Part 1 – Has Tech PR really changed that much in twenty years?

This blog post about PR in the ‘90s brought back memories of sitting on the floor frantically stuffing 150+ press releases into envelopes in time for the last post.  Without the wondrous tools that account executives now take for granted, making a clippings books involved learning scalpel skills that would rival a surgeon’s. 

The other massive change for anyone born before 1975, whether working in PR or something else, is the Internet and email.  We had one email account in the office and checking once a week was adequate.  While the idea of going back to 10 minutes a week on email versus 10 minutes an hour is pretty appealing for most people, it was a lot tougher to get up to speed on new technologies or new clients without Google.  Finding the information took time, whereas now it’s navigating the information that takes time.  However, the ability to quickly identify what is useful and what is useless is still vital.  Was the article worth photocopying and binding into a pack for the rest of the team? Is the information worth reading or should you skip to the next one down in your search?

While the Internet took away a lot of the manual labour involved in PR, a lot has stayed the same.  Most importantly we still initially try speaking to journalists on the phone to pitch a story, rather than simply emailing them a press release. Email is even easier to bin than faxes and post!

In some cases, we are still promoting the same technology vision.  For example, in the mid-90s DEC was talking about the house of the future – a quarter of a century later my fridge still doesn’t order my groceries for me, although Amazon might make it happen.  Mainframe is still a key technology for many enterprises, and it’s still a challenge to get journalists interested unless you come up with the right angle.

There are also some things that never really took off.  Video conferencing was hyped as the alternative to flying around the world to meetings, but I can count on one hand the number of meetings I’ve had over video conference in the last twenty years.  Even when the option is available via Microsoft Lync, no-one really wants to see how they look even if it is just a thumbnail in the corner of the screen.  Kids born in the noughties may be different as they are used to Skyping with grandparents from birth, and as they are entering the workplace in the 2020s, we might finally see video conferencing take off.   In some ways it is bizarre that it hasn’t, as the conference call hasn’t changed in the last twenty years – it often matches this parody. 

A bit of nostalgia serves as a useful reminder for technology PRs is that one thing definitely hasn’t changed.  PR programmes need to focus on ensuring user adoption rather than promoting technological advances - once people are comfortable with something it is difficult to persuade them to move onto something new, even if it is better.  The current debate about how much time email wastes has seen a lot of press recently as a result of this speech by Professor Sir Cary Cooper.  There are tons of tools out there that are a million times better than email for collaboration, but for many of us email addiction can’t be broken.  If we can’t move forward, maybe we need to go backwards – in the 90s phone or walking to someone’s desk worked well and was a lot better for our health. 

In part two of this blog post rather than looking back twenty years, we’ll think about what changes will happen by 2020.