The first few years of my PR career in Silicon Valley were marked by a singular frustration — most PR professionals did not aspire to be, nor were they particularly expected to be, as driven to innovate in their own field as their clients were in theirs.

"Just get into the Journal," seemed the dictum. "Everything else is secondary."

For a number of reasons so tangential to this story as to be distracting, the advent of social media is what kept me in public relations at a point in 2001 when I asked myself "Is this all that there is?" Years later, I'm glad to see there's a lot more. A hell of a lot more.

For what it's worth, 2009 will be the year when real innovation starts to come back into PR — not in the relatively cosmetic form of press releases gussied up in Web 2.0 regalia and such, but fundamental changes in how the art of communications is applied day-to-day. Some of these changes won't be all that sexy. Most of them will be perhaps only operational in nature. However, they will be no less important.

I won't venture into trying to predict the innovations themselves but, rather, discuss the emerging conditions that make them possible.

The Tourists Are Going Home... Again

In 1998, anyone who could fog a mirror was in PR... and was gone by 2001. During that period, pundits and journalists cloyingly used the word "innovation" to describe businesses that were little more than undifferentiated online storefronts for commodities.

Similarly, starting in 2005 - 2006, anyone with a blog became a "social media consultant". While people can argue the relative merits between generalists and specialists, one thing is for sure: You need to be a communicator first, a "social media expert" second or even third. This distinction is what will separate the tourists from the residents in the current downturn.

A painful industry shakeout is inevitable, but the people with a real passion for modernizing and humanizing communications — and who can make the business case for same — will succeed. These are the people who have personally invested in their craft and will drive sustainable innovation in PR.

As Microsoft's Don Dodge recently reminded us, "Tough times never last, tough people do."

Doing More With Less

A few years after the Cold War ended, some American tech companies — Sun Microsystems, in particular — set recruiters after Russian computer programmers with both fists. The reason was simple: Due to export restrictions, the Soviet Union could not get a hold of the latest and greatest computer processing power. As a result, they were forced to write code that was very tight, efficient, and even elegant in order to eke every bit of performance out of the meager hardware available, akin to swinging a weighted bat in the on-deck circle before stepping up to the plate and knocking the ball out of the park. (I can imagine Yakov Smirnoff, with taped glasses and pocket protector, barely able to contain his glee while sitting in front of a SPARC workstation and delivering his trademark "What a country!" line.)

When I was an independent practitioner in 2002 - 2005, Web tools — and especially RSS — were indispensable if I was to deliver a level of service comparable to what I could when I managed a staff of two or three. Trusted bloggers, in particular, became my "information processors" — if something mattered to Jon Udell, for example, I was about 85% sure it mattered to me.

Similarly, in the current downturn, marketing departments — few of which would ever describe themselves as adequately funded in good times or bad — will be forced to master Web tools in the operational sense (e.g., subscribing to search feeds, etc.) as a matter of necessity, even if they were reluctant to do so in the past. Competitiveness quickly gets people past the idea that such activities are "just for geeks" or another unwelcome mouth to feed in addition to an overstuffed inbox.

As Hugh McLeod says, "Human beings don't scale". While that may be true, learning to use technology (rather than the other way around) to increase your information processing capability is a critical skill for the modern communicator. If you haven't already, now is the time to do it.

When the economy turns itself around, marketers who have seen the value of learning these tools to increase their own ability to process information will find themselves much better prepared. In a few years, you can probably count on another geometric explosion in the amount of information humans produce and that knowledge-workers are expected to make actionable.

People Are Finally Realizing That It's No Longer A Technology Issue

We're seeing this play out now: DellOutlet's use of Twitter.Com netted $1 million for the company — more than I think Twitter has made and at near-zero cost. The George-Wright-helmed effort for WillItBlend had an initial outlay of $50 and increased product sales five-fold.

Why are these examples important? Well, it's essential to look at how far we've come in a decade. During the dot-com boom, which I'm proud to say I blissfully avoided, the MIS departments of many companies held the keys to the company's Web site. Now, a skillful communicator with maybe slightly more computer savvy than it takes to set up a BlogSpot blog can build properties as advanced as social networks for relatively little money and still provide excellent experiences. Robert French's PROpenMic network, based on a fairly inexpensive deployment on Ning.Com, holds its own against efforts that I can only assume are more richly funded.

In the efforts described above, the keys to success were creativity, commitment, and sweat-equity. The technologies used were secondary, and, today, the selection of platforms is even broader. Despite the marketing services industry's tendency to lionize the more expensive campaigns within its awards programs, the examples that practitioners, students, academics, and companies will most want to see are those where cheap or inexpensive technologies, aptly used, yielded incredible results.

The PR 2.0 arms race is over. The question remains, "Now that many in the PR industry have been at this for some time, what have you actually done?"

Only The Dynamists Survive

Students interested in a PR career will often ask me "What is your typical work day like?"

My answer: If you're looking for a job that offers a "typical work day", then you might want to seek another line of work, especially in 2009.

In her book The Future And Its Enemies (1998), Virgina Postrel re-dissected the world, not into "left/right" or "liberal/conservative", but into "dynamists" and "stasists". The latter (you can find examples from both sides of the aisle) seek to exert control at all times, usually from a central source, believing that innovation and change must be carefully managed. In other words, if something exists outside the "norm", it is somehow "wrong" and must therefore be "pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered". Dynamists, on the other hand, exist "where creativity and enterprise, operating under predictable rules, generate progress in unpredictable ways."

(At the risk of committing Web 2.0 heresy, I've come to regard Postrel's book as much more inspiring than The Cluetrain Manifesto, my opinions of which I've published before. I highly recommend you read it.)

To me, Postrel's notion of dynamism is more than just a fun theory about how innovation happens and societies might ideally work. When I think about how Future hits me where I live, I think of dynamism as a guiding philosophy by which public relations remains relevant as a management and communications discipline in the long term.

That's how I'm going into 2009. My only hope is that, in the effort to mitigate risks in uncertain times, people don't stop taking them.