AI, AI, Chief: Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Changing The PR Game

✍️ Opinions

Subham Kumar

May 31, 2024 — 4 min read

AI, AI, Chief: Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Changing The PR Game

This article has been contributed by Ms. Pallavi Tinekar, Vice President - Technology & Startups, Concept Public Relations.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to impact our lives right as we use cloud-based service platforms for some information, play music from an app, or take help from satellites for routine navigation to avoid traffic. It also continues to assist in managing communications, identifying potential crises, and generating content, in the field of Public Relations. Many PR pros are increasingly and enthusiastically accepting the use of AI tools to deep dive and understand what better outcomes they can generate maximizing their efforts. A recent study on the use of AI technology by PR pros revealed that the majority surveyed already utilize AI in their work. There was a direct correlation between ‘happy’ PR pros using AI in their work, and feeling confident about their ability at work. This indicates that those who use AI technology to enhance their PR and communications work often perceive its benefits more positively. It is key for agencies and firms to understand the potential benefits as well as the drawbacks of incorporating AI into their work.

AI’s multifaceted role in PR

PR campaign planning: A large language model like ChatGPT can help with each campaign step: from defining objectives, identifying the audience, creating content, identifying tools, planning outreach, and impact measurement.
Content creation and strategy: AI’s role in content goes beyond basic content generation i.e. in ideation, writing tasks, and editing and ensuring brand consistency across diverse formats.
Media monitoring and analysis: AI has revolutionized media monitoring as it sifts through vast data, providing key insights into sentiment, trends, and influencer activity, crucial for reputation management and strategic planning.
Research purposes: Research is central to a lot of activities in PR and AI-powered tools prove to be valuable business assets to PR in their ability to perform time-consuming tasks. Some tools have proven efficient in conducting research and providing the desired results, freeing up time for more creativity.
Data-driven audience insights: Data is central to PR to land effective messaging, coverage, and overall impact. Automated data analysis and predictive analytics are increasingly becoming important to PR, thereby enabling effective PR strategies based on audience preferences and behaviours. This means that AI algorithms can now identify patterns, monitor online trends and news, and help evaluate the effectiveness of PR efforts.
Crisis management and response: During crises, AI can assist with real-time data analysis and provide invaluable insights offering immediate crisis support in managing communications, maintaining consistency across channels, and providing insights for strategy adjustments.
Enhanced audience targeting: We can dive deeper to understand stakeholder demographics, psychographics, and behaviours, with AI which in turn helps to understand the target audience, message personalization, measure the effectiveness of the campaign, and push the traditional PR measurement periphery. With advanced AI tools, data analyses and the delivery of insights will become easier, and PR professionals will be able to effectively target their messaging to their audience.
Creating press releases and reports: Natural Language Generation (NLG) technology can assist PR practitioners in creating personalized content tailored to their target audience, thereby allowing more time for creative content creation and strategic thinking. However, human intervention is still critical for the communication process.
Data-driven media relations: There is a whole new world for data analysis to help PR teams monitor and analyze media coverage and identify key trends and opportunities. Key metrics such as audience reach, sentiment analysis, and engagement rates, can assist PR professionals to identify media outlets and journalists most relevant at delivering their message to their target audience. This understanding also fuels future media relations strategies.
Creating media lists: An AI media list generator incorporating machine learning algorithms from GPT-4 is a cutting-edge solution as it helps create customized media lists, identify media coverage prospects, conduct sentiment analysis, and monitor media impressions. These tools also help PR professionals identify resonating content for their target audience. Ultimately, this enables them to create more effective campaigns.
Video and monitoring: With increased consumption of video and video-based content, it is pertinent to note that AI can help create videos faster, without a crew, actors, sets, and complex editing software. Text-to-videos help create thought leadership content and monitor for deep fake content to avoid brand crises.
Email replies: Effective overall communication by analyzing language patterns and context to produce polite and empathetic responses, helping to avoid any unintended passive-aggressive or negative undertones is possible with AI. These tools also help to map individual preferences as well as follow organizational guidelines.
Reputation Management: With AI in public relations, sentiment analysis is widely used to monitor, measure, and handle public sentiment toward brands, campaigns, or public figures, bringing a lot of value to reputation management.
Crisis communication: During crises or sensitive situations, AI-based sentiment analysis aids PR teams in monitoring and evaluating public sentiment. It further helps in detecting negative sentiments for immediate response/action.
Budgeting: PR teams can analyze historical data, market trends, and campaign performance, for budgeting purposes using AI tools. Continuous learning by uncovering patterns and correlations within the data, leading to optimized budget distribution to realize expected outcomes, evaluate the cost-effectiveness of various PR activities, and recommend optimal strategies for resource allocation.
Speech-to-text applications: With the increasing frequency of collaboration and in turn meetings, it has become pertinent to document these to maintain accuracy, and follow up on action items. Such tools can also assist in last-minute speech writing, thereby saving time.
Influencer identification: AI tools can help identify the right influencers by deep-diving the social media data. Follower count, engagement rates, content relevance, and audience demographics can help make quick decisions on influencer identification.

Conclusion

There is a growing need to adapt to the evolution of AI. While many human elements are still absent from AI, data still needs to be interpreted accurately to gain prominent insights. We anticipate more testing for AI to help solve actual PR problems. Having said that, it is critical to acknowledge that AI will automate repetitive tasks and in turn free up PR teams to focus on more core actions supporting business growth.