PR and Social Media

Hello everyone!

Today I’m going to talk about how the rise of the Internet, in particular of social media, has shaped new ways of doing PR.

It is no doubt true that digitalisation created benefits for PR practitioners and new tasks that have been added to the PR toolkit:

• a new way of communication: first of all, social media allow PR practitioners to communicate with their audiences and to have a ”two-way” kind of communication, because they can connect with people by engaging conversations and getting feedback
• Working with influencers: to improve a brand’s reputation and awareness, PR professionals can collaborate with social media influencers, whose digital following is massive
• Social sharing and press releases: including what people think into a public relations campaign is now possible, by adding social sharing capabilities to press releases
• Crisis handling: PR practitioners, who are also responsible for handling crises,  can address and solve problems more efficiently and quickly thanks to social media

Despite all these benefits PR gained from social media, it seems that digitalisation brought some challenges with it. One of the main threat of the ”social world” is that PR practitioners have less time to deal with deadlines, because they have to keep up with the new rhythm of society and this may penalize the quality of their work.

Overall, I think that the impact that social media have on the practice of PR cannot be avoided any longer, therefore it is important to learn how to handle the threats and use the new opportunities as well as possible.

Press Release’s Importance to PR

Hello everyone!

Today, as you can tell from the title of this post, I’m gonna talk about press releases and their importance to Pubic Relations.

As you all know, a press release is a free PR tool that aims at attracting media attention to newsworthy information, to an upcoming event or to one that has occurred. The first press release dates back to 1906, when a young man named Ivy Lee used it to talk about a tragedy happened after a train accident in Atlantic City, N.J.

After almost 100 years, despite we live in the age of social media, press releases are still play a central role in spreading news and a wide range of new items, such as:

• scheduled events
• new products or services
• business accomplishments and awards
• sharing data and trends
• addressing issues

For what concerns the PR world, the press releases has been and are still being an invaluable component of PR campaigns and programmes. It can be used and adopted to a great variety of media relations situations: as I already mentioned, as tool to spread news; but also as feature, as starting point for a more extended news feature; it can be the base on which a press conference is underpinned and finally as starting point to communicate with social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Press releases’ importance to PR has also been highlighted by a study conducted by the Guardian’s Nick Davies, which shows how PR practitioners s are successful in leading the news content of quality newspapers.