For this New Year I’ll leave it to others to announce the 6,7,8, 9 or 10 most important new PR trends for 2020, all inevitably linked to technology.
Instead I’ll just focus on the single most important PR factor for any year – human intelligence.
HI may be a new concept to some, but it’s been around for ages and will continue to be a key element in any area of PR work, and all walks of life.
If it isn’t buried beneath the tidal wave of movement towards AI and all other emerging forms of new technology, while so much of what should come naturally to us all is widely being erased.
HI is the most powerful tool at our disposal. It combines all the natural skills and senses we were born with, and the vitally important, but increasingly abandoned, ingredient of common sense.
If you go to a music concert these days and are among the army of people watching the act through your smart phone, are you enhancing the live experience, or missing out?
Do you really go home and play the concert back the next day? If so, notice anything you missed at the time because the phone was in front of your face and you couldn’t see much else beyond the forest of arms raised all around?
Inside our head is a device which captures perfectly sharp and true to life still and moving images, along with the corresponding sounds, stores them away for life, and allows us to play them back at will.
I still see and hear Bruce Springsteen kicking off his 4th July 1985 visit to Wembley Stadium with ‘Independence Day’, and remember how the whole place bounced when ‘Dancing in the Dark’ blasted out.
That’s not to say that my iPhone 11 Pro, with its three cameras and everything else, isn’t a wonderfully helpful device in PR or any other business.
But it’s a device which has its place, and my New Year’s resolution for 2020 is to use it less, and do more to keep HI alive.