What is Public Relations?

The question is so simple but there are numerous answers to this. Well people often relate public relations with other professions. It is far beyond than any of the profession; it is the result of many economic reforms and political circumstances. So it has evolved into a very different entity in itself.

In the simplest way, talking about yourself is also Public relations. Enhancing, developing relationships, and finding ways to say is all about public relations.

Ordinary people tend to confuse Public Relations as advertising. Many associate it human resources while some think in terms of a receptionist on a company desk. The general perception is to link it with marketing.

I have tried to get a general opinion about Public Relations in this Video. Check it out!

Mobile Communications in Public Relations

Have you ever thought the spinning role of mobile phones in public relations? It is now known as the 7th mass media in the world of communications. Because of its multi –dimensional qualities it is tremendously making wonders for the society at large. If Internet is more interactive then mobile communication is direct. It is an excellent tool to make a successful PR campaign.

Photo sourced from smh.com

As of now, mobile communications has as a long way to go, when implemented it can give amazing results. Though, I think following things could be considered while making a PR Campaign:

-Make a .mobi site and upload all the press releases and clients details, so that when you are out of office, just SMS the journalist and your work is done.

-Create mobile blogs and update all the upcoming events and happenings

-You can even put the mobile blog on the .Mobi site

-Communicate through SMS; you can make media invites (for the Press conference) and some important facts and figures for finance journalists.

-You can do surveys through mobile texts, mobile blogs and websites also

- Content feeds do amazing stuff, which gets linked with personalised emails (on this one needs to talk to the .mobi sites company)

- Now social networking sites like twitter have mobile updates, you can connect through twitter to the rest of the world.

-In those 45 characters, you can send links of your blogs, websites and information about your company and clients

- Mobile conference calls are also very useful way to make campaigns, discuss the strategies and ideas with your client.

The world is moving faster, hence the PR practitioners especially in a communication world need to enhance their ability to work in such environment. The technologies are only made for making our life more simple and mobile communication is our future.

Why online PR training or study is important for PR guys?

We all know and cannot ignore the fact that social media or PR 2.0 is becoming ‘the X factor’ in the Industry. The fast growing Internet usage has an immediate effect on the way we are communicating today! There are speculations about the slump in the mainstream media, as more and more people are getting used to the new media.

It is a breakthrough in the way traditional PR is working today, the various online tactics used for a PR campaign is doing wonders for many companies and also for many people. It is quite relevant to understand how the key publics are using these medium?

The key words like blogs, social networks, search engines, social video sites, all are very powerful medium of communication. It’s making a record in itself. So, the future starts from here and it does not look back!

As a PR practitioner, online PR is the next big thing so both training and study becomes all the more important to understand the diversified industry. The different parameters have to be applied while practising PR.

Work @ Office or Home!

I was reading a post by Stephen, managing director of 3W PR (a UK based online PR consultancy). He has a polling box in his blog which asks PR guys preference of working at home, office or a combination of both. It was quite interesting to know from his polling box that most of the PR guys were quite okay with working at office but an occasional chance of working at home was also welcomed.

It’s always good to work at office, as the routine deadlines and the professional environment give you that jolt to work. While sometimes you may find it boring and work from home. It’s all because of the Internet system, social networks and sites like Skype is another place where u can have your video calls, and one can do live conferencing with journalists, which I think is another wonderful way to get connected with people who are really important for you.

At the same time there are also disadvantages to this, as a PR practitioner, your boss would want reports and mails to be done online and you end up putting more hours than your office hours! Though technologies have both the effects to it, but one needs to create its own space to tackle things at Office or at Home!

Dominos Crisis!

On Tuesday, 15th April, from Conover Branch of Dominos in North Carolina, the pizza giant, Dominos got a reputational shock, when two individuals created most appalling videos online!

According to the news articles, the footage contains, an employee putting cheese up his nose and passing wind on a sandwich. As he appeared to tamper with the food, a woman said, “In about five minutes, it‘ll be sent out on delivery where somebody will be eating them, and little did they know that cheese was in his nose and that there was some lethal gas that ended up on their salami”

It was a huge shock for people who love this brand so much. What on earth these people were thinking of? Thank God! A blogger alerted the company people about the Youtube video, which was already viewed by a million people online. The company started healing its own wound, through pro-active and direct online response. The video was immediately removed from the site. Through twitter.com they answered millions of queries, that really helped them to clarify things in a more interactive and simple way. They also published an official response on their website, and apart from that , they uploaded a video on Youtube! In that video the President, Dominos, US, has clarified the whole situation, which is the best thing to do when you are handling a crisis situation!! Just watch the video below:

Video Sourced from Youtube

Utterly Butterly Delicious!!

