Millennials: Changing the Landscape of Public Relations

On Tuesday March 19th, I attended the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications’ Millennials: Changing the Landscape of Public Relations. Progress SU hosted the talk with four speakers. I had the privilege of hearing from Tom Armitage, who teaches at Utica College. Kelly Gaggin, a Newhouse alum, Evelyn C. Iggram,Director of Communications for Wegmans and Jess Knauss the CEO and Founder of Digital Hyve.

Photo taken by Olivia Ly in the Herg Auditorium

The panel began by debunking common stereotypes of millennials. Jess Knauss, a fellow millennial made great points on this topic stating, "I'm sick of hearing that millennials are entitled... where the truth comes in is that I don't think it's about entitlement it's about impatience." As a millennial I found this refreshing, as I was hesitant to know how an older panel would speak about my generation. After the event I continued to reflect on Knauss’ statement. When I thought about it likes on social media, online shopping, and instant messaging are all things I have grown up with and reflect this impatience. With this impatience comes innovation, ways to complete the same tasks, but only faster and easier than ever before. Not only do we complete tasks in different ways, as millennials, we demand brands to change instantly and implement new changes when problems arise.

The panelists also focused on the basics of communication, like every student learns in COM 107 their freshman year, it’s all about mutual relationships between the PR professional and the stakeholders. Not only do professionals need to focus on the client but it’s important to focus on the people you work with, not always the people you work for.

Storytelling was also a key theme of the evening. A few of the panelists believed that millennials and the younger generations are hyperaware to ads and messages they see every day. Similar to my blog posts, Knauss’ stated that it’s the “first and last thing you check is your phone.” Due to this strong connection to the online world, communication specialists must now be transparent and genuine. Older generations are used to being told blatantly to buy something or check out a brand, however, those tactics will not work with millennials. Rather our new tactic makes us different from the rest of the population, we need filters and don’t like to adapt like older generations. That is why we are slowly reshaping the PR, and communication field entirely.

Toward the end of the event the panelists talked about what future employers look for in employees. I thought this part of the evening was helpful as a sophomore PR student. I could also tell that the rest of the audience thought so as well, as March is a tense time for college students waiting to hear back from internship application and job opportunities. They told us writing skills and photography/ video skills are the most important things they look for in students out of college.

One drawback of being a millennial is that we all want instant gratification, which normally isn’t a problem but can be in the work place. Often times we hope to become CEOs or advance quickly, but that isn’t always the case. They left the evening by stating this “Focus on the bigger picture, don’t give up, learn as much as you can and put in as much as you can. I feel very fortunate to be taking the PR classes that I do, to prepare me for the “real world.”