“The formulation of a public relations strategy properly begins with listening, not talking.”
- Leonard Saffir, Public Relations Executive, Former VP of Porter Novelli
The field of Public Relations is a complex and important part of almost every company’s brand-building efforts. PR professionals are tasked with understanding the industry that their business operates within, and must adjust messaging, consumer engagement, and potential reactions to crises with ever-changing strategies. As the world transitions more and more into a digital space, this job is becoming increasingly difficult to successfully pull off, but there is a solution: Social Listening.
Though the tools have been around for some time, their widely-implemented use is just now being utilized to help optimize public relations work. Through listening to consumer and media sentiments, finding useful online influencers for effective partnerships, tracking key trends for up-to-the-minute intelligence, detecting a decline in brand health on social media, or acquiring the knowledge to better mitigate the fallout of a PR nightmare, social listening is now accepted as the must-have weapon in any respecting public relations team’s arsenal.
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Jeff Lutz, the Vice President of Corporate Communications and Content with Hart Inc., is an entrepreneurial innovator, and an industry titan whose work spans 15 years worth of PR experience.
