PR just keeps getting better... PR 2.0

Deirdre Breakenridge states in her article, PR 2.0: A Communicator’s Manifest, that “PR 2.0 puts the public back in public relations”. For a while, PR professionals took the back seat and worked behind the scenes of their brands and corporations. Due to social media, PR is back in the public world interacting and making appropriate changes to better businesses along with their audiences. Technology was able to connect the world through social media. It is important to understand as Brian Solis, principal of a PR and new media agency in the Silicon Valley, stated “understanding social media is more about sociology and less about technology”. It is about understanding social communications, where technology is only a vehicle, your fuel is social communication, you are the driver and your brand is the model.

Social media has directly affected the roles and lives of PR professionals. Social media changed the way PR had to connect to their audience and brands. The difference is that now PR jobs engage their audience in communication in order to better understand what it is that they need. Due to broadband connectivity, PR professionals can now use many outlets to relate to their audiences.

There was a time when it was only up to the professionals to create relationships between brands, especially in the world of business. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and various other forms of social media facilitate the ability to build relationships through communication. Today, you don’t need to be a computer genius to interact or communicate online, but you do need PR knowledge to brand yourself properly. PR professionals had to learn how to maintain these relationships because although they can be easily created they can be even easier to destroy. Blogs for example allow for personal expression from being the most simplistic to the most elaborate of ideas. Maintaining a blog is a key factor in identifying ones brand. Through online social media, people are still learning how to be careful with the information that they decide to post and allow other to see.

In Tom Peters’s article, The Brand Called You, his opening statement is: “It’s a new brand world”. It’s true; thanks to technology the world has evolved at a drastic pace within the last several years. Tom Peter continues to state that, “the Web makes the case for branding more directly than any packaged good or consumer product ever could.” Communicating with others and getting your brand out there has never been easier.

PR professionals had to be inside the scope of social media in order to understand their audiences. People started putting their thoughts and ideas out more readily than ever. This allowed PR to make use of the communication circling within certain audiences and use it to benefit that audience’s brand. As a prospective PR professional it is important to become a part of this growing giant called social media, because this trend is continuing to expand and with full force.