The post has been translated automatically. Original language: Russian
Listen, let's be honest: the PR people screwed up big time. They traded people for numbers.
Go to any decent PR department right now. What will you see there? Analytical dashboards, Brand Analytics charts, endless reports on CTR, reach, and engagement. Everyone is sitting smartly, moving sliders in dashboards and praying for KPIs. PR has turned into some kind of IT laboratory branch, where instead of living people there are faceless clicks and views.
Many have forgotten how this profession began in the first place. And it started with psychology. With the ability to listen, understand other people's fears, catch fleeting moods and speak so that the person on the other end of the wire (or screen) exhales: "But, yes, they understand me!".
In the pursuit of beautiful presentations for management, many have played too much math. And that's what it led to.
The illusion of million-dollar coverage
The main disease of today's PR is metric madness. When the main guideline is the number in the "coverage" column, a person stops thinking about the meaning. He only thinks about the delivery.
The PR guy is jumping for joy: the news got into a major Telegram channel or some media outlet. The report for the boss looks divine — a million views! Everyone claps each other on the shoulder. But if you put aside this digital tinsel and show-offs, and ask real people, it turns out that this million is zero.
People opened the post, lazily scanned the clickbait headline, caught another flash of irritation from the information noise, and in three minutes they forgot both the news and the brand itself.
Algorithms have learned to measure attention — how many seconds a user looked at the screen. But they will never learn how to measure an attitude. You can collect a billion views and remain a soulless, annoying sign for the audience. The numbers have given you a false sense of control that hides the brand's absolute loneliness.
Texts without a soul
When SEO optimization or artificial intelligence tips become the main editor of your text, the most important thing disappears from communication — a live voice.
The texts become perfectly correct, smooth, and tailored to the algorithms of search engines... and completely dead. They are sterile. There is no pain, no irony, no character in them. These are just sets of letters that don't touch anything inside at all.
But a person can feel the falsity from a mile away. On an intuitive level. When a company's server crashes or flights are delayed, and the press service rolls out a dry clerical manifesto in the style of "we apologize for technical problems" — this is perceived as a slap in the face. A spit in your situation. At this point, people don't need the right words. They need to hear a human voice: "Guys, we screwed up. We're terribly sorry, we haven't slept for three days and now we'll fix everything." But for some reason, the word "sorry" is not in the KPI templates.
It's time to get back to the people
If you don't want to completely turn into robots that send spam to other robots, you will have to return the balance manually. Tools, automation, schedules — let them stay, it's a normal side job. But they don't have to be meaningful.
Stop dividing the audience into "men 25-45 years old with an above-average income." This is nonsense that says nothing about a person. It's time to look at the psychographics: how do these people live? What are they afraid of at three o'clock in the morning? What infuriates them about their work? What they love, what they talk about over a beer in a bar with friends...
Every time you write a text or come up with a project, you need to ask yourself one simple question. Not "what keywords should I insert here", but "how would a person who reads this on the subway feel after a hard shift?". Will he feel better? Will he be interested? Or will you just take away three more seconds of his life for the sake of your beautiful report?
PR is not higher mathematics. It's the art of understanding people and being able to talk to them. It's time to close the tables, turn off the monitors, and get back to basics. To lively, complex, emotional people.
P/S And now a little test for you. run this text through the AI model and let it tell you what is live text and what is generated.
Сегодня говорим о журналистике и пиаре.
Все же знают, что такое спам? Думаю, историю происхождения термина и как такового явления напоминать не нужно. Так вот, сейчас мы переживаем вторую, а то и третью волну спама. Только сегодня в этом виноваты сами агентства. С появлением ИИ некоторые, а может и все пиарщики решили - ну все, вот мы и поймали кота за причинное место. Теперь-то мы сгенерируем сотни, а то и тысячи писем для журналистов с нашим «уникальным» предложением или пресс-релизом.
Вот только они забыли про одно: редактор или журналист - это не пиксель, не строчка, а живой человек. Он прекрасно понимает, что ему сейчас пропихивают очередное, хоть и вежливо составленное «исходящее после переработки человеком продукта» письмо. Простите за откровенность, но журналист - циник, и он не глупый. Он не верит сленгу, не верит вашим красивым, выверенным, с крючками, текстам. Он верит в то, что его зритель или читатель -это человек. А кормить человека «экскрементами ИИ» - это в первую очередь удар по его репутации.
И что в итоге-то? А в итоге тот, кто поймет это быстрее - поймет это уже сейчас, - оставит ИИ-инструмент исключительно для технических потребностей. Творчество же вернет маркетологу или пиарщику, чтобы прямо живым языком, чтобы не письма в почту, а звонок по телефону…
Кстати, про звонки будет отдельный пост. Забегая вперед, скажу: а у вас сколько процентов сотрудников не звонят людям, а пишут письма в почту, телегу, вацап? Процентов 80 или больше? Если вы руководитель компании, ради интереса проведите эксперимент - уточните, сколько из них звонит по телефону. Ну, это уже я в сторону ушел, давайте к делу.
А итог в том, что вы повторяете историю американской ветчины. И я жду рождения нового термина вместо спама. Есть варианты, как назвать это? Пишите в комментарии. На сегодня все, увидимся завтра.
Как всегда – текст создан при помощи ИИ. Проверьте что здесь от меня, а что сделал ИИ.
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