Wednesday March 26th: New Media

Today's class focused on how New Media has changed the scope of the PR world. In traditional media, PR practitioners relied heavily on journalists to place news stories. The newspaper was one of the most important and effective ways to get messages across to the public. However, since the internet has become such an important facets in the people's everyday lives, New Media has challenged how messages are communicated to the public.

In class we learned that New Media has challenge the way PR places stories and created a more dynamic relationship with audiences. Because new media is fast, feeback from the public is quicker, stories can be quickly communicated to the public, and individuals such as bloggers are becoming third party endorsements.

Some of our classmates who are taking the New Media module did a presentation on current topic in New Media, which included Second Life, Viral Marketing, and Search Engine Optimized. I am still unsure as to how Second Life is relevant in public relations. The way it has been presented it seems that it is purely for entertainment purposes, but I'm sure it serves some kind of purpose; I just don't know what purpose. Viral Marketing on the other hand, is extremely important in today's consumer culture. Viral Marketing is network-enhanced word of mouth. Millions of people, especially the younger generation, use viral marketing. We use viral marketing when sending text messages, reading e-books, posting you-tube videos on facebook, or sending video clips through e-mail. The great thing about viral marketing is that messages can be sent to millions of people worldwide. However, a disadvantage is that i can hardly be controlled. The messenger cannot control how many people will view the message or the length of the time period in which it will be viewed. Search Engine Optimized helps companies PR practitioners reach their target audience over as many channels as possible. PR practitioners can program a search engine to make their clients product/message/company/press releases on the top of the list through programming key words into the engine.

This class has motivated me to read more books about New Media because the topic is very important in todays PR industry.