Week 10

New Media and Public Relations

Understand emerging new media concepts and theories

New Media widens the circle of communication and can incur serious consequences to the organisation. It allows for publics to become more connected to each other transcending countries and continents. This facilitates the exchange of information and messages with regards to an organisation and push for greater transparency and accountability of the organisation. It is the publics word against the organisation and the former is more than often seen as un-bias and trustworthy compared to the latter.

According to Anne Gregory (2004,246), there is 2 school of thoughts that implore on the use of technology.

One school of thought assumes that advancement in technology like a home phone to a mobile phone is simply an extension of a communication channel, there is not much attempt by the publics to use it as a two way communication. Users still stick to the initial intended use which is to communicate with each other instead of using it to communicate with an organisation (Chia 2002, James 2007).

Another school of thought admits that technology has brought huge shift in the balance of power between organisations and publics. This power lies in the control of messages that the organisation have versus what the publics have access to. With new media for example, an organisation can no longer control the dissemination of messages that its key publics receive.

Appreciate the impact of technology on public relations practices

Technology has not changed much of public relations practices as much as it has the profession simply because many practitioners sees it as previously mentioned an extension of communication and has not identified on how to fully utilise it. Many still prefer interpersonal methods of conveying their message across to their publics.

Identify the challenges new media pose for the public relations profession

New media allows for the easy and fast dissemination of information disregarding time zones, geographical locations or resources which has proven to be useful especially to activists. As a result organisations have a hard time to contain messages and issues that activists are probing upon. Any wrong move in response would dearly cost the organisation as activists can easily spread these negative messages through new media and cause a backlash to the issue.

In the case of Web 2.0 or ‘technology that fosters information sharing, collaboration, social networking and relationship building among web users’ (Fitch, K., 2009,342),while there is a potential for dialogue and interaction PR practitioners do not know how to use them to meet their publics need rather than just make it into an ‘isolated feedback and answer’ platform. Karl Herger and Gwyneth Howell (2007) says that this has much to do with the unknown identity of users, limitations in internet access and computer literacy and unequal distribution of control among organisation and their online publics. Also until everyone has access to the computer and most importantly to the internet, we still have to use both new and traditional media.

It has also raised legal and ethical issues of the use of new media by PR practitioners.

Public relations bodies like PRIA and CPIR have turned to providing guidelines on the use of new media because there is a lack of legislation to control it. PR practitioners also have to make sure that their content does not fall short of the expectations, privacy and rights of the global audience. There is also the implementation of the eMarketing code of practice, which governs the content and type of information that organisations send out online.

Ethical issues arise when PR practitioners are not honest in the messages that they put out regarding the organisations that they represent. CIPR suggests that the organisation provide guidelines on how new media should be approached at and used. The question of astroturfing where a group is created in the name of grassroots or community support which it is actually independent of, has also been come across as being unethical as it mislead the public. This is the case where PR practitioners pretend to be representatives of the public to increase support for its clients.

Consider the use of social media to develop opportunities for dialogue and two-way and multi-way communication

Social media is media that allows for greater inclusion and participation of users. Their interactive nature allows them to exchange opinions, information, knowledge and interests and helps to foster and strengthen relations. While it is necessary for PR practitioners to judge how useful the platform of social media that they choose in communicating with their public, it is often difficult to do so. They also find it difficult to connect with their publics although they do use social software sites like blogs, websites, wikis and social networking sites to research on their competitors.