PR 2.0 – a balanced perspective
It’s time I think to take a slightly more considered view of the PR merits of social media. To listen to some of the chatter coming from PR schools, you would think that the combination of social media and PR, so-styled PR 2.0, has rendered traditional PR techniques completely obsolete. This, of course, is nonsense.
PR 2.0 clearly is a valuable tool to have to hand. It is another way of communicating with a particular audience. But I suggest its real value is for consumer PR accounts, where establishing brand values is of critical importance. But many – if not most – businesses actually want business-to-business PR. They want to see their firm reported in their particular trade magazines or the business pages of traditional newspapers.
Similarly, most journalists do not have time to trawl the web looking for stories. They may well have their Linked-in, Facebook and Twitter accounts and be aware of what topics are trending on these sites, but they still depend primarily on well-written, relevant news releases for filling their pages.
This is not dinosaur-speak or luddism. I use Twitter and find valuable information on the web. I simply want to introduce a more balanced perspective to the debate. PR is all about communicating with your target audiences, getting the right messages to the right people. And that, I suggest, will involve a blend of traditional PR 1.0 and web-based PR 2.0 techniques.
