 So in our previous video, we talked a little bit about the modern history and the evolution of public relations over the last, you know, couple hundred years from the 1800s through to today. And so we've covered where we came from. I want to talk a little bit now and look into the future a little bit. Check our crystal ball and see if we can identify what may be coming down the pike for public relations practitioners in the future. So with that in mind, let's take a look at some future trends in public relations and just some key questions, things we need to be aware of in public relations that may be coming up for us in the in the next evolutionary stage for public relations. So when we think about key questions, first of all, one big one is probably already sorted out is the growth and impact of digital media. Just a huge explosion of digital media that we didn't have in 20 years ago. Really, this was not a factor nearly as much as it is today. And in fact, if we look at the social media usage in the United States, adults for adults in the United States, social media usage in 2005 was about 7 percent of the adult population in the United States. In 2018, it was 73 percent. So this dynamic explosion, exponential growth in the usage of social media, for example, in the United States as part of digital media, just just went through the roof. Another area of importance that can kind of characterize this growth force, the percentage of Americans who get some portion of their news from social media or have some portion of their intake, news intake from social media in the United States in 2012 that represented 49 percent of the population, which is pretty big. I mean, that's a lot of people getting at least part of their news intake from social media and in the span of just those eight years though, since then and we moved to 2020, we see that that number grows to 71 percent of American adults who get some portion of their news intake from social media. That's just incredible. Digital media is having an enormous impact on the entire world and public relations is not immune to that. We have to embrace that and really determine how we can best utilize digital media for growth and impact in the public relations industry as well. We're also seeing an expect to see more of an emphasis on measurement and ROI. So measurement, meaning some quantitative way to determine what impacted this public relations effort, this public relations campaign, that this work in public relations have on our bottom line. How do we measure that quantitatively? It's not just a matter of what does it feel like? It used to be just kind of in some ways you just say, well, that seemed like it went pretty well. Now, now we need to have some sort of way to quantifiably measure the impact and have that as part of our objectives and our goals as built into that public relations campaign. How are we going to measure this in a quantitative way? You know, in a very specific, quantitative way. And then also along with that, then focusing on return of investment. That's ROI. ROI is just return on investment, return on investment. So in other words, what are we getting out of this? You know, in a very specific, very quantifiable way. In fact, ROI has this formula where you just very simply divide net profit. So what is it that you gained in net? What is it that you you profited? The organization profited from this in a quantitative way. Divide that by what you spent, you know, divide what you earned by what you gained by what you spent, multiply that by 100. That gives you your percentage of ROI. So it's got that very specific formula. And organizations are looking for this now. This is again, part of the evaluation process for public relations has to do with these specific quantifiable methods for measuring and identifying return on investment from a public relations effort or public relations campaign. We're also seeing the integration of public relations and marketing. Again, I mentioned this before. We spent a lot of time defining between, you know, the difference between public relations and marketing and advertising, and they are different. They are very different. They have different functions, different objectives, different purposes, but they are also very much tied together for many organizations. So, so really seeing more of an integration between partners and partnership between public relations and marketing and even advertising in there as well. So how are they working together? Even though they have different functions, different objectives. A lot of times really how do they work for an organization together to meet those singular objectives of the organization? So we're seeing more integration and a future trend is the integration between the public relations and marketing function working together in partnership. Some additional key questions we need to have in mind as we look to the future of public relations, the intersection between public relations and corporate social responsibility or CSR. Corporate social responsibility involves a lot of different things. But basically what are the responsibilities? You know, we identify, you know, what are the responsibilities of citizens, for example, as a citizen of your community and of the United States or whatever country you're living in. What are your responsibilities as a citizen? How what are you responsible for in terms of dealing with other people and maintaining your property and so forth? What are your what are your obligations as a citizen of that of that of that community and of that of that state of that country, whatever. And we're recognizing that organizations now have the same types of responsibilities, in a sense, right? We have organizations have a responsibility to the publics that they