How BIG DATA is Re-inventing Public Relations?

Friends, Thank you very much for taking out time from your very busy schedule to read my blog(s). Sharing PR knowledge with you with finesse has become my passion now and I really feel encouraged after reading your feedback in the comments column.  Friends, happy to present 72nd blog “How BIG DATA is Re-inventing Public Relations?”

According to a new market research report "Big Data market" by Component, Deployment Mode, Organization Size, Business Function (Operations, Finance, and Marketing and Sales), Industry Vertical (BFSI, Manufacturing, and Healthcare and Life Sciences), and Region - Global Forecast to 2025", published by Markets and Markets™, the global Big Data Market size to grow from USD 138.9 billion in 2020 to USD 229.4 billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 10.6% during the forecast period. – PRNewswire

Research plays an increasingly important role by informing the PR process to help improve performance and generate value. Through the emergence of new research methods and advanced technologies, coupled with the accelerated pace of business, a new form of public relations is emerging where statistics spark creativity, data drive more fully integrated communications and tools enable people to act more quickly and with greater intelligence.

Friends’ data is all around us in the shape of information. We check our smart phones for news and social updates, we read and write emails, we buy products from online stores, we research good restaurants for dinner, we buy medicines online, we track our health & diet, and we search for random products online. The list is infinitely long.  Friends, we are consuming information all the time, and in the process, also transmitting information about ourselves. It has never been easier to access information and to create information whether we intend to or not, thanks to www.

Today, nearly every industry uses big data for future planning by predicting how people will live and what they’ll buy. Certain types of data sets, such as those that span decades or centuries e.g. long data, have far more predictive power than a similar volume of data from only one year. And when it comes to foreseeing sudden cultural shifts, like the rise of smart phones, even the most sterling data has limitations. Today it's possible to collect or buy massive troves of data that indicates what large numbers of consumers search for, click on and "like." There's also a huge influx of performance data that measures the effectiveness of PR and advertising campaigns via impressions, click-through rates and other modern metrics that are far more nuanced than sales figures alone. Friends’ Big Data involves capturing, integrating, organizing, analyzing and acting on as much information as possible. It provides the foundation for descriptive information via monitoring and reporting and it enables predictive analysis using statistical tools.

Organisations increasingly drive their business decisions based on data today. Digital technologies are constantly creating new sensors that provide information and can be used for digital processes. For the first time, this enables an informal elicitation of the entire process, from product development to sales, marketing and corporate communication. The self-optimization of business processes makes it easier to adapt the management of value creation to changing market, competitive, and regulatory conditions.

The major growth factors of the Big Data Market include the increasing awareness of Internet of Things (IoT) devices among organizations, increasing availability of data across the organization to gain deeper insights to remain competitive, and increasing government investments in various regions for enhancing digital technologies. The proliferation of data amounting to big data has forced vendors to adopt big data solutions and help data engineers to simplify and manage their decision-making process. Big data solutions enable organizations to access to social media data from search engines and sites, such as Facebook, Twitter that enable organizations to fine tune their business strategies.

The term Data Mining, also known as knowledge discovery from data, is the automated extraction of patterns representing knowledge implicitly stored or collected in large databases, data warehouses, online, other massive information repositories, or data streams. Data mining is a multidisciplinary field, drawing work from areas including database technology, machine learning, statistics, pattern recognition, information retrieval, artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and data visualization.

Public Relations aim to grab attention and attract new audiences. It is designed to build trust in a brand and transform awareness into new relationships that bolster the end game. A data-driven strategy can help with all of that. When a PR campaign uses big data in its campaign plans, resources are streamlined, costs are reduced and ROI improves. Big data enables PR and related (IMC) agencies to gather and understand information from a wide range of sources quickly and effectively. The true value of a PR campaign can be determined by an increase in sales and leads. Big data identifies customer behaviour, trends and opinions. This information can be incorporated into campaigns to enhance the provision of resources, reduce costs and improve ROI.

