Our industry has a bad reputation – I know that, you know that, and I’m sure the good people commenting here know it too.

That reputation has led the industry to become a byword for irrelevance and non-importance. Which, when the budget cuts come, mean that PR is at the forefront with marketing for being canned.

So the old school complains that PR isn’t being respected enough, that not every agency/professional is the same. But it’s the old school that is causing this lack of respect.

There is a bunch of amazing young professionals coming through. PR interns are bursting at the seams to come into our industry. And they’re being scared away.

Prehistoric practices and bosses that don’t thing “kids” could offer value are keeping our industry in the mire. There are a bunch of great ideas just waiting in the wings to take our industry forward, but egos and dictators are keeping them hidden.

So yes, in my eyes the biggest challenge the PR industry is facing is opening up to listening to new people and ideas. We’re meant to be an innovative industry – let’s prove it.

Thanks David. I don’t always respond, but when I have a fully baked (or even semi-baked) thought on something I prefer to share it all. I do so in the hopes that it informs, intrigues and inspires.

And surprisingly it doesn’t take that long if it’s something I’ve already have bouncing around in my noodle. (Who knew that Grade 11 typing class would come in so handy a gazillion years later?)

I’ve mentioned before that we here in Canada (when not doing Yoga as Gutless from Faux News suggested) are lucky to have the MR2P system to at least satisfy the bean counters. Plus with other tools in existence measuring share of voice, etc. isn’t that hard (finding clients to pony up for in depth analyses was tough before and will be tougher in the near future!).

Measuring Online media is still tricky – particularly because that is still in-exact and for the most part unverified by a third party. But that is improving. BPA is working on this and will not only have ho-hum numbers, but useful demographic data like they do for print audits.

Measuring Social Media won’t be so much ‘a challenge’ as it will be a mystery. @matthewi gave a great Third Tuesday Toronto presentation about the media shift to SM and spoke about analytics – or lack thereof. As he put it “There’s a gigantic amount of BS out there.” This will give a lot of people fits over the next year and it can’t be ignored.

But here another big challenge. We talk about how doing PR, at least the media interaction sliver, is about building relationships. With the media attrition that we are seeing (on both sides of the border and across the pond) many of these relationships just don’t exist any more. So suddenly not only are we figuring out who to talk to and why, we also have to figure out how to do that in a changing media landscape. And then we have to start over because the people we’d been working with have been laid off.

There are plenty of people who bang a “the media is dead” drum, but that’s pretty far from the truth. Journalism is certainly not dead. The traditional dissemination mechanisms of journalism are radically changed, but there is still a need for real and accountable investigative reporting.

Tweeting can give us alerts. Blogs tend to inspire pre- and post- analysis discussion as well as opinion. But Journalism tends to give us the meat… that we blog about, retweet, etc.

So as these primary sources of information generation shift about, and as we still have clients who are paying for coverage (in legacy media, new media and social media) just doing that and remaining profitable is indeed going to be a challenge. Heck, it already is.

I really don’t have a problem with impressions, though I would caution that you shouldn’t show just that number. If you’re including it in a broader analysis of message pickup, tone, etc… than I think it makes sense.

@jeff w. – I agree that impressions and AVE are typically used because they are actual numbers in an industry where we’re hard pressed to produce numbers-based results. That’s definitely part of the challenge.

@chuck – how in the world did I know you’d pick “measurement?”

@brad – excellent point! Digital is definitely a multi-discipline sandbox. PR has an opportunity to show the value it brings to said sandbox. Of course, with the amount of PR agencies slapping “social media,” new media” and “social marketing” into their capabilities decks without actually doing anything to learn about and get smart about the space, the industry also has the opportunity to show the non-value it brings to said sandbox.