New media power

New media has provide the opportunities for public relations practitioners to collect any information needed, give the chance for them to monitor public opinion on certain issue and has the benefit to communicate and give feedback with their publics about a variety of issues.

New media is becoming the preferred term for a range of media practices that employ digital technologies and the computer in some way or another (Dewdney & Ride, 2006). New media has made the life easier where anyone can reach to each other in a short time. New media has become the preferred choice to communicate because it is cheap, can be done anywhere as long as one has an internet connection and can obtain the feedback from the source.

Example of new media are RSS feeds that allow favourite news and information updates to be delivered to the costumer as soon as they are posted online without consumers having to search for the content, email, text messaging, instant messaging, chat online, online forums blogging and etc.  

Public relations practitioners have to face the challenge to publish correct information online because people can read what they produce. They need to give correct and truthful information in order to maintain their good image in the eye of their stakeholders. They must be reliable in providing information and if they not, people will not believe in their organization anymore. 

Public relations practitioners must understand that they need to analyze how the new technologies can give the impact in helping their roles in giving the information to the public, disseminate the idea or opinion, develop a good media relations, manage their reputation, have a good stakeholders relations, marketing communications, sustain the relationship with the investor and must always be prepared for issues and crisis management. Hence, the new media has helped the public relations practitioners to work in effective and efficient condition.

Reviewed by: Nur Maisyarah Binti Che Mansor (2009116141)

http://www.pria.com.au/sitebuilder/forms/forms/file/34-174/Melanie%20James%20article%20Asia%20Pacific%20PR%20Journal.pdf

TV is dead. Long live the Internet. By Caroline Davidson, the guardian.

In Today’s world, both Television and the Internet are converging changing behavior of the viewers. New media technologies especially the Internet have become human number one source in gaining information, socializing, networking, entertainment and so on.

According to Paul Lee, research director at Deloitte said that the emerging of both television and web or the internet was driven not by technology but the users themselves.

The developing in technology of television remains it to be watched however by computers or tablets, or on hybrid devices that converge both television and internet connectivity.

Users prefer online video as a medium and web-based applications are being adapted for TV.

According to Barnaby Benson, head of development at eano.tv, predicts online and TV convergence will blur the conventional boundaries of both platforms. "One effect is to make brands more like broadcasters and websites more like TV channels for a brand," says Benson.

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            What I can conclude is, the word “convergence” itself was rarely heard in the last century but the worldwide trend is now towards convergence of different communication functions, technologies and service onto a common platform.

Convergence has resulted in applications such as mobile TV which lets people watch television on their mobile phones and broadband connections that enable data, Internet access and voice to be carried over a common pipe. This in turn gave rise to the concept of a converged digitally connected homes and personal communications.

In that same way, the convergence of services, platforms and technologies results in the creation of a myriad of other services and technologies. These trends drove regulators and service providers to adapt. Regulators especially had to adapt their organizational structure, purpose and regulatory framework to facilitate and take advantage of the changes convergence brought about.

Reviewed by Sarah IlianaBinti Mohammad Salleh (2009713675)

Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-tech-law/tv-internet-youtube-online-video

Leveraging New Media for PR

Some people said that, someone can’t be a public relations people or practitioners without noticing that nowadays, many newspaper and magazines have been moved to the online form. Maybe it is not fully being changed but it slowly changed to that form. 

            Next, news outlets are actually merging without our conscious and online publications are here to stay and become quickly a primary outlet for public relations people or specialist to tell and sell their stories to make people out there knows about the company or organization. 

SEO becomes common place in the corporate world, and we constantly hearing about YouTube, Facebook and others. A strong social networking campaign can set the PR practitioner’s competitors apart from them and helps to promote the business.

Blogging phenomenon has become mainstreams with the entries of videos, photos and specific subject in the blogs. Some of these blogs describe personal experiences, others feature specialized industry news. The goal for a PR specialist is to reach the blogs that bring the added values that comes from these outlets.

Next, the second popular social media is podcasting. Podcasting includes online streaming and broadcasting of video or audio messages. Both types can be used to promote problems and suggest solutions. Podcasting is measurable because it can tell how many people are downloading the podcasts.

