3 things communicators need to know in 2013

I hope that in the next few years we will stop addressing each other as PR, marketing or social media strategists—or whatever the fancy titles are—and start referring to each other as content managers, because that’s what we try to do.

We invest time, energy and money to produce content that will encourage our key audiences to positively engage and respond to us.

The year is almost over, and as we define our 2013 communications strategies, I want you to keep these three critical elements in mind. These elements will make or break your success:

1. Diminish the lines between PR, marketing and social media.

As the chief marketing officer or chief of communications, your goal will be to bring together all areas of content creation and curation in your organization under one umbrella. We can’t afford to take a silo approach anymore, especially when our customers demand real-time information available to them at the palm of their hands.

Moving forward, your title will have very little to do with your ultimate objective, which is to create relevant, engaging and valuable content for your target audience that positively affects your bottom line. We need to consistently think in terms of a content strategy that helps us solve our customers’ problems.