'Utterly butterly delicious', this is one of my favourite punchlines from Amul (a dairy co-operative movement in India). Well folks! I am not talking about Amul, this is all about delicious, the social book marking site, a web service for storing, sharing and discovering web book marks with friends and people with similar interests.

Photo sourced from fearless-future.com

I wonder how stupid I was; when I used to send interesting URLs through mails to my cousin who is preparing her civil service exams, and she needs hundreds of articles to keep herself updated with the current affairs. No more worries...now.I am now going to add her in my network and she can go to all those useful links which I will store it now in my account!

Among the 20 Largest Social Bookmarking Sites ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast, Delicious stands in the 6th most visited social book marking sites.

As per an article in wiki, there are innumerable advantages of a social bookmarking site, a social bookmarking system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as searchengine spiders.

All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. Also, people can find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by web spiders.

Additionally, a social bookmarking system can rank a resource based on how many times it has been bookmarked by users, which may be a more useful metric for end users than systems that rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.

For users, social bookmarking can be useful as a way to access a consolidated set of bookmarks from various computers, organize large numbers of bookmarks, and share bookmarks with contacts. Libraries have found social bookmarking to be useful as an easy way to provide lists of informative links to patrons.

As a PR practitioner one can use this tool very smartly and tag all the journalists’ friends and while storing links for the press releases, you can store related links so that they can easily refer to them and for the journalist it will be quite time saving tool. And it’s also quite effective tool if you share this in-house and use them for your own research work.

Well, society is becoming more informative and such tools are here to make our life so easy!Thanks to social bookmarking!

.Mobi

Mobile communications is the fastest growing technology in the world. Its a tinny mini computer for us! But now mobiles are not just for listening each others voice, it has gone beyond that!

It’s now more advanced and is used in many ways, i.e, emails, mobile games, photos, videos, instant messaging, music, MMS, WAP (wireless application protocol), and many things which you would have never imagined!

.Mobi often used for mobile websites. Mobile website is a kind of World Wide Web that is specially designed for mobile devices, e.g, mobile phones, PDAs and other such gadgets. In such a website one does not need a landline phone connection or a computer.

(Photo sourced from mazandkilgore)

Though most of the companies do not have a mobile website, but there are lot of companies who are working on this technology. Moreover, everybody doesn't use high tech mobile phones, so its has a long way to go!

According to a study by Mobile Ready Report the 10 mobile ready sites are Google.com, WashingtonPost.com, Ask.com, Yahoo.com Flickr.com, Live.com, Facebook.com, Overstock.com, Weather.com and USA Today.com. Only three of the top 10 most popular Web sites – Yahoo, Google and Face book – scored greater than a three out of five on the report.

BBC in 2006 recorded, 61% of mobile BBC international WAP users came from Nigeria and a 19% from South Africa. WAP is a technology that gives people to access internet with basic information about current news updates, weather forecasts, flight information, stock quotes...etc.

BBC very recently relaunched its mobile homepage that will work in iphones,nokia's high end mobiles,Sony Ericsson and Samsung.

All these technologies have lots of opportunities for Public Relations industry. Now, PR people can use it for direct interaction with their target audience,e.g, one can launch a mobile blog and make it chatty so that people are aware of the product and the services, in a very informal way. They can even upload links for their press releases and also do surveys via mobile.

Instant and direct, that’s the future for PR!!

Photo sourced from BBC Mobile Site

References:

http://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/news_analysis/112779/dotMobi_says_websites_should_go_to_mobi.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4795255.stm

http://www.webreference.com/programming/mobile/intro/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2009/04/new_mobile_homepage_launched.html

Spinning WiKi!

You must have heard about ‘Spin PR’! I think it’s a negative connotation of public relations. It’s a hot topic in the PR circle though it is getting space in the media. In public relations, spin means elucidating a campaign, event or an activity and then persuading the key publics for or against an individual or organization.

Photo sourced from Wikimedia Commons

Millions of people go to WiKi as they consider it has one of the most trusted sources of information. The websites accuracy is regularly edited and updated by its readers! But some of the PR guys they delete information that lead the reader to know some of the facts and details which are against the organizations or individuals reputation.

This is how companies are trying to spin WiKi’s content, which goes against Wiki’s neutral factor.

According to an article by Peter Dizikes, PepsiCo employees deleted references to potential health problems caused by their company's famous soft drinks. Other corporations have hired public relations firms to manage their Wikipedia reputations or even create events, ideas and campaigns out of the online equivalent of whole cloth.

