Social media and PR basics

Social media is getting wider, more popular and versatile all the time, but what does it have to do with public relations? Well at first social media is powerful and flexible tool that can be used on various fields, so why not also in PR? It provides PR professionals with new tools and helps them to build stronger relationships. It’s a sort of whole new PR arena with whole new opportunities, and it actually kind of serves us all well to stay up on the media trends—learning faster, easier ways to share information. In today’s fast developing world, nearly every “public” with whom you’re trying to build a relationship is online.

In generally marketing can be split to two activities: advertising and Pr. Advertising is paid activities, where for example company’s products are promoted. Pr on the other hand is so called un-paid activity. It includes media relations, internal communications, government relations, issues management, development, and lobbying and even more. But in this point of view social media falls under PR because its unpaid – and thus PR. On the other hand many departments incorporate social media.

http://pr.typepad.com/pr_communications/2009/07/defining-public-relations-for-social-media.html

 

PR professional Steve Rubel even predicted that social media is transforming social media. Rubel states that some of the practices of public relations are becoming obsolete and that the new era of public relations is just beginning.

http://www.podtech.net/home/930/social-media-transforming-public-relations

That was just some basic information about social media and PR. I will probably go little deeper to this subject in future and write more about it. Below are also some useful web sites and one interesting blog about social media and PR.

 

http://metricsman.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/five-social-media-pr-measurement-trends-to-watch-in-2009/

http://www.slideshare.net/eschipul/strategic-pr-with-social-media

http://prandtheweb.com/

-Ilari-