Along Came the Internet and Changed My PR of Years Ago

This week our focus is on how the world of public relations has changed so drastically because of social media.  When I graduated college with a bachelor’s in public relations, I was well trained on the ins and outs of dealing with the media, our consumers, employees, and whomever else with which I needed to communicate. Pitching ideas and events came easily to me because I could write the most intriguing press releases and draw in publicity from many angles.  I never got to put my training into use because I got a great job doing post-production editing of TV shows, movies and commercials.  After over 10 years, I was forced to leave this amazing job because of repetitive stress wrist injuries.  My second career would begin in education.  This was extreme going from working in entertainment to educating teenagers, but the transition was easy because my main job was preparing students for college, teaching them how to produce the news, and doing light publicity for the program.  Years later, I still work in education, but I am pursuing my master’s in strategic communications and here I am learning the new ins and outs of public relations. The Internet was just becoming popular when I graduated college, and social media had not been introduced yet.  Social media has changed public relations in so many ways since my initial training, and this revolutionary communications tool can help an organization as well as hurt it. 

            Nowadays public relations can happen instantly, whether your organization was planning it or not.  Soumitra Dutta points out in an article What’s Your Personal Media Strategy in Harvard Business Review that your social media presence is important and that it can bring your organization invaluable exposure that is often positive but sometimes negative. She states that now some of the best businesses have social media strategies to help them reach their goals and their decision to use social media proactively or reactively is most important.  This morning in a technology conference, a leading educational technology expert told us that studies show that 75% of the U.S. population has a social media presence.  That was much higher than I expected, but considering this high number of participants, having a social media presence is a no-brainer for any company wanting to pitch an idea, a new product or seek information or feedback from the public. If a company wants exposure, joining Facebook, Twitter or putting videos on YouTube are creative and inexpensive ways of publicizing your brand. 

It is vital that you communicate with your audience. Having a social media presence makes public relations so much more interactive now because feedback, good or bad, can be instantaneous through social media and the Internet.  Leading companies such as BP and Nestle very well know the importance of a social media presence and how monitoring and nurturing that presence can make or break your brand, especially during a crisis.  When I was studying PR, we learned the importance of having a crisis plan.  In the article Corporate Facebook Pages: When Fans Attack, the authors tell us that in order to handle a crisis situation with care you should first listen to the public’s complaints and suggestions of how to fix a problem before you fix a problem. Showing compassion and listening to your audience gives them a chance to vent and usually allows your company an opportunity to gain more credibility and trust in the process of crisis management.  Inconsideration and not showing enough care to respond to your audience on social media is a good way to lose credibility and gain a bad reputation with the millions of members that use this communications tool.   

            I want to learn more about strategic communications and put my entertainment and writing background together to be a better public information worker in education. Tools such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have possibilities that I never cared to investigate.  For years now, I have looked at them as distractions that my students use to escape the real world.  Now I am seeing that social media is actually bringing the world to this generation in a way that my beloved television did for me when I was their age. I’ve mentioned that I was a laggard when it came to technology, but now I am opening my eyes to the vast possibilities of social media and how it can help me professionally.  In order to pursue my career and help my current organization to grow, I will use some of the many tools listed in the HubSpot article How to Leverage Social Media for Public Relations Success.   I already produce creative videos to help my students learn and showcase their talent.  We already have a Facebook account.  Now I can put those videos on Facebook and YouTube and help my organization to receive recognition for the work that we do in helping our students.  Who knows, something could go viral and help us gain sponsors and help our students to be noticed and win scholarships for college.  We can also utilize their tech savviness and knowledge of today’s trends to make our social media sites creative and attractive to students of all ages.

            Once again, the subjects in my class are introducing me to amazing possibilities.  My undergraduate experiences along with my work experiences are coming together with what I am learning here. Public relations has in some ways remained the same, but with the help of social media and the Internet, the practice has changed and improved drastically.  Thanks to this growth in technology and the awesome possibilities that lie ahead, the projects and ideas that I am imagining are something that I look forward to creating.