What is the role of the new communication professional?

I’ve been studying communication for almost six years and I still have much to learn, but in the past year and a half during my masters degree I realized and learned that the new communication’ professional must do a little of everything.

Its not just about knowing how to create a nice layout for a website, or develop a PR plan, talk with clients, know about marketing or write a blog. It’s everything.

The new professional must be like communication itself now day; multimedia. We’ve heard so much about integrated communication, advertising on and off line and all those topics that are looking for transmit the message and create a connection between communicator and audience. It is crucial, in the process of creating content, to understand or know what is going on around the communication area. Spread the message, form opinions and stimulate discussions, and receive feedbacks about what was transmitted

Our profession is unique. In many professions people specialize in something and basically do that all the time. Our area moves fast and changes even faster, and we have to pick it up. New technologies are born each day; however, the old ones are still there working as usual. Furthermore, most of the old ones are connecting with the newer technologies.. We can see TV channels in tablets and smartphones, we have Internet radios, and even a coffee mug has multimedia connections to our smartphone cameras.

So, why do the communication professionals have to know just about TV or radio, PR or production, marketing or advertising? Marshall McLuhan famous sentence ‘the medium is the message ‘ is becoming stronger truer in my point of view. The medium now leads and shapes the message. Companies, advertising agencies and professionals are developing researches, cases and even theories about how to convert, create and adapt messages and contents in many different mediums.

Even when the message is good by itself but goes trough the wrong medium it will fail in its main goal, communicate. It’s not about each medium having an audience profile and the PR agency studying and identifying which medium to use to reach the target. This used to happen ten years ago, but our area, as I said before, moves too fast. Today the message must be in every possible medium in order to reach the target anytime and anywhere, and adapting the message is a key factor for success.

That’s the reason why today’s communication professional has to be multimedia. There isn’t a way to create an effective multimedia message if it does not come from a person who understands what is going on around him and knows the communication world in a 360 degree way. So if you are a communication professional, re-think it, re-do it and do it in many different ways until your message reaches someone and gets back to you. Once it gets back to you, which mean it worked and its time for something new.