The one-time ubiquitous emblem of classic PR, the press release, has technically been dead for a while now. To be a bit more precise, His Majesty the Press Release has been dying - a relatively slow death, but a death, nonetheless. And there is no coming back. Now we are in the afterlife, thanks to the social media revolution.

Maxim Behar

Regardless of what is done in the wider communications industry, PR will always be linked to content creation. And that content remains textual, first and foremost.

Social media's almightiness has brought about many things, but the main one is transparency. Total transparency everywhere and for everyone.

Some PR professionals have been slow to grasp the scope of the paradigm shift brought by the social media revolution in our industry. Many who have grasped it have been slow to keep up-to-date with it.

Ten years ago, in order to be able to spread news, you were supposed to have a major in journalism, have a press card, and be called a journalist. Otherwise, you couldn`t. Now, to spread the news, all you need is a social media account.

That's what social media has done to our business. At the same time, it has made the PR industry infinitely more measurable, and much more transparent.

The big issue with newspapers is that there is no one to fund them anymore. Nobody can support them and bear the costs in the new environment of public communications revolutionized by online media and even further by social media.

The main feature and top advantage of social media, which has made it such a powerful instrument in the hands of PR experts, is the ability to share - and especially the intriguing possibility of seeing your post go viral. In that case, your post is so catchy and contagiuos that it spreads like an epidemic and can consequently become a pandemic.

The perception of PR agencies as editorial teams in the years of social media revolution is all the more relevant given that traditional media are no longer just endangered species, but are actually going extinct.

The perception of the PR expert as a creative liar is going to die over the next few years. It will dissolve as a notion in the public mindset, because liars simply cannot exist in modern PR life.

The tsunami of social media that has conquered global communications within a few years has swept away privacy, once predominant, and has laid the groundwork for a new world where everything is public - or is rapidly becoming so - and where everything is transparent - or is about to be.

The two main treats of the world of total transparency are its hyper-dynamics (because everything is shifting at a mind-blowing speed) and an immeasurably higher dose of ethics.

There are other classic PR instruments - press conferences, media meetings, business brunches, business conferences, etc. All those are now replaced by posts on social media, and occasionally still by personal meetings with journalists.

Therefore, it makes no sense for advertising to even compete with PR, because advertising is not competitive anymore. PR`s edge clearly rests on creative and strategic services.

This new world of total transparency and the previously unimaginable abundance of data is the level playing field in which only true PR professionals really stand out based on how they can position a client's message in the most efficient and beneficial way.

To a great extent, the PR experts need to know the target consumer, their traits, media consumption habits, preferences, everything.

Today, thanks to the social media revolution, clients actually own media and consequently a platform to express themselves.

Today, the PR business is 100 percent measurable. You can demonstrate with utmost accuracy who read what, when they read it, what gender they are, what education they have, what country they are from - we have all kinds of data to the smallest detail. That, too, is related to the transparency of our business.

Today, we are right there with the social media and hold it in our hands. In my opinion, such change of ownership always means revolution, regardless of its direction.

Visuals are becoming an inseparable part of our work as PR experts. Yet at the end of the day, we, the PR experts, are the people who manage content. We are the masters of content, whether it's textual or visual.

We can’t just say, “This pen is great, and consumers should buy it!” We ought to wrap up this message and create not only a convincing, but an interesting story around it. Here I am, improvising on the spot: A lady dropped her pen in the street, it was raining heavily, and a gentleman picked it up and said, “May I have your number?”