In conclusion, Public relation practitioner can improve the social media that they use now in order to increase the effectiveness of their company’s or organization’s communication with the public. Besides that, it will help to strengthen the reputation of the company in the eyes of public in terms of gauging with people.

Reviewed by Noraini binti Abd Rahman

New Media, New Influencers & Implications for Public Relations by Society and New Communication Research

Technology is design for instrumental action that reduces the uncertainty in the cause-effect relationship involved in achieving a desired outcome. It is where the importance of new media technology seen very clearly nowadays, which may be proactive process and cannot be ignored especially by Public Relations and Marketing professionals. According to the article by Society and New Communication Research (2008), a recent survey of nearly 300 public relations, corporate and marketing communications professionals experienced in social media, fifty-seven percent of respondents said that social media tools are becoming more valuable to the practice.  

In the new media development and execution phase, it is important to determine which new media tools and tactics that appropriate for an individual or organization. A survey shows public relations professionals rank blogs, video sharing and social networks as the three most effective channels of new media communications. The most successful new media programs often start small and often evolve into larger and broader activities. 

There are three major steps required for an organization to embarking on a new media program which are outline all strategies, set goals, and prepare for possible outcomes. The earliest two steps enable an organization to correct misinformation, discuss, and use the power of two-way communications from new media to reach the goals. The third step is essential to ensure success.

Apart from having new media as the key to ensure success, it is also one of the best ways to recruit audience especially the influencers. As given from this article, key influencer characteristics can be as simple as a blogger passionate about your service or product or as complicated as how often one comments on a blog and the length of their post. If you are starting small, a simple blog search and review of a blogger bio may provide the necessary information to identify key influencers.   

In a nutshell, new media technology is changing the landscape of public relations in various ways. First one is shifting from one way PR communications to two or multi-ways conversations. Then, new media has also affected how PR professional engage and interact with the traditional media reporter. Lastly, as more new media tools and techniques emerge, it enable PR practitioner to expand reach of messages and programs to the mass audience.

Source:

http://sncr.org/sites/default/files/documents/tip%20sheets/SNCR_New_Influencers_Tip_Sheet.pdf

Reviewed by Nor Azila bt Mazlah @ Mazlan (2009740421)

Twitter as a rescue to Dominos PR Disaster

The use of new social media is vital for an organisation to reach their consumers needs today.  The reality is businesses are desperately trying to find ways to interact and engage customers in the process of perfecting their products and services as this tactic will assure customer loyalty, and ultimately gain massive profits.  It is also one of the best ways in managing crisis whenever the organisation been hit by the disaster that may lead to bad views from the public.  This method was used by Dominos public relation team when they faced shocking experience when two of Dominos employees doing revolting things and has been spread all over the Youtube viewers.  After receiving negative views on quality of Domino Pizza, the CEO reached out to their customers via Twitter asking for feedback on what is the ways that company can regain the customers trust due to the incident.  Besides that, he spends huge time and much energy to get the customers respond on how they can improve their services and choice of pizza.  We can see this is another unique business trick when the CEO choose the new media as a bridge to reach out its customers and the best solution what we can see how Dominos has achieve their business goal today. 

What the CEO did is right.  When they have trouble with their customers trust, they go straight away to them.  They communicated directly which make the customers feels appreciated.  Moreover, it is a brilliant idea to grab the opportunity in using new media social networking when we know it is today’s trend and any issue is spreads immediately in the social media like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.  Thus, they visibly make the customers as the priority in business when they directly listening to their customers demand in order to improve their quality of pizza based on the customer’s experiences.  Furthermore, Dominos public relation team work so hard in facing the positive and negative impact on the spot and not leaving the customers to make much more assumption about the incident when they come out video response from the company later after the incident.  It is relevant by today scenario to use new social networking media to gain good customers relationship and listen about what they want.  They react positively about the issue when they sign up for twitter account which has over 1200 followers since the incident happened.  By using these new media technologies, Dominos itself open their wide opportunity when they give responses and allowed their customers to talk about the issue openly.

Sources

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/editors-blog/2009/04/dominos-creates-twitter- accoun.html

Reviewed by Nabila Farahanah Zulkefli - 2009178883