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Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Is Social Networking Turning Back Time?


Last Thursday I gave my presentation on Social Networking and PR and to say it was met with a load of old scepticism would be an understatement!!

If this ICT is all singing and all dancing then why have very few practitioners actually took up the opportunity because as far as I can see it is used more by pubs and clubs than any other organisation, and from what I can see they are not really using it that well!

Anyhow when researching the subject it made me think that maybe, just maybe, is PR going back to its roots whereby market segmentation and targeting messages are the core factors in a successful campaign.

I believe very strongly that segmentation is crucial to the success of a campaign then again that may be the result of coming from a marketing background. What struck me with social networking and certain other social media is the endless opportunity to segment and target over and over again, an organisation can even target one specific person if it so wishes. So yet again I have to ask, why is this not being fully utilised? Instead PROs are focusing on blogs, wikis, fancy online press releases etc etc but lets be honest by doing this are we possibly neglecting more markets than we are actually tapping into? How many average teenagers that you know have a blog? Now think, how many average teenagers have a Bebo, MySpace, Faceparty page?

I am aware that this posting is more about me asking questions than answering any but from my little experience with ICTs and 'PR 2.0' i think more questions need to be asked rather than PROs simply taking it for granted that these things work just because someone the other side of the big massive pond says so.

Can anyone answer my questions?

Debz

1 comment:

Mhairi Clarke said...

I agree. I think that there has to be a balance with the use of new and traditional media and push/pull technologies. I think that some of the new pull technologies are more media friendly eg RSS Feeds, possibly Social Media Press releases but I'm going to hang fire on my judgement of these. I think there has to be the right balance between targetting messages at specific audiences and providing information to those who want to receive it.