Why the future of communications is integrated
For communicators who are out to prove their impact on the bottom line, being able to work in concert across multiple channels is a crucial ability.
Picture this. You’re the communications director for a company that has separate teams for PR/communications (your team), marketing, social media and digital advertising. While there’s a lot of crossover between the work these teams are doing, there’s no real alignment.
When the advertising team plans a campaign, they might come to the communications team for messaging support, but not every time. When the digital advertising team is ready to launch a new paid campaign, they might come to marketing to see if that team is running similar campaigns on other channels, but not always.
Does this sound like an effective process? Not even close.
With so much crossover between PR, marketing, social media and digital today, you might think it’s crazy that teams can continue to operate in such silos. But while we’ve made a lot of progress on the integration of these teams and their respective work, the siloed approach still exists. In a recent survey by Intrado Digital Media and PRWeek, more than half of respondents said their brand’s marketing and PR departments still operate independently from one another, at least organizationally.
Read that again: more than half. We can, and must, do better.
What does ‘integrated’ mean?
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