Brandwatch and Cision: a story of two sides of the impact of technology on PR workflow

Job cuts are the human side of the modernisation of PR but new opportunities are being created enabling us to work smarter and deliver better work.

Cision is set to lay off 100 people in London as media monitoring revenues fall according to PRWeek. I hope that those affected are able to find new roles quickly.

It's an unfortunate sign of the shift in PR from publicity or earned media, to integrate different forms of media including influencers; owned media; paid and earned social media; and earned and owned communities.

It’s also a sign of the impact of technology. As tool savvy PR consultant Andrew Smith commented much of the media monitoring market is shifting offshore or is being automated.

You don’t have to look far for evidence.

Brandwatch held its Now You Know user conference in London today with around 500 delegates. It’s an ambitious business intelligence firm.

CEO Giles Palmer and CMO Will McInnes joined product developers to lay out the roadmap of this extraordinary British success story.

Brandwatch’s datasets include national and international social media; communities such as Mumsnet; and 8,000 different earned media thanks to integration with LexisNexis.

It provides a range of services including: audiences, conversation and media monitoring; media intelligence; and prediction.

A new tool called topic wheel announced today as part of the core Brandwatch platform identifies the key topics of conversation from a dataset. It’s an example of the rapid progress of machine learning in marketing and PR tools.

The contrast between these two sides of the same industry could not be more stark.

Photo of Giles Palmer by Michelle Goodall with thanks.