New Media and Public Relations

Advances in digital technology have engendered a shift in communication patterns characterized by the shift from the "one to many" broadcast paradigm of mass media to the "network paradigm" of "many to many" communication. There have been so many studies stating high potential of new media in public relations practice. However, some others also cite that new media is one of the biggest challenges facing the public relations profession. Why? I personally think even though new media have the power of fast and wide dissemination, it creates controversial issues on legal, ethics, and so on.

Impact of new media
Traditional public relations techniques are no longer appropriate in much of public relations practice as they fail to connect with an internet-savvy public. The advent of new media means the communication environment is more complex and more immediate, with "instantaneous and far-reaching" consequences for organizations. Publics are more powerful and can form across geographic boundaries. Their capacity to generate and share information allows them to challenges organizational information, ensuring greater transparency and accountability on the part of organizations.

Industry attitudes
Surveys suggest that despite widespread internet access and use among communication professionals, the internet has not really changed public relations strategic or practices. It is said that PR professionals haven't yet worked out how best use what the internet offers us. I guess the inability of PR practitioners to control over the information on internet is the main problem. New media has given the role of producing and editing media to audiences' hands. This limits the ability of PR practitioners to perform their role of building and maintaining their organizations' reputation.

While most did use the internet for public relations purposes, few really exploited the potential of new media to foster dialogic and two-way communication.
In a series of interviews conducted in Southeast Asia in 2006, one public relations consultant suggested that the profession was "scared" of new media and did not know how to use it.

However, there are still some cases where PR people successfully made use of internet and new media. PR campaign by IKEA is a good example. (See video below or click HERE to see)

Legal issues
The impact of new media on professional communication has seen the emergence of new legal and ethical issues. Not only does technology make it easier to plagiarize with its "cut and paste" culture, but it also exposes legislative grey areas such as the boundaries between personal and professional communication.

Ethical issues
The CIPR has developed guidelines for using social media, partly in recognition that the rapid and dynamic growth of social or new media means that appropriate legislation around the use of such media is not always in place. The three principles are: integrity, competence and confidentiality.

Astroturfing
It is an another unethical practice of creating fake entities that appear to be real grassroots organizations, when in fact they are the work of people or groups with hidden motives and identities.

Social media
New technologies like Facebook, MySpace, etc encourage greater participation and interaction on the part of users. They are described as easy to access.
Research from Europe suggests that practitioners may have finally begun to embrace social software such as blogs, websites and wikis. The challenge for practitioners is to develop online texts that engage publics rather than simply drawing on such sites for research purposes. Another difficulty is how to measure the impact of social media in terms of its capacity to influence and persuade publics and audiences.

New media applications
Here are some new media applications:
1. Blogs
2. Podcasting
3. Second life
4. Social network
5. Twitter