The crowd sourced #PRstack initiative is an example of a shift in thinking from Industrial Age to Social Age. It’s gathering pace, too, with a further 50+ public relations tools added to the database and its first Twitter chat now on Storify – writes Scott Guthrie

More than 50 products were added to #PRstack within 24 hours this week. Whilst a Twitter chat generated international input on the next phase of this open sourced public relations project.

#PRstack is the crowd sourced Google document of tools for the public relations business. Prezly, a storytelling platform for brands, has built a web app at www.prstack.co which sits on top of the spreadsheet, interrogating the data.

 #PRstack Twitter chat now on storify

Yesterday the #PRstack community met online to chat about the next steps for the initiative’s evolution. There were representatives from the US, Canada, Australia and Europe as well as the UK. Here is the summary of that Twitter chat via Storify.

Mapping PR tools to workflow stage

#PRstack maps more than 150 tools against four areas of public relations practice:

1. Publicity/Media
2. Branded/Owned
3. Influencer relations
4. Community

And seven stages in public relations’ workflow:

1. Planning
2. Insights
3. Management
4. Content
5. Channel
6. Monitoring
7. Analysis

shift in thinking: hoarding to sharing

The #PRstack initiative is an example of the shift in Industrial Age thinking to a more enlightened Social Age view. These hacks and crowd sourced disruptions bring about change. The former ‘powers that be’ aka the ‘knowledge hoarders’ become questioned and challenged. Slowly they become the ‘powers that were’.

Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms writing in the Harvard Business Review describe the shift as a transition from currency to current in an article called Understanding New Power. They write:

“Old power works like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures.

“New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.”

As public relations practitioners we need to build working cultures which praise the relentless share-ers, the givers. We need to be co-producers, co-operators and co-creators.

Origins of #PRstack

#PRstack is the brainchild of Stephen Waddington, Chief Engagement Officer at Ketchum and past president of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. I’ve written before about this initiative and its origins.

Stephen explains in a post from December, 2014 called #PRstack: Help hack public relations workflow that the idea came from a paper he delivered at the Global Alliance’s World PR Forum.

In the post Stephen says: “The paper explores how our business is modernising from publicity to influencer relations; and then to communities and social business … .The logical development of this work is to look at how you design and build workflow in each of these areas, and then how you transition or build teams”.

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