Trends in communications post COVID 19
It will play a pivotal role in shaping future communications. It is crucial now to put your audience first, to be cognizant of what’s weighing heavily on their minds and how you come in to help them. Empathy can no longer be a superficial trait among communications professionals. The audience of today can see through you and there’s no point trying to fake anything, especially empathy. It is more important than ever before to practise empathy all day, everyday.
2. Analytics
Gadgets, especially mobile phones have become a gigantic source of data on your potential audience. And data on your audience is what you need to personalise content and make sure it reaches the right audience via the right medium at the right time. But this data needs to be harnessed and made sense of. And Artificial Intelligence provides the analytics toolkit to do that with ease. Blockchain on the other hand helps you to ascertain the veracity of the data you’re trying to analyze. The use of these technologies will make one master of data source, data tools and data quality – presumably, one of the dominant trends in communications post COVID.
3. Personalised Content
Quality of content has always been a major component of all effective communications strategies. But now, personalising content is key to attract audience’s attention. It a well-known fact by now that audiences love hearing their name and the word “you”. Sending the right message to the right person at the right time will become the norm in the days to come.
5. Crisis Communication
Scientists predict that there will be many such pandemics as Covid-19 in the coming years. Looks like communicators will be up at night a lot, confounded by how much to communicate and how often. Purposeful messaging, only when you have something important to add to the ongoing discourse will win the race. It will also be interesting to see how communicators maintain the balance between being vulnerable and authoritative.
Related: 11 Tips on Crisis Communications
5. Video
With the unprecedented shortening of human attention span, it’s clear as daylight that content must be instantly appealing, short and skimmable to make it as easily consumable as possible. Audiences have been obsessed with videos lately- be it a Ted Talk or a TikTok. The phenomenal rise of OTT in Asia proves that video, as a form of content, is the most engaging and also requires the least amount of effort on the part of the audience to consume. Needless to say, video-making as a skill will grow in importance more than ever before and the form will reign supreme in the world of content, post-Covid.
The best bet for communications professionals now would be to become masters of the new rulers of the game – absolute domination mode.
This blog post originally appeared on Sulagna Chakraborty’s blog: sulagnaonline.wordpress.com
Sulagna Chakraborty
Sulagna is a student of Public Relations at SCoRe, and aspires to make it big in the world of PR. She’s a passionate learner who likes to read, write and listen, and loves spending time with children. TEDTalks inspire her and she dreams of being a motivational speaker one day, giving one of her own TED talks. She can be reached at @SulagnaChakra20 on Twitter, and as Sulagna Chakraborty on LinkedIn.
