Strive Notes

Over the past four weeks we’ve had a student from the London Film School working in our offices.  John Craine is pursuing a MA  film making, but wanted to get an understanding of the PR profession.  We tried to give him a chance to experience a broad range of PR tasks and activities.  Here’s what he thinks about  our profession after working four weeks in PR:

I‘d come to the world of PR with a fairly open idea about what it might involve, and I was slightly skeptical when I was told that PR has really embraced ‘social media’. Once I signed up to the various services I was surprised just how widely used social media are. My only previous experience of it was using Facebook to keep in touch with friends from uni, a long forgotten invitation to join Linked In from someone I barely knew, and I’d only heard fleeting mentions of Twitter. But now that I’m signed up, I’m noticing social media everywhere I look. I would stop short of a blanket seal of approval of its use (as with Facebook it is often used to broadcast the banalities of the user’s life), but for the world of PR and the media, it’s a great information sharing tool.

I’ve also learned from my month in PR that PR is everywhere! It’s made me realise that behind everything that I read in a newspaper, from an article about a famous person to a product review, there is a PR professional pushing for publicity. As opposed to a technology journalist reviewing gadgets,  which I had presumed he had just come across, I now realise that he would have been bombarded with suggestions from various PR firms competing to get their client’s product reviewed.

At first I found this revelation quite alarming, but the more I thought about it I realised that the journalist has no obligation to be kind about a product or subject that a PR firm has presented. Developments in social media mean that negative coverage can spread like wildfire and disastrously boomerang on the PR firm and their client. A humorous example of this occurred recently when a PR representative cited a hypothetical URL in an email pitch to a journalist, which, in fact, redirected the journalist to a pornographic website! News of the incident spread like wildfire across Twitter and then across blogs as enduring memorials to a quite genuine mistake.

Although I was initially worried that information was being filtered by a conspiracy of journalists and PR agencies, I have been reassured that the balance of power is not so complicit nor threatening. Although the rise of social media and its egalitarian nature often serve as a platform for self interest, they are also a forum for public regulation and corporate accountability.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Turn Your Commenters into Connections (slyvisions.com)
• Can Social Networking sites increase search engine rankings? (ceoworld.biz)
• What All PR People Should Know About Journalists (rohitbhargava.typepad.com)

Filed under: public relations