WEEK 10
CHAPTER 12
NEW MEDIA AND PUBLIC RELATIONS-Kate Fitch
Internet use varies between and within countries, with factors such as age, education, socioeconomic, and geographical location impacting on levels of access and use.
Technological advances have the potential to transform the relationships and communication between organizations and publics, audiences and communities.
New media has a big impact to the practitioners.
An article by Craig Rodney 2009 stated that the impact of social media upon corporate communications is changing the role of the public relations practitioner. In short, the world has changed, and the dynamics of PR have changed with it.
Extreme changes in general media are changing how PR practitioners address content, the media and representation of their clients.
There are also many tools now available that allow the practitioner to become publishers themselves and package content for media and consumers. These outlets allow the PR agency to build its own audience and invest them in the publishing component of content (Rodney 2009).
The internet gives public relations practitioners a unique opportunity to collect information, monitor public opinions on issues, and engage in direct dialogues with public of a variety of issues (McAllister & Taylor, 2007).
This implies realising the effect that platforms such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook have where content is involved, and an acknowledgement of the changing roles in ownership of that content (Rodney, 2009).
The influence of media has also changed. Whereas in the past pure readership numbers and broad demographics were used to gauge influence, now quality beats quantity. There is always a chance that 300 Facebook users who are part of a niche group may offer more influence in a specific area of interest than 5000 magazine readers who may or may not be interested in something (Rodney 2009).
We all know the fact that facebook and twitter have a strong influence over any current affairs that are happening everyday.
That is why it is so true that a practitioner might get some help from these two social network as a part of getting people's attention over his or her promotion.
For the first evidence, I found this article that saying how he loves the way twitter and blog work.
He said he succeeded to get people to sign up for his first program that he created through twitter and blogs.
Here is how he said how useful and effective twittering and blogging are.
"Every time I post on my blogs, the post is pushed out to my twitter status. That is one form of promotion. Especially if you're using a blog to promote your product or service. Any blog title over 140 characters will be truncated and converted to a short URL. This is where it becomes really critical to pay attention to your blog post titles.
Yesterday after my previous blog post showed up on my twitter status, I got a response from one of my followers:
See, it works! Ok, so that's one person, but most people won't tell you they signed up for your program. They just do it. And this illustrates something else."
Apart from the first evidence, I do find another one over here about how effective twitter is.
This man named Ostrow was trying to write about promotion from a website builder Squarespace, where the company offered up 30 iPhones in 30 days to be randomly awarded to users who included #squarespace with their tweets.
Here is how he said after dealing with twitter.
"Not surprisingly, this promotion is working. #moonfruit is Twitter’s top trending topic today, beating out the likes of Michael Jackson (), #iranelection, and Wimbledon-related tweets. The lesson is becoming pretty clear: free stuff works as well on Twitter () (and perhaps even better thanks to Trending Topics) as on the rest of the Web."
From what I've gotten so far about the effectiveness of a twitter and blog, you know that actually it does work for the practitioner.
Obviously, we will never totally count on it, but just try to give it a shot, sure will work for you even a little bit.
That is what I got for today.
Thank you for reading.
References:
Bizcommunity, 2009. Social Media's Impact on PR. Viewed on the 15th of March 2010, from http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/18/38116.html
Mashbale, 2009. Twitter Promotion Done Right: #moonfruit. Viewed on the 15th of March 2010, from http://mashable.com/2009/07/01/moonfruit-macbook/
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