15 areas of work in progress for 2015 in marketing, public relations, and social media are discussed. Key areas include: 1) Demographics no longer define audiences as social media subverts norms. 2) Integrating multimedia and channels creates a potent feedback loop. 3) Facebook has 850 million daily users and understands human relationships. 4) Brand conversations on social media must move beyond industrialized tactics. 5) Publishers are turning off comments as conversations move to social sites.

1. 15 areas of work in
progress for 2015
Stephen Waddington
@wadds
Marketing, public relations and social media in 2015

2. #1 Demise of demographics
Traditional marketing models based on age,
gender, location and income no longer work.
Marketing segmentation was never that simple but
in 2015 social media subvert all norms and
hierarchies. Listen, and I mean really listen, and then
let's have a conversation based on what I say, and
more importantly, what I do.

3. #2 Multimedia, multi-channel
This isn't a throwback to CD ROMs and the 90s but is
instead a nod to channel integration. I met a radio
presenter last month who said social media had
given his career a shot in the arm and had become
almost as important as his daily broadcasts. The
feedback loop and direct relationship with an
audience created by a combination of media is
incredibly potent. Choose your media wisely.

4. #3 Facebook knows
Stories in 2014 of the death of the social network
giant were wholly unfounded. Facebook is truly
becoming a utility. Now a decade old it has 850
million daily users (September 2014). It's like the
phone network but much more powerful.
Facebook’s understanding of human relationships is
incredible fodder for marketing and public relations,
psychology, and in time, history itself.

5. #4 Difficult conversations
There's a game that I play whenever I have an idle
five minutes. I tweet brands that sponsor content on
Twitter and ask them a question. Do it and see how
often you get a response. The use of industrialised
marketing tactics in social media has got to stop.
Consumers are starting to fight back and this
approach certainly won't work in messaging
networks.

6. #5 No comment
Publishers and brands are turning off comments
across the web. That's because conversations take
place across the social sites that readers choose
and are rarely on the original publisher's site. I use a
WordPress plug-in on my blog to hoover up
comments from across the web. You could always
make my day and leave a comment below with
your thoughts about this blog post.

7. #6 Stop posting shit on the Internet
Brands are increasingly becoming over enthusiastic
on social networks in a bid to seize the moment. This
issue particularly relates to the rise of so-called
content marketing. The results are polarised
between the minority of campaigns that are rooted
in listening and engagement, and the majority that
make a lame effort to tame the zeitgeist and churn
out bland content.

8. #7 Third party tools
A burgeoning tool market has emerged to support
campaign planning across fragmented forms of
media and devices. Think hard about your workflow
and how you can best integrate tools to deliver
against your campaign objectives. Challenge
vendors to demonstrate how their tools can help
you deliver the outcomes that you need.

9. #8 Internal influencers
The best advocates for an organisation are almost
certainly the people on the payroll. Yet most
organisations gag their employees with policies and
rules. Equal effort should be applied to external and
internal publics. My tip would be to always start with
your internal stakeholders and work out.

10. #9 Pigs, lipstick and authenticity
In 2015 any gap between what an organisation
does and what it says will be called out. You can
see the result day in day out played out across
social forms of media. Traditional media frequently
harvests lousy examples from Facebook or Twitter.
You can put lipstick on a pig but it will still be a pig.

11. #10 Continuous learning
Upgrading skills to work across all forms of media is
an ongoing work in progress, much like our business
itself. We're moving from being generalists to having
broad knowledge of our discipline and a specialist in
an area such as research, planning, strategy or
content. Never stop reading or learning.

12. #11 End of the line
The future of the media remains a work in progress.
Publishers and networks are all trying to figure out
how to develop sustainable business models. In
order to optimise campaign investment, paid media
may need to be integrated into earned campaigns
and earned media into paid campaigns. Public
relations practitioners need to get over the fact that
sometimes you simply have to pay for it.

13. #12 Show me the money
If you can't show the return on investment for your
work you can't expect to receive appropriate
remuneration for your effort. It's not rocket science;
it's basic economics. AMEC's Valid Metric
Frameworks and Google's channel attribution model
are good starting points.

14. #13 Vision and values
Organisations without a clear vision and values will
really struggle in an era of fragmented media.
There's simply too much noise. The purpose of an
organisation should be rooted in its values and core
to every aspect of its communication. Values should
define what an organisation says and does as much
as what it doesn't.

15. #14 Once upon a time
The Cannes Festival of Creativity teaches us that
memorable brands tell stories that respond to the
motivation of their public or audience across all
forms of media. Award winning work is based on
smart creative. The content frequently engages the
audience directly as part of the campaign. Tell me
a story.

16. #15 Higher purpose
Public relations increasingly has a role in every area
of an organisation. It's shifting from the
communication department to human resources,
customer service, sales and product development. It
is the ears, eyes and mouth of an organisation, and
increasingly the conscience.

17. Stephen Waddington is European Digital & Social
Media Director at Ketchum and Visiting Professor of
Practice in Public Relations at the University of
Newcastle.
If you’d like to discuss any of the issues raised in this
deck please contact Stephen at
Stephen.Waddington@ketchum.com