When social media rose to prominence and started becoming relevant as a reputation enhancer and awareness tool for brands, the advertising and marketing worlds became embroiled in a silent war over who would win the spoils. The prize was simply too lucrative to leave it to chance to determine who the best suitor should be.

To many, the victor has yet to be officially declared as social media still oscillates in the limbo between social media stand-alones, the various traditional marketing communication disciplines and corporate departments. The reality, however, as it emerged from the recent Bell Pottinger debacle, suggests that social media has become a formidable weapon in the arsenal of the public relations army.

The UK-headquartered PR firm was expelled by Britain’s Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) on account of its unethical conduct in the handling of one of its South African clients, during which it manipulated social media to incite racial hatred to help it achieve the campaign objectives.

The Bell Pottinger bomb exploded at a time when the $14 billion (Dh51.42 billion) global PR industry had managed to regain much of the ground it had lost in terms of relevance and revenues for the spoils in the social media war. This growth is expected to continue unabated, mainly driven by content creation and the industry is predicted to reach the $20 billion by 2020 according to last year’s USC Annenberg Centre for Public Relations global study.

Social media has provided communicators with unparalleled advantages in terms of reach and precision targeting; but with increased power comes increased responsibility — like being in a possession of a nuclear bomb but having neither the ethics or a basic understanding of its catastrophic consequences.

For, when billions are at stake, people of low morals usually tend to take shortcuts to achieve their aims with little regard to societal values. And the advent of new technology through its usage in brand marketing or political campaigning has become their ally and alibi at the same time.

A recent example of such behaviour came to surface along with accusations against the unethical use of Facebook and its role in enabling dubious Russian-funded, Trump-trumpeting promoted posts find their way into the news feeds of undecided American voters before the November elections.

And what’s even more disturbing than the callousness of an unethical service provider like a PR agency is the refusal of social media behemoth companies to accept any responsibility, claiming that they merely provide the technological means to an end.

Yet, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of Silicon Valley’s golden boys are all too aware that their Big Data power in shaping human behaviour and predicting attitudes has rendered their algorithms ferocious propaganda tools for the unscrupulous and those interested in fuelling hatred.

If social media is allowed to continue its destructive path unchecked, uncontrolled and unregulated, the PR industry puts its own hard-earned reputation at risk. A few years back, the PR world took a giant leap of faith betting its future on the rise of the untested social media bandwagon.

Today, the industry is on the verge of derailing from its ascending orbit and in need of an urgent readjustment to prevent a catastrophe of cliff-dropping proportions.

With social media now well encroached at the centre of PR campaigns and strategies, what does the PRCA plan to do next to moderate cyberspace to prevent similar incidents?

As Francis Ingham, director-general of PRCA and chief executive of the International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO), told me during a chat in the aftermath of the Bell Pottinger scandal: “Social media’s presence within PR campaigns is hardly new, of course, but it is certainly growing. We intend to police even more proactively than before member behaviour. And we would not hesitate from taking the same action if necessary.”

Only time will tell whether social media is a curse or a blessing for the PR industry. And PRCA’s bold action to expel Bell Pottinger was a step to the right direction.

But an awful lot still needs to be done imminently to reboot the industry in light of the proliferating digital landscape.

The writer is head of PR and Social Media at Al Futtaim and author of ‘Back to the Future of Marketing — PRovolve or Perish’.