By: Christy Ferguson
Public relations professionals are always looking for new trends to improve the business. According to many articles online that discuss public relations trends of 2010, social media is becoming one of the best vehicles for public relations practitioners to reach their target audiences and/or clients. This semester my campaigns group and I have been using all different forms of social media (Facebook, Twitter and blogging) for our client the Norman Arts Council. Within a few months, the awareness of the NAC has significantly increased just through the usage of social media alone. Along with Facebook and Twitter, the new social media foursquare is a great way to interactively keep in touch with what is going on around you in the city where you live.
Because we now live in a very fast paced world, social media is a nice tool that allows for public relations professionals to stay in touch with work and clients while on the go. Handheld electronics make it even easier for people to access their social media, and I feel that sometimes it has even become a distraction within the working world. Although social media is a great tool for the PR professionals, we don’t want it to distract people to the point where it is the only thing they rely upon.
In the article Public Relations Trends 2010 by Christine Perkett, she says, “It’s an exciting time to see PR going back to people and relationships. Successful PR executives know how to build and maintain quality relationships – today, social media is a core part of making that happen.” I completely agree with this but at the same time I think PR professionals have forgotten how important it is to create mutually beneficial relationships and to actually meet face to face with a client rather than over the Internet. If you please your client or employers by doing good work for them, then you have benefitted from this relationship because you know that can do your job to the upmost ability. Don’t get me wrong, social media and the Internet are great, but we need to make sure that we are still creating strong relationships and keeping clients in the forefront of our minds at all times.
CR Ransom’s article 2010 Five Smartest PR Moves and Trends to Start Now, gives great advice to those who are already in the PR field or who will be in the near future. These PR moves included everything from value awareness and branded exposure to event effects and social engagement. I think event effect is interesting because it is basically creating events “that leave lasting effects to influence brand loyalty.” We so often promote events whether there is a “wow” factor or not. It’s time that PR professionals go out and promote events that they know will be successful and stand out among other events.
I look back 10 years ago and wonder how people communicated without the social media we have today. Social media has made our job as PR practitioners more efficient and it is easier to stay in contact with those who are important to us. Another great thing about social media is that it is constantly growing and with that, the communication vehicles seem to be getting better and better. For instance, we started out with MySpace followed by Facebook, Twitter and now foursquare. What will the future bring?
Image courtesy of http://www.dirjournal.com/guides/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/social-media.jpg
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