With New Year’s Eve fast approaching, Stephen Waddington highlights some resolutions that should be on all PR pros’ lists

"Set yourself personal learning objectives each year”

Read more, more widely: One of the characteristics that mark out an industry from a profession is a memory and body of academic work. Other disciplines aren’t shy about incorporating theoretical models but when it comes to PR we too often rely on instinct rather than rigour. 

Get your geek on with a big little data collection: We all have incredible access to data that can help us understand audiences and listen to what they think about us, our products, services, competitors and the market. This is big data. We’re also able to understand how an audience engages with our work because every action on the social web leaves an audit trail. That’s little data. Every PR needs a geeky data collection.

Let insight be your guide Media analyst Altimeter suggests that we are exposed to more than 3,000 brand messages per day. Most are lost in the noise of daily life. Those that reach their intended audience and resonate are almost always based on a creative idea that is integrated and engages with its intended audience across multiple channels.

Make like Scorsese Content in all its forms is the drum beat of PR campaigns. We need to get out of our comfort zone of text and images. A modern practitioner needs to be confident in working, and ideally producing, all forms of content. Experiment with creating these different forms of content and applications such as Instagram and Vine. Soon every CV will need these skills.

Be on trend We operate in a broad media environment yet frequently limit our campaigns to owned, shared and earned channels. The changing nature of media means that in 2014 campaigns need to include a paid component. If you’re a PR purist who believes paid media isn’t something that we should consider, please think again.

Rock that scientist look Ever since the era of Edward Bernays, PR has been about putting psychology and the understanding of human nature at the heart of our work. Increasingly we’ll see social science take prominence in our strategic work. Now’s the time to get your lab coat and spectacles sorted.

Get your swagger back We work in the business of communications and so it stands to reason that we need to be good at communicating. If you want to get on, you need to be confident in producing your own content and presenting. You need to be able to persuade senior leaders or clients of your view. 

Understand the cheese The public relations business has traditionally been lousy at proving its value. Rather than addressing this issue head on we’ve relied of faux proxies such as advertising equivalent value. In 2014, we need to understand how to define measurable objectives and tie them into business objectives.

Continuous learning, like foundation knowledge, is an attribute of a profession. Our business is changing fast. The value of our services is increasingly recognised and appreciated by organisations but we need to ensure they remain relevant. Set yourself personal learning objectives each year to tackle the areas covered here.

Stephen Waddington is European digital and social media director, Ketchum, and president of the CIPR.