Christine Perkett recently wrote an interesting and provactive piece for her blog, Perkett Persuasion.
In it, she reminds us that PR is not dying but evolving. Media is changing and for PR firms and professionals to survive, we must evolve alongside it and adapt in order to really take advantage of everything these changes offer.
Check out her post here: Your Turn: What Can We Do Better in Public Relations?
And Check out this post by David Mullen in which he Coins the Term ‘People Relations’ – Brought to you by @Dmullen @Ariherzog @shannonpaul & @missusp - The “P” in PR Should Stand for “People”
I think blogger relations and people relations have really gained value. Word of mouth no longer means generating buzz and executing stunts, it means keeping a consistent and constant dialogue with your audience or consumer base. Obviously, as twitter evolves and becomes more of a mainstream platform, this type of engagement should be a focus in PR. Similarly, blogs are powerful a powerful and influential medium that has come to rival the even the greatest of traditional media outlets, especially when catering to a niche market. Keeping up what blogs are popular, who blogs about what topic…etc is incredible difficult because it changes every day. But for social media people, this opens the door of potential exposure, if handled correctly. As print continues to flounder, people will turn to blogs and hybrid sites that combine brand blogging with user generated info (like Gereports.com – not affiliated with them in any way,just a good example). Everyone is now both a consumer and producer. Relying solely on traditional media for outreach isn’t taking advantage of the fact that everyone’s voice is equally powerful and valid, and continues to gain authority as social media evolves. The fact that this world is ‘online’ gives a lot of people who have been in PR for a long time, the feeling that it’s not a credible medium and that it’s not valuable. As such, social media or blogger relations…and ‘people relations’ aren’t taken seriously. Blogs are spammed, twitter is used to feed useless updates about company news or brand deals…and the potential is never seen and those feelings are validated because no effort is made. We need to, as an industry, learn to respect the online community and understand that individual people are as important as major newspapers & that doesn’t devalue our jobs, rather, it provides us with an unlimited number of outlets to work with. Understanding that will help take PR to the next level. Change = Good
