Case Study in Careers - How Can a Human PR Consultant Compete With Big Data Algorithms?

Public relations folks have always specialized in unique and powerful strategies to help people, candidates, nonprofits, agencies, businesses, and corporations maintain their powerful brands. Today however with the advent of supercomputers, and all of the social networks with everyone running around the Internet telling everyone else what they "liked" it's hard to understand exactly why you need a PR consultant in the first place, that is if you had that data available. Okay so, let's talk about this for a moment shall we?

You see, all a company has to do is give the people what they like, and contact those people that liked certain things with a customized message. That's a pretty easy strategy. That strategy will work for someone who's writing speeches for a famous politician, and that strategy will even work at the local level if you own a small business. Further, I would submit to you that it only takes someone that understands a little bit about social networking digital analytics to figure this out one time, and write a program, and a few simple algorithms which could make that ability simple for each and every one of us.

Am I suggesting that there will soon be an "app for that" and that you can have it for your business just as any large corporation might? Yes actually that is what I'm explaining, and as that comes into fruition, which surely it will, one has to ask if the human PR consultants will be the next job category to depart the business world? Will they all be replaced? And if they are replaced will they be replaced by computer programmers who have a little bit of marketing background and some leadership experience in a startup under their belt?

It would appear to me that this is the case, this will be our future. Now then, if you are a PR consultant what should you do? Well, you might want to think about what I'm saying here, start harvesting all that data, using it, and developing the tools to allow you to go low-cost high-volume, create a startup of your own, get funded with millions of dollars, and become the next big thing.

Because if you wait too long, the big data folks will take control of the industry, and leave you high and dry, as I fear you are next on the list of industries they plan on replacing. Indeed, I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.