Expect the unexpected in 2017
Facebook is rolling out its Year in Review videos enabling users to relive all their favourite memories from 2016 with a personalised video at the top of your news feed.
It is of course perfect timing at the end of a year and highlights the challenge for media organisations as they start to roll out their own reviews of the year. An automated service which condensed all the events of year would be useful given the sheer volume of news in 2016.
Political journalists have been competing to compute just how much news there has been this year with Journalist of the Year at the British Journalist Awards Laura Kuenssberg estimating it has been “five years of politics in 10 days”. Which is a lot but sounds about right.
Compressing five years into one annual review will be a challenge and the newspaper reviews of the year may need to be serialised over several days for those who have the appetite to read all that has happened. The celebrity death sections alone will fill a few days.
After 2016 there will inevitably be the sequel of 2017 and the indication is that the pace is not going to slow down that much.
January 2017 will see the inauguration of President Trump and the 15th anniversary of the launch of the Euro. By the end of March 2017 the UK will almost definitely have triggered Article 50 and the official process of leaving the European Union will have started. In addition there are elections in France and Germany as well as the Netherlands.
Communications professionals planning for the year ahead can draw up grids and planning documents and produce Excel spreadsheets bristling with known events and their dates for next year. You can – if you like that sort of thing – produce lists of the dates when UK inflation and unemployment figures are going to be released for all next year. You can even treat yourself to GPD announcements if you are that way inclined.
The temptation is to give up on planning ahead or simply to plan a few weeks in advance. If everything is uncertain and it is hard to take decisions then it can seem to make sense to simply wait and see.
Sitting back and waiting for things to happen and then reacting clearly is an approach but it is not an approach which will help organisations to communicate authoritatively and to deliver on business aims. Expecting the unexpected and remaining flexible is the better approach.
While others are focusing on the review of the year it is vital to be focusing on the year ahead. You cannot predict everything that is going to happen but you can prepare. Of course if you can predict everything that is going to happen then please get in touch.
Written by Kevan Reilly, Director