PR 2.0 = Communicating WITH, Not To
Social Media and Web 2.0 are altering the entire media landscape, placing the power of influence in the hands of the ‘crowd’, a crowd made of regular people with opinions, expertise and the passion of sharing those opinions with friends, colleagues and people.
Brian Solis believes that communications technology is going to fundamentally change how we communicate with each other, with family, friends, and business associates. Although people have not yet begun to see the true ramifications of actually what they’re doing with each update, which is to change how we share information and how people are getting information, and in turn, re-sharing it.
In this video interview, Brian Solis explains the deeper significance of the connections we make through social media.
Public Relations as we know it is quickly changing.
Public Relations was once an exclusive club. PR people occupied their time by writing press releases targeted exclusively to reporters and editors…
PR people are used to thinking about consumers as an audience. Prior to 1995, outside of paying lots of money for advertising or working with the media, there just weren’t any significant options for a company to tell its story to the world!
Consumers are NO longer passive but active participants via their conversations on social networks, forums and blogs.
The Web has changed everything. And the Social Web is empowering a new class of authoritative voices that we cannot ignore. Monologue has changed to dialogue, bringing a new era of Public Relations. It’s no longer about traditional media and analysts. PR must now also focus on the very people it wants to reach.
The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people and brands of their existence.
The time has come now for PR 2.0.
Traditional PR cannot any longer buy influence, same as the movement from traditional advertising. A business report published in 2007 by IBM cited the impact of changing patterns in consumption and consumer influence on content as major issues for the advertising industry. In its opening paragraph it states:
The next five years will hold more changes for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did. Increasingly, empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies are redefining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked… Traditional advertising players – broadcasters, distributors and advertising agencies – may get squeezed unless they can successfully implement consumer, business model and business design innovation.
The internet has made public relations PUBLIC again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media. Blogs, online news releases, social networks and other form of web content let now organizations communicate, exchange, converse and engage directly with consumers (buyers).
Social Media is transforming the business, ROI and the role of public relations.
Some PR 2.0 takeaways:
- Be active on social media (you have no longer the choice)
- Switch to online ‘multimedia’ news content
- Learn PR-SEO = how to optimize your news content for search
- Share your content onto social networks and social news sites
- Use Twitter to gain traffic nd for media relations
- The social media press release, if done right, is your best tool:
- - Provide all the fact checking and research the reporters need
- – Learn to use del.icio.us (or other social bookmarking) to make fact pages for a press release
- - Offer the quotes and access for interviews
- - Upgrade your newsroom to a social media newsroom (such as ours @ 90:10 Group)