These kinds of things question the Wiki’s authenticity? And contrary to this PR’s unseen power is not giving good vibes at all!

Viral Videos...the new ways of Public Expression!!

'Our Social tools remove older obstacles to public expression, and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media. The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals' – Clay Shirky

The buzz stops here...You must be wondering, what am I talking about? Yes...it’s all about hundreds and thousands of viral videos which we come across everyday created by known and unknown people. Watch out the video :

Video sourced from YouTube

Viral Video is a video clip that gains enormous popularity through Internet sharing, emailing and uploading videos on social networking sites, blogs and websites. These videos are one of the best cost effective ways to reach out to the right audience. It’s funny, humorous, sombre, interesting and sometimes it’s also abusive!! But it has become one of the easiest ways to say things which wasn’t possible few years back!

YOUTUBE is one of the popular platform and you can find loads of viral videos! The Marketing and PR guys they do not let this tool go off, they use it extensively to reach their target audiences!

It’s also a way to enhance your brand, company, organization, clients, new campaigns and many things which you would like to communicate. It has become a rapid viral kind of thing that just goes on and on...

Some of the interesting Viral Videos to visit:

Albino Blacksheep

Metacafe

YouTube

Veoh.com

Does Facebook have any role in Public Relations?

As Facebook celebrates its 200 million users milestone, there’s been lots of talky- talks upon the role of such social networking sites in Public Relations. I am not very active on Facebook but it’s a good way to connect with friends, communities, groups and also make new friends both professionally and personally. It helps in getting useful insights from different audience of the people who matters to you and your company.

If we see the new released heat map of Facebook, the site is more international and its very popular in most of the western countries than in Asian countries. In India for example, Orkut is more popular than Facebook, though it is catching up!

Photo sourced from Facebook

In a profession like Public Relations, networking is very important. The idea of Facebook is good if we use seriously in the professional aspect of it, otherwise we are left with the question ‘does facebook really helps in public relations?’

Interesting Links to Read:

Social Media is a different playground...

Twitter for business, Facebook for PR

Get a Life....not a second life!!

“Second Life! What’s that?” I asked my professor when he mentioned about ‘Second life’, a virtual world with highly imaginative and creative 3D characters. I was amazed by the fact that people can make different avatars of themselves and do whatever they want to do! Something interesting to watch here:



Sourced from Youtube

It’s like a gaming station, if you want to go to Shopper’s Stop or to one of the expensive mall in your city, you can buy things virtually and stay happy with that!! It’s really absurd and just an escape from the real world.

Some people say that, it could be used fantastically to serve the training and learning purposes, but according to a research conducted for The Daily Telegraph shows just 580,000 people logged on was ...just for gaming! (sourced from telepgraph.co.uk)

According to some media and tech experts second life is going through a downfall and it will be terminated soon! The corporate world involved in making businesses out of it has recently been thinking of not to participate in the virtual sites like ‘Second Life’. Thanks to the recession!! Why on earth, you need to go to such a world and spend your money on absolutely nothing? Just to please your senses!! Get a Life....

Interesting Links to Read:

The suits come to Second Life. Now it’s dying

Second Life's span is virtually over as firms decide to go Real

Let’s twitter about ‘Twitter’...

140 characters of twitter was enough to make news in the web world. The so called micro blogging service, in yet another attempt made loads of news in the past two days during the G20 meeting. BBC News, Telegraph and many other media talked about the protestors’ usage of twitter as one of the effective ways of promoting their campaigns.

Interestingly,the instant messaging service posted on twitter, made the inside news so live and fresh that people easily got connected with the protestors protesting there! The instant and constant update on twitter in every short while looks as if somebody was doing live reportage! Are we witnessing the new form of communication wave that is shrinking the world?

Photo Sourced from Twitter

Started in 2006, with 6 million users, it has become very popular all across the world. As far as ranking is considered it has become the third largest social networking site!

In the past, twitter has always been scrutinized for its ridiculous usage of its blogging service, whereas there are people who think its an opportunity to connect with professional and personal individuals.

The world of tech has always got two split ends, one end is 'responsible' and the other end is 'bizarre' in its approach. It’s up to what extent people use them....in good or bad ways!

Introduction

Welcome to the world of Blogosphere, the most powerful form of communication in todays world!! As part of Public Relations and Technology module, I am going to look at the various influencing factors of technology on the conventional form of Public Relations.

The blog will be an open forum where you can engage yourself in discussions on new media.I will also post regular updates on the latest developments in the online PR circle.

So, are you ready to be on the PRowl!!!