Web's Growing Importance in Public Relations

For a recent class assignment, I had to write a short reflection on why web is essential in any PR campaign, any marketing plan or any effective communications strategy. Unfortunately, there are many who would rather reject new technology than take advantage of it. Fortunately, I'm not one of them.

Hardly anything exists outside of the internet these days. There are very few people who don’t use email or some internet website or application to communicate with others. In such an online oriented world, it’s pretty much impossible to work in public relations without using the internet as one of your major tools. Public relations is all about communication, as is the internet. It’s only natural that the two would go together.

Due to the similar goals of public relations and the internet, it becomes essential that the public relations department of an organization play a major role in that organization’s social media strategy. Social media is about communicating with a public, about managing a company’s reputation, which is the job of public relations. In order for social media to be effective, an organization must know its public well enough to reach out to that public and interact with that public, also parts of a public relations job description. Who knows an organization’s public better than the public relations department that has researched the organization’s public and based company decisions on that public?