Monday, May 11, 2009

PR 2.0: New Media, New Tools, New Audiences


by Nick Holmes

PR 2.0: New Media, New Tools, New Audiences by Deirdre Breakenridge highlights the “new” Public Relations. Public relations has become a “Two-Way Highway” in the past few years. No longer does one send a press release and hope it gets published, then hope someone actually reads it. In the modern day, publics feel the need to interact with their lives.

Social Media is the face of this changing medium. Web sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have forever changed the way Public Relations practitioners interact with the publics. Using these new tools, PR professionals can place messages in places not traditionally known for news.

These new tools are developing around us. PR Practitioners needs to realize that this new medium is the way of the future and to embrace it rather than fight it.

PR Practitioners need to remember in this digital age to monitor what they send out, and the frequency in which information is released. The fastest way to lose followers is to pollute their streams with useless information. Publics are willing to share their social networking time with outside organizations, but this privilege should not be abused. As a twitter user, I have “unfollowed” many celebrities or companies when they pollute my Twitter feed. If I am doing this as a Public Relations student who understand and supports their efforts, what is this causing your average society member to do?

Social Media will continue to evolve and eventually be replaced by the next “big thing.” But until PR 3.0, this is the world we’re living in.

2 comments:

Leslie Koch said...

This book sounds really interesting! I think it's great that companies are now looking into social media, but with those strategies it's important to maintain messaging and consistency. I agree with all of your points, great post!

Kristin Bussell said...

I too think this book sounds very interesting. Social media is definitely the trend of current day society and it's really something that has a lot of potential benefit to PR practitioners, organizations, etc. Because social media is so new there isn’t a lot of textbook information out there on it so I feel like this book in itself is also an innovation.