Results of 2019 Global Communication Survey Released

Photo by Javier Quesada on Unsplash


Michael Lasky, an attorney who heads up Davis & Gilbert, LLP’s Public Relations Law practice and has spoken at numerous Public Relations Global Network and Public Relations Society of America events that I’ve attended, sent me a note recently that the 2019 Global Communications Survey from the USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations has been released.  There are some interesting findings.  Here is what he sent:
This year, the annual survey studied the use of technology, both at public relations firms and at in-house corporate communications departments.
Below are some of the key takeaways from the survey:

  • Three out of five public relations professionals predict that future communication technology will cause the average citizen to become more engaged. However, the same number believe that engagement will be based on misinformation, which almost three-fourths (74%) think will create a more polarized society.
  • 38% of U.S. CEOs believe that social media and online influencers (shared media) are the most valuable form of communication to their companies, which is, just slightly ahead of original content distributed through their company’s channels (owned media) (36%).
  • When it comes to communications platforms that will be the most important in the future, the big winners are platforms whose popularity is based on photographs and videos such as YouTube (48%) and Instagram (46%), while text-based platforms such as Medium (5%) trail far behind.
  • Social listening and analytics (54%), website analytics (54%) and social media engagement (51%) are the three most important tools for PR professionals.
  • PR professionals need to adopt new skills such as big data analytics (65%), video production (59%) and search engine optimization (59%) in order to adapt to new technology.
  • As an interesting aside, fewer agency executives were optimistic about the growth of their agencies this year (69%) than this time last year (86%).

To read the full survey, you can visit here:
https://annenberg.usc.edu/research/center-public-relations

Photo by Javier Quesada on Unsplash
Written by
at May 7, 2019

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