SeePR

Last week, flying below the radar of almost anyone not in tech’s innermost circles, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat down for a keynote interview at Gartner’s ITXPO* in Florida. What did Schmidt discuss? The future of the Web. And why should we, as current or aspiring PR pros care? Well, Schmidt’s forecast could mean there are many changes in store for how we do our jobs.

ReadWriteWeb summarized the meat of Schmidt’s predictions, which is a great read (with video content, too) for anyone interested in Web innovations. However, as a PR student, Schmidt really struck a chord with me when he started talking about how teenagers use the Internet. “They consume this stuff very, very differently,” he advised the audience, explaining further that teenagers are “particularly good at manipulating all these [applications] seamlessly.”

While he wasn’t addressing an audience of PR practitioners, he said one thing that rings very true for our field: “Five to 10 years from now, that’s your employee.”

Just as companies like Google must acclimate to a changing Web landscape, so too must PR practitioners as we prepare for an influx of even newer media and digital strategies that haven’t yet been conceptualized. That’s what makes defining a PR education so difficult. How do you know that the courses you’re taking today will be relevant mid-career – or even five years from now? What is that “next big thing” to hit the Internet? Some teenagers are probably already using it now, but we haven’t heard of it. Recently, the UO’s journalism school revamped its PR curriculum to better train us for the “new media” landscape, and I am very thankful. Courses are focusing more and more on the Web as a PR tool, and while we still learn how to write a news release, we have adapted it to a variety of forms and have learned how to reach out to opinion leaders who seek less conventional forms of information.

Yes! I have conquered another digital trend.

But in reality, even the tools we’re learning now won’t last too long in the changing digital workplace. PR pros in the digital age will be responsible for continually re-educating themselves as social media morphs and new communications tools are made available. I wish I could tell you more about what may be in store, but the truth is, nobody knows. Adapting to new innovations will likely require on-the-spot adjustments and training. Many PR professionals, still lagging slightly behind the learning curve, have taken it upon themselves to teach themselves the things that today’s PR students are now learning in the classroom, such as uses of Twitter, blogs and other new technologies. That’s why I really applaud Edelman for instituting the “Rotnem” program, which recently earned coverage in the Chicago Tribune. Rotnem, which spells “Mentor” backwards, “assigns junior staff members to serve as social media guides for their senior ones.” Other companies, too, have both formally and informally called upon younger employees to show superiors how to navigate the ropes of social media. As someone on the brink of starting a PR career,  I’m inspired to see entry-level practitioners working alongside high-ranking executives – including regional presidents – through Edelman’s program. What an amazing way to forge valuable relationships and start influencing decisions in the workplace! Maybe it’s my own, 20-something bias, but I think Rotnem and other informal, mid-career educational programs are an asset to the PR practice. And I can acknowledge that I won’t always be on the supplying end of the cutting-edge knowledge; we will all have to take a lesson from the young PR pros at some point in our careers, as new digital innovations again change the PR landscape. Do you agree? How would you react to being on the other side of the digital divide?

In all honesty, we’ll probably all have Schmidt to blame for half of these new innovations. Who knows what he and his cohorts at Google are cooking up right now? We’ll just have to wait, see, learn and adapt.

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*If you’re really interested, Gartner is “the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company,” and its recent symposium, ITXPO, was billed as “the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives.”