One of the most significant developments within the public relations sphere in recent years is the employment of the internet to engage with and disseminate multi-media content, which has provided major new channels of communication for public relations practitioners. However, this doesn't seem to have resonated too strongly with the Hive bigwigs when it comes to effective marketing practices.
People everywhere are now, more than ever before, engaged, enthused and influenced by public communication because of the internet, mobile technologies and other wireless digital communications. The Web 4.0 revolution has provided a plethora of new opportunities for integrated marketing communication strategies with AI entering the mix. Many public relations campaigns now involve the amalgamation of internet, blockchain technologies and traditional broadcasting processes to communicate their messages.
We've also witnessed a massive increase in new user-created sites including weblogs and social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube which has presented a number of opportunities for more creative and better targeted public relations campaigns. It is now possible to connect with more specialist publics and it is easier to reach them with far more accuracy than at any other time.
In the digital age we now have access to an immense volume of diverse information and the social aspect of the internet engenders a social environment where news and other information is exchanged peer to peer, or computer to computer, with no involvement from news media outlets. Other types of online marketing activity include podcasting, webcasting and iTunes which have become very powerful means of reaching key audiences.
Only up until a few years ago public relations was simply viewed as online versus traditional print and broadcast media. Today that perspective is no longer valid and the real answer is that in order to disseminate the right message to the right audience public relations practitioners must consider all media formats and often combine them in what is now an integrated digital environment.
There can be no doubt that online audiences and the increasing socialisation of those audiences using various new media technologies is establishing itself as an increasingly dominant source of public relations activity.
Social media is essentially distinguished by its interactive qualities. Participants are able to post, receive and process online content for use by themselves or others, they can become publishers, producers and curators in their own right. I'm sure all of us on Hive appreciate the value of this! Participants achieve all this personal interactivity whilst simultaneously filtering out messages from other organisations.
From a corporate and public relations view the most exciting and most popular social media outlets used to be confined to platforms like the world’s largest social network site Facebook, the career and vocational focused LinkedIn and social networking site Twitter. Funnily enough when Twitter initially launched many viewed it as a blogging service, this is interesting because given the recent of launch of Snaps via the Peakd frontend Hive, along with other interfaces, has now successfully integrated its own Twitter platform into Hive. There is a distinctive overlap when it comes to the definition of blogging.
The huge surge in popularity of these online communities makes it a potent audience to be targeted by public relations practioners, quite simply it is a public that can not be ignored. The Economist magazine recently reported that if Facebook was a country it would be the world’s largest country due to its 3 bn subscribers - an unbelievable amount of users for just one social media platform. This is shortly followed by YouTube which now has 2.5 bn users of its platform.
We also need to identify the use of streaming and podcasting which public relations practitioners are increasingly employing as tools for communicating their messages. Furthermore, some organisations now employ multimedia news releases (MNR) to increase their presence on the net. The internet really is ‘the next frontier for public relations professionals’ and here on Hive we simply shouldn't ignore it. Yes, we are a small community but we still need to consider how public relations can play a very important role in getting the Hive message and profile out there.
Peace!
