The world of communications and marketing is constantly changing, but are the communicators, marketeers and everyone else keeping up? How do we ensure that specialists walk the walk, and not just talk the talk, and how do we put plans in place so that the non-specialists ie the general workforce, learn to adapt?

Communications has moved on, from social media broadcasting to engagement, from print to video, from news release to news hub, from a sometimes semi-detached service to a fully integrated business function, from just gift wrapping a business’s work to actually contributing to it. But in reality, has it?

Those of us who lead and work in such teams, and those who work in organisations which claim to have an integrated function, should ask ourselves if we’ve truly modernised, from overall strategy right through to day-to-day activities? We’re probably all guilty of slipping back into old habits if we’re not careful and if we take our eye off the ball. I am at times guilty of this, how about you?

Does your social media activity engage with your customers and colleagues, actively living your brand, or are you just pushing out messages to tick a box and show your face? Are you engaging with the wider world on other organisations’ and individuals’ accounts, or are you just logging on to LinkedIn or Twitter for a minute or two every day and liking a few posts, including your boss’s? Most of us know what we should and shouldn’t be doing, and nobody likes a crawler.

Video content is taking over the internet, which is great news, but how much of your content is still print based and not digital? Are the leaders, movers, shakers, and everyone else in your organisation learning to love the camera, as they really should, or are they still typing a paragraph or two to avoid confronting their stage fright? And have your communications specialists been upskilled sufficiently behind the camera to help everybody be at their best in front of it?

The skills sets for communicators and marketeers have moved on, and yet recruitment practices for these specialists haven’t. Do we want formally qualified CIPR or CIM candidates, or people who have developed a wide set of skills, experiences, and successes through different means?

Personally speaking, I don’t care where they come from, as long as they are adaptable, skilled, willing to continually learn, sufficiently confident to take risks, shrewd enough to adopt an evidence based approach and, most importantly for me, have the right attitude to achieve success both for themselves and their organisation. A bad attitude, and an unwillingness to move with the times, are the kiss of death. This still leaves room for the innovators and the disrupters, providing they have the greater good in mind, but we should cast the net as wide as we can.

Equally, across organisations the non-specialists need to embrace the new world too. I was once told that communications was too important to leave just to the communications team, and this was sound advice. An organisation will fail to communicate and engage effectively if its general approach is stuck in the past, it’s incumbent upon every employee to embrace new techniques and challenges. Being scared can not be a legitimate excuse for inaction, and in reality everyone needs to become a specialist to some extent.

We all need to be conversationalists – not broadcasters, identifiable video stars – not anonymous producers of prose, flexible and adaptable – not rigid disciples of theory, and risk takers – not hiding behind traditional techniques.

If this is you, then the future is bright.