on social media PROs can effectively reach target audiences at the times they are most active on the relevant platforms.

By engaging in two-way conversations and fostering relationships on social media on behalf of a client digital PR activities can help build or improve a brand’s reputation as well as identify brand ambassadors, but also promote products and services and thereby increase brand awareness. Direct, real-time conversations furthermore allow PR professionals to shape public opinion instead of just reacting when negative situations arise.

At the end of January music retailer HMV saw itself at the outburst of a serious social media crisis. Company employees were live tweeting their own mass redundancy from the brand’s official Twitter account @HMVtweets, using the #hmvXFactorFiring hashtag (which is still quite popular). The tweets went viral in a number of seconds and got thousands of retweets and mentions.

For about 30 minutes before it was stopped, the tweeting was telling the world what was happening behind closed doors – more than 60 employees were pulled into HR and got fired just like that.

Funnily enough, the tweeting also announced in public the apparent lack of understanding for social media by HMV’s Marketing Director who asked “How do I shut down Twitter?” (Just another example how traditional marketers still don’t take social media seriously…)