One of the biggest reasons social networking is crucial for public relations is because it offers for a wide expansion of news coverage. It allows stories to reach different audiences almost instantly. It also allows for feedback, which is something that is a fairly new concept. The audience can comment, rate, publicize, etc. a story based on what they think of it. An article by Patricia Faulhaber expands on this concept.

The other big way social networking can assist public relations practitioners is that they can make connections with other professionals all over the world. People can connect through social networking sites, such as facebook and linkedin, blog posts or RSS feeds. They can follow professionals they are particularly interested in and start an online relationship with them. You never know when your contacts will come in handy when you’re looking to get your story out there, find a job or get a recommendation.

Facebook especially is a huge tool used in the public relations field. There are pages, groups and ads for companies everywhere. Although it may seem weird at first because facebook started as a site just for college students, it is important to recognize this shift and use facebook as a professional tool, too. Jean Pitzer raises the idea that facebook may not be around forever in her blog. She questions the future of facebook:

As Facebook becomes more popular, it will attract the same kind of attention from advertisers and spammers that MySpace has. One of the things people love about Facebook is how personal it is, but its growing commercialization could make it lose its appeal. This begs the question, is this effort to transform Facebook into a business tool a hex to the service and a wasted effort? Or, is it possible to learn from the mistakes of Facebook’s competitors and effectively break into this space?

Heather Yaxley has a great article on her blog about how to use the internet and networking to your fullest advantage as a PR practitioner. Some of my favorite points are: remember to engage in conversations (leave comments), track what is being said about you using an alert system, think multimedia and “build your google juice”. The full list can be viewed here.

The New York Times featured an article, How to Use Social Networking Sites for Marketing and PR, that discussed the importance of keeping your profiles on these sites professional. One tip that I found particularly useful is “check out their public profile before engaging them in a conversation. Chances are you might have a connection, whether it’s a college, a personal interest, or a shared skill such as speaking the same foreign language.”

The important thing to remember about using social networking for PR is to remember to always keep it professional, and don’t be one-sided about it–comment, follow and build relationships using online sites created for doing so.

On Jon Greer’s blog, there is a statistic that 5-10 percent of traffic to latimes.com comes from the photo section. Traditional media is becoming less popular each day. People don’t want to read through a long story with a lot of text when they could view/hear a simplified audio or video piece.  On AOL news, when you click on a story you can either read the whole text or view a slide show of images with blurbs of information on the side. I tend to choose the image option because it is more interesting and allows for quick browsing. AOL also has a “In Video” tab in it’s slide show of relevant news stories. This shows that the media is recognizing what the audience wants, and delivering it so that they continue using their source.

Public relations practitioners have recognized this new desire for alternative media. This site allows you to create an online press release using a simple wizard that allows you to encorporate videos, photos and other file sharing tools. Prxbuilder can also distribute your releases uses non-traditional media outlets.

Here is a quote from Kevin Dugan that I think says it all:

“News can be targeted by community participation, posted to a blog, included in a podcast and a variety of other means, you don’t need to blanket the world. Use the right medium, audio, video, print, mash-up, others to convey the story…You are your own media outlet, create a channel like blip.tv, blog, podcast, slide share, and make it easy for users to share with others. Video is not limited to TV, fully integrated multimedia news organizations may well be the right target for a pitch that was previously considered the realm of television.”

It is important to recognize the change from traditional media to new media and embrace it. If you try to run and hide from multimedia tools because you are technologically shy, you will only fall behind and lose audience members.