Opayemi calls for concrete data analysis in PR practice
By Ibidunni Banjoko
The president of Public Relations Consultancy Association of Nigeria (PRCAN), Israel Jaiye Opayemi has called for concrete data science in Public Relations practice in Nigeria. He made the call during his opening speech at the 7th Lagos Digital PR Summit, which has the theme, “Digital Communities: New Frontier Building Relationships”. The summit took place recently at L’eola Hotel, Lagos.
Opayemi said: “My joy is that this summit is being held at a time when our nation itself is in conversation with the existence of new digital communities that may shape the future of our country. You hear people saying that the outcome of the next election will be determined by the active youths of the nation.
“We are practicing public relations in the age of data. We’ve gone from discussion around data warehousing, big data, data league, and we are now confronted with the reality of data science. Be you in the public relations department of the Nigerian navy or you are working for politicians, the government or the organized private sector, one of the questions you must ask yourself is: What is the role of data science today in the practice of public relations?.
“It is not enough to have data; anybody can have data. But you have to break down that data and now begin to put them in clusters, looking at the patterns and asking yourself critical questions, then you can begin to form your strategy,” he said.
“The critical question that will arise if somebody throws that kind of data at you about the outcome of the next national election is that you will calculate how many people registered PVCs, then how many of those people have actually collected their PVCs? How many of those people will likely collect their PVCs before the Election Day? Now you can see that you are breaking the data down and you are now putting them into clusters. You’ll also ask yourself how many of those people belong to some of the established political parties, and how many belong to the new ones? With these you are beginning to have an insight into how these will shape the outcome of the election,” he explained.
Opayemi advised the PR practitioners not to just take data for data’s sake and then begin to quote them, adding that they should analyze the data to demonstrate the capability of professional public relations people.
“Big data is nothing if you can’t break it down and understand it. You can’t even predict the trends unless you do all of these,” he said.
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