I came into a PR department, which like many, are in a state of alignment and solidification of the PR function. For professionals in the middle of a business flux like this its long days and full meeting schedules. For the student looking in and on its somewhat of a silver lining. There is a constant reaffirming of business motives and pathways - short, medium and long term goals are writ large in both white boards and in the never-ending trail of internal mail (would the world end without outlook?).
Ok so I didn't post this because I didn't really have a theme for discussion.. So lets talk about social media itself.
First of all let me get it out there - that social media is the most powerful, effective and efficient way of gathering and distributing ideas that this race has ever created.
It beats syndicated mass communicative efforts such as the drive time radio show, the choreographed media event, town hall meetings. It beats Gutenberg’s' press. Social media challenges the hypothesise put forward in many journalism units taught by Curtin. Social media is in both an ideological and pragmatic sense the first free - press platform we’ve ever had. Journalism is not dying, it’s evolving and it is serving the public sphere better than it ever has.
Social media and social tools are inherently congressional in nature. They have been designed and implemented with the enduring principles of the early liberal pioneers (including my main man J.C.R), the evolution of which is in itself an intriguing composite of democratic socialism and neo liberalism. When the aim of dissemination is to share (compared to institutional gate keeping) something happens to the relationship between sender and receiver; that doesn’t naturally occur in the top down relationship that has evolved in western economies since industrialisation. When the aim is to give and not to take – it makes the learning experience easier and more efficient.
Furthermore, social does not mean free ($). Pay-walls, implemented by companies is not elitism and will certainly not ill effect the new social sphere as long as the aim of dissemination is still sharing. If you’re not willing to pay for content it doesn’t make you a cool net libertarian, it makes you cheap. Savvy information based companies will realise this is a call to quality and specialisation (away from minute by minute content updates) delivered to customers in a way that allows the essential ideas or arguments to be on - shared by them in an easy (probably stripped down) manner.
What does this mean for public relations activities? Well that’s up for discussion.
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