Friends’ as you are very well aware that Public Relations is a “relationship” business built on the basis of creativity, networking and the ability to communicate effectively through compelling content. Research is playing an increasingly important role in informing the public relations process for better targeting, better positioning and improved performance evaluation. Now, through the emergence of new research methods and advanced technologies, coupled with demands of accelerated pace of business, a new form of public relations is emerging where statistics spark creativity; data drive more fully integrated communications decision-making; and tools enable people to act more quickly and with greater intelligence. For global businesses, as well as for public relations, the driving force is known collectively as Big Data. In this new landscape, communications practitioners must evolve along with their profession to understand and come to terms with the science beneath the art of public relations.

While creativity, networking, and communications would continue to play important roles in contemporary public relations, technology, data and critical thinking have forever changed the way objectives are set, how messages are developed and targeted, how campaigns are developed and executed, and how public relations performance is evaluated. But we shouldn’t overlook the coverage that we get through traditional media, that provides a valuable source of “verified content” through the journalistic process.  Despite reports indicating circulation and audience declines, traditional media delivers credible context to help make sense of events which may directly, or indirectly, affect the organisation and the brand even when the organisation and brand are not referenced in the news coverage. Additionally, traditional media have a profound impact on social media, as news coverage often appears as a link in posts.

Today, Public Relations doesn’t only require PR practitioners to create a compelling headline of a press release but also effectively manage a pivot table, a technique in data processing in order to draw attention to useful information. Friends’ Pivot table is a table of statistics that summarizes the data of a more extensive table i.e. from a database, spreadsheet, or business intelligence program. The summary might include sums, averages, or other statistics, which the pivot table groups together in a meaningful way.

The importance of Big Data is not the vast quantity of information made available, but instead, it is the value that can be created to improve performance, and better understand competitors, consumers, employees, media, and other publics. Businesses must learn and recognize that data alone do not answer “why” or explain inferred insights. Uncovering insights of Big Data require a human element and critical thinking to create meaning.

Much of the challenge with Big Data comes from data integration of structured and unstructured data. While structured data is more organized, easier to reference, and less costly to analyze, the majority of data held by organizations is unstructured data.  Unstructured data like emails, documents, and social media data can be invaluable to organizations, and companies must find ways to effectively and efficiently harvest and analyze the data, and, in doing so, improve their ability to understand and operate their business.  Businesses must also consider where this structured and unstructured data is coming from, and what level of control it possesses regarding the data.

Big Data are also comprised of “Small Data” streams of owned material, shared material, or outside sources. Owned material, collected from internal data streams like organizational websites and company pages on social networks, is highly controllable. Whereas, external data streams, like organic social media conversations or government data, are from outside sources and allow little to no control. Internal data streams are performance drivers that show fixed and variable costs and revenues among other information, while external data streams target audience, societal and financial and economic trends, for example. The purpose of utilizing Big Data is to help the organization achieve its objectives, and create better, more efficient strategies and tactics through assumptions one can validate prior to execution and insights gleaned from that process.

The intrinsic value of data helps businesses derive meaning, recognize patterns, and make informed assumptions in decision-making. The terminology might change in the coming years but the need to strategize, collect, and analyze data will remain a top priority for the businesses. The term big data is tossed around in the business and tech world pretty frequently. In a nutshell, it's the process of taking very large sets of complex data from multiple channels and analyzing it to find patterns, trends, problems and provides opportunities to gain actionable insights. Big data is very valuable, but also a lot to handle for traditional software.

A number of companies have emerged over the years to provide solutions for wrangling huge datasets and understanding the relevant information within them. Some offer powerful data analysis tools, while others aggregate and organize datasets into usable formats. The following companies tackle big data, enabling the organisations to make better sense of their businesses and take new steps towards problem-solving.

