When PR meets New Media

I've been reading New Media and Public Relations,  Sandra Duhe's compilation of the best of the academic papers on New Media and it's impact on PR. It's not for the faint of heart, given that most of the papers are theses written for the text book crowd. But there are some great gems in there -- I'll be reviewing it next month in The Measurement Standard 
but in the mean time, it did inspire me to come up with my list of 12 signs that this is the end of the world as we know it:

 

12. Gatekeepers? What’s a gate keeper? 

11. Wickipedia is nearly as accurate and just as credible as the Encyclopedia Brittannica and a lot more people use it.

10. 1 no-budget YouTube video will be seen by as many people as watch the Superbowl

9. Shel Israel calls Facebook the most productive business tool he’s ever had

8. Your efforts to “manage your message” have about as much chance as Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign

7. Deadline? What’s a deadline?

6. IBM receives more leads and more exposure from a $500 podcast than it does from an entire advertising campaign

5. Employers no longer check references, they check Facebook and MySpace

4. People are paying $5000 to join exclusive versions of Facebook and MySpace

3. Google has replaced my thesaurus, Websters, the encyclopedia, and my short term memory loss.

2. Every presidential campaign has a social media consultant

1. Measurement is easy

 

Comments

[Alecia O'Brien]

Hi Katie – great post. The rise of social networking sites and video posting sites are certainly causing corporate communicators severe grief. Their work loads have increased as a result of having to spend copious amounts of time monitoring the blogs, networking sites and their international equivalents that keep popping up (think Facebook’s bigger rival, Bebo, in the UK). They’re having to develop corporate blogging rules to ensure their own employees don’t say anything out of turn and proactive PR strategies to defend themselves should a disgruntled customer decide to post a video somewhere condemning their product.

What a nightmare. It’s almost like the big, established brands of the world need to consider a new employee role for their communications department – a Corporate Communications Social Media Monitor...!

Message management is extremely difficult and is only going to become more so. As the technology continues to increase (think of the entrepreneurial and VC boom that has occurred for Facebook plug-ins), so too is the technology for tools to help comms people keep tabs on what is going on and being said.

The rules of the public relations game have changed and perhaps comms people need to rethink their playing strategy. For example, tons of journalists are on Facebook. Maybe there are some relationships that can be leveraged here? Comms people could log on, befriend their key stakeholders and learn more about the journalist’s writing and preferred pitching style than they ever could through a basic media database. If anything, it’s a step towards message management.