Social media as public reinforcements (Ashleigh Smith)

Social media and PR can now be seen as an important relationship to help build and maintain communities and networks to engage audiences. Dave – I see you say that it was actually PR responding to audience markets, rather than the other way around.

In reference to Dave's comment “"Social media putting the public back in PR" - that implies that at one point the public and PR were entirely separate, which is simply not true” . I’m not so sure that this suggests the public were ever separate due to the recent movement and use of social media. Public Relations is exactly what the name is – relationships with publics, and how else do you have a relationship without some sort of exchange? In this case, this is through information which is used to send out knowledge and send in feedback. Perhaps now in the 21^st Century, it’s social media REINFORCING public interaction with organisations. As prior to the breakout of internet use, it would have been definitely harder to for organisations to research and understand their audiences without the ease and quick nature social media brings. Possibly we can now appreciate social media as the flagship frontier for public democracy? Or at least aims to do so?

Fill et al (2009) states that the ascension of Internet and mobile moderated media comes at a time when the television has lost status as ‘the’ dominant foreground type of marketing communications to consumers.

According to the attached video, to reach 50 million users it would take:

• Radio 38 years
• TV 13 years
• Internet 4 years
• ipod 3 years
• Facebook – added 100 million users in less than 9 months
• ipod app downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months

This highlights how social media has helped open the reach and community receptive to PR. Not only is this just a public (community, state, nation – as per Bianca’s definition), it is a GLOBAL public. The video also states that if facebook was a country, it would be the 4^th largest, behind China, India and USA. That is a huge online community which is reachable with a computer.

The power of social media is that so many people can participate in it, however once something is out there, organisations have no control over it.

Back to my thought of public democracy, if we were to reference the 2008 Obama Election Campaign, would he have been so successful in securing votes without the aid of social media? The fact his campaign was able to utilize this medium to their benefit, united thousands, even millions of Americans (and to those Aussie’s like us watching/reading at home) to be proactive, have a voice and support a cause. Without the public being involved on blogs, Youtube, Facebook support groups (which I myself even joined) – the name “Barrack Obama” may not have had such a strong impact on the younger generations who were the ones online throughout the campaign. This is an example of public involvement (with social media) at its finest for Political Public Relations.

- Ashleigh Smith

References

Fill, C., Wells, W., Russell, T., Clow, K. E., Miller, R., & University of Sydney. (2009). New and Fragmented Media. In The Media and Marketing Communicsations. (2nd ed. pp. 243-259). Frenchs Forest, N.S.W.: Pearson Australia.

YouTube. (2010). Misskatodins ‘Benefits of social media – PR’. Retrieved online 11 April, 2010, from http://www.youtube.com/user/misskatodin#p/a/u/1/6td3tM8xr-g