Companies offering BIG DATA solutions are…… 

·         IBM

·         Salesforce

·         Alteryx

·         Klaviyo

·         Cloudera

·         Segment

·         Crunchbase

·         Google

·         Oracle

·         VMware

·         Unacast

·         CB Insights

·         Databricks

·         UserTesting

SOME REAL WORLD BIG DATA EXAMPLES

·         Discovering consumer shopping habits

·         Personalized marketing

·         Fuel optimization tools for the transportation industry

·         Monitoring health conditions through data from wearables

·         Live road mapping for autonomous vehicles

·        Streamlined media streaming

·        Predictive inventory ordering

·        Personalized health plans for cancer patients

·        Real-time data monitoring and cyber-security protocols

Five Essential Skills to Master Big Data

There is a whole new skill set we have to master to understand and be ready for the insights and opportunities Big Data brings to public relations. Following are five essential skills to master Big Data one can undertake right away.

1. Become an Analyst. Don’t be intimidated by data and analytics. Use the brain and look for the ways in which different insights might help to make better business decisions.
2. Learn Excel. One of the best gifts we can give ourselves is to take an advanced EXCEL course to learn how to manipulate data in spreadsheets. We need to move beyond the basics. Take a course locally, or the one linked to above.
3. Collect Data. Consider collecting our own data to supplement what we get from any tool we use.
4. Evaluate Tools. By all means keep an eye out for new tools. There are some new generations tools Big Data bring that can turn data into amazing visualizations. 
5. Ask Questions.  With all of these big data tools, understanding the methodology new tools use to analyze data will be critical. We may not know or even understand the formulas, but we can ask critical questions. Let’s not base business strategy on tools unless we fully understand their strengths & weaknesses.  

To conclude,

Big Data is evolving traditional public relations functions - permitting growth, greater efficiency and improved efficacy. While creativity, networking, and communications continue to play important roles in contemporary public relations, technology, data and critical thinking have forever changed the way objectives are set, how messages are developed and targeted, how campaigns are developed and executed, and how public relations performance is evaluated.

Big Data provides many new applications for the public relations profession, not only allowing practitioners to better analyze operating environments both internally and externally, but also expanding opportunities to move past traditional communications approaches to create better objectives, more strategic positioning and audience targeting, and to uncover more opportunities to quantify and enhance PR’s contribution to business success and its influence on the bottom line.

There is no question, the public relations profession must continue to evolve alongside Big Data, and with this growth and advancement PR practitioners can further demonstrate the positive effect PR has within business overall.  The concept of Big Data - advanced technology that allows large volumes of data to drive more fully integrated decision-making is transforming the world of business, and even more specifically, the public relations profession. Practitioners must evolve with this transformation through the incorporation of Big Data into traditional PR functions.

Public Relations, perhaps more than any other industry needs to embrace BIG DATA wholeheartedly in order to defend its place as a key business driver. Because information i.e. DATA is at the core of any good PR strategy or campaign, PROS are generally experts in monitoring and influencing public opinion. But the job is getting harder every day. We can no longer hope to assess public opinion in the traditional way because everybody has at least ten things to say and they are posting all of them online. And whether we want to accept it or not, this swath of information affects audiences’ perception about a business in addition to their buying decisions.

Today, the big challenge among PR and communications professionals is to recognize that the profession they knew is forever gone and new skills are required to learn. The accelerated pace of business, the digitization of media, need for the businesses to deliver more and better results for less have irreversibly changed public relations from a business of relationships to a business of terabytes.  For PROS, the winds of change are blowing. Those who adapt will succeed while those who ignore the emerging importance of technology, science and data in public relations will, sadly, disappear.

And, the good news is, most of the tools required to deliver on the benefits of data-driven public relations already exist. Few top BIG DATA tools are listed below….

·         Apache Hadoop

·         Apache Spark

·         Flink

·         Apache Storm

·         Apache Cassandra

·         MongoDB

·         Kafka

·         Tableau

·         RapidMiner

·         R Programming 

The challenge among PR & Communications Professionals is to recognize that the profession they knew is forever gone and new skills are required. The accelerated pace of business, the digitization of media, the need for organisations to deliver more and better results for less have irreversibly changed public relations from a business of relationships to a business of terabytes.

Thank you for reading the blog.

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