There has been an ongoing war discussion for some time now about how social media are affecting traditional PR and how this is PR and this is not PR in the digital world.
Why is this shift to new channels creating such a heated discussion?
Traditional PR is clearly defined as “is the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics” (source: Wikipedia) with practitioners knowing that the way to reach your publics is usually via mass media. That’s how things worked from the beginning of PR and they’ve worked well until now.
The definition itself has the end goal of reaching your publics, not of going through the media necessarily. The reason why mass media worked well for so long is because that was the most effective medium to reach your audience in mass. This is what you learned in school, this is what you learned in practice while working in PR firms. Now, all of a sudden PR practitioners are asked to take what they’ve known and practiced all this time, throw it out the window and try to reach their audiences, the end consumer for example, directly and to have a conversation with them instead of a one way flow of messages. Wait… how are we supposed to handle that, what do we do when the public answers back not agreeing completely with our messages or even worse, disagreeing? Maybe if we hide under the blanket long enough it’ll go away. No my friends, I’m afraid social media is here to stay and is already evolving the way people communicate, act and how they use the internet (even shifting from Web2.0 to Web3.0). So two choices are at hand, get on the social media train and fast because it’s leaving the station or stay stuck at the station.
This shift doesn’t mean that traditional media are now obsolete. For a truly succesful campaign you need a mix of many factors and channels, so you do need to include traditional media in your campaigns. I know that there are arguments out there that traditional media are slowly dying and that the power now is given back to the people, but I think traditional media still have a long lifespan, as they too are evolving to the new era of communication and information.
Conclusion: traditional media and PR are evolving, social media is here to stay, for a successful PR campaign you need a good mix of both, not underestimating either medium.
Your thoughts on the subject?
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