serve. Now, one of those publics, if you're a for-profit organization, would be to your stakeholders or to your ownership and to your employees and things. But you also have responsibilities to the public around you, the publics that you serve, your customers, what you're providing them and also to the world around you to not be environmentally damaging, for example, right, to do your best to to help, you know, maintain a healthy global environment for us and to be ethical, to be fair to to your resources wisely and with good stewardship and so forth. So so how does public relations factor into all that for these organizations? That's where we're seeing more of that intersection of public relations playing a role, not just in strategy and not just application but but executive leadership decisions when it comes to corporate social responsibility. What are our responsibilities as an organization and how can we best meet those things and fulfill those responsibilities? So you're seeing more of, again, interaction in the intersection between public relations and the area of corporate social responsibility. One thing we really have to do a better job of in public relations and I think there's a real understanding of this and there've been some efforts but still much, much more to do in this area is diversity and inclusion. If you look back at the video we did on modern history of public relations, it's really a bunch of old white guys that were featured in that. Lots of people of color and minorities and women have done great things in public relations, but it's, you know, limited enough that it stands out because we have not as public relations as a field has not done a very good job of of, you know, really improving diversity and inclusion. And that's important for a couple of different reasons. First of all, I mean, just, you know, again, that social responsibility since we have the responsibility to be inclusive as a field and to really be represented well by people of all backgrounds and ethnicities and cultures and all those different types of things, right? But in a more practical sense, beyond just the ethical responsibility, it's important for a variety of different reasons, including things like how can you, as a public relations advisor, an organization or part of an organization, how can you expect to reach an audience if you're not represented in your organization by people from that audience? You know, how can you expect to speak to people from these minorities if you are a group of middle-aged white guys? How can you really understand the best way to reach and engage that audience if you're not represented, if you don't have that representation in your organization? So we need diversity for that reason, just in a very practical sense. We also need diversity for the, talk about diversity of thought and diversity of ideas as well to get out of these kind of boxes that we've been in, where we have these homogenous people of this, you know, similar background, similar, similar cultures and things. You're going to get a very limited scope of ideas with that. So you really need that diversity in public relations to help enhance the diversity of thought and the diversity of ideas and the diversity of leadership and just in terms of representation. It's a very important, in a practical sense, very important thing that we need to improve upon in the immediate future. And it's certainly in an ongoing sense as well. But this is something that needs to be a priority in the field of public relations is increasing the diversity of not just a personnel, but diversity of thought, diversity of ideas and all those types of things. So that's something in the future, in the very near future, in the immediate future and in the long term future that needs to be improved in the area of public relations. One other key question that we're going to have to answer is public relations folks, is this idea of globalization? You know, since we have this world now of digital media and we really have a broader audience, you know, organizations are multinational now. They are worldwide organizations are working all across the globe because we can, we have that kind of reach now. And so public relations firms need to be thinking outside of just their community and into, you know, a larger scope. This idea of globalization, which again can come back to diversity and inclusion. And it involves all of those types of things. But really we need to be thinking globally now and how is this going to impact the organization that we're working with or representing or whatever. How is this going to affect that organization on a global level? Not just on a local level, but now our audience is really the world. So we need to keep that in mind and have that sense of globalization. How do we best manage that? How do we best utilize that and capitalize on that as public relations practitioners? So, you know, this again just offered a little bit of a glimpse into that crystal ball. And these are more questions and answers though, right? We need to these are things we know are coming and that we need to have an answer for in the future for public relations. So it's going to be up to that next sort of evolutionary group as we expand upon this to identify what are the best answers for these key questions as we look at the future of public relations. If you have questions about this or about anything related to public relations, history, the future and so forth, please feel free to email me. I'd love to hear from you there. In the meantime, I hope that you will be thinking about these things as somebody who's potentially going to be involved in public relations in the future. These are things we need to think about now so that we have an answer for them as we move forward.