mediajunk

I had a lively chat yesterday with the founders of a new PR/Communications company, a client of ours. We discussed PR and the internet, and agreed that few PR companies in Ireland are using the internet to its full potential.

The reasons are understandable. People who are experienced in traditional media often find it difficult to embrace the internet, because they see it as a variant of publishing, rather than a new medium. Advertising and PR practitioners tend to regard a website as a digital version of a glossy print brochure, or (worse!) an opportunity to "wow" people with a moving, clicking, whirring, music-blaring, pop-up advertisement. In short, they use tricks that work in traditional media, to little -- or negative -- effect.

Ironically, as Paul Holmes points out in his Manifesto for the 21st Century Public Relations Firm, PR companies should have been the first to embrace the internet since, right from the outset, "the Internet was in many respects a public relations medium". The model of information dissemination used by PR firms -- a targetted, viral model, dependent on active intermediaries -- was encoded in the internet's DNA.

The Internet was about information and education, not promotion, because it gave people unprecedented control over the messages to which they were exposed.

It was about earning attention rather than demanding it. It was about dialogue rather and conversation rather than monologue. And it was about multiple stakeholder groups rather than customers alone.

When I did Media Studies in college, I was familiar with Marshall McLuhan's epiteth, "The medium Is the message", but I never really grasped it. McLuhan had been writing at a time when a new medium, television, was changing the information-dissemination landscape, but by the time I was studying his words, television had become the dominant channel.

Now his words make sense. If you can show people that you "get" the internet, you are sending out a clear message to your audience. Part of getting the internet, for example, is to understand that transparency rules (and rules tyranically, according to trendspotting); deception is not tolerated.

Says Holmes:

bq.Employees, customers and community members will have access to communications channels almost equal to that of the largest corporations, and any inaccuracy or insincerity will be quickly identified as such and exposed—not only undermining the company’s message but produced the precise opposite result from that intended.

We have already seen examples of this trend, from a blog covertly funded by Wal-Mart to a YouTube video supposedly created by an ordinary citizen but in reality posted by a public relations firm representing Exxon Mobil. In both cases, the fraud was quickly exposed and the companies held up to ridicule and condemnation.

In a crisis, even in a tyranny, there is opportunity. The web offers unprecedented opportunity for PR companies. Want to boost hotel bookings? Forget airbrushed photos; get to the top of Tripadvisor.

Embrace the internet; figure out its rules and play by them. You'll soon see opportunities that couldn't have existed even a few years ago.

Tags: web 2.0