Public Relations professionals need to start being held more accountable for campaigns, Twitter Australia’s head of PR and communications, Nathan Burman believes.

“As PRs we should have a reasonable indication of our campaign launch or product launch is going to go. Or what kind of coverage we might expect to see,” he said.

“And I think we should be able to report back on ‘did this actually play out the way we thought it was going to?’ but also, we should be measuring and looking at what’s happened from that as well.”

The debate as to whether PR sits in the art or science category continues to stew, with a number of PR pros such as Burman, Claire Young from Red Balloon, Peter Witts from Amazon, Peter Hook from Hook Comms and Ambera Cruz from Meltwater, going head to head on the issue in a webinar tomorrow.

If you haven’t registered, make sure you do here. It’s going to be a ripper.

Hook from Hook Communications recently told B&T the industry is being trashed by unrealistic expectations.

“The biggest issue I see for the PR industry today is completely unrealistic expectations in many cases caused by public relations people not briefing their clients well enough,” he said.

“They create an impression that things can be achieved based on what the client wants, as opposed to understanding how the news cycle works and working within that framework.”

For Burman and the art area of PR he said they now have to be more creative in how they pitch campaigns and stories, “especially when we look to give a new perspective on things people might have heard before.”

But when it comes to the science side of the coin, “PRs have probably gotten away with being not as accountable as they may have always been for a while.”

From a pure PR Twitter point of view, Burman said they look at how the results went, not just in terms of Tweets, but what happened and whether they expected it or not.