PR diving the web
Q&A with Ashan Kumar
What is PR 2.0?
Before we take a look at PR 2.0, it is important to understand the
advances of the world wide web. “Web 2.0” refers to a perceived second
generation of web development and design, that facilitates
communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and
collaboration on the World Wide Web.
Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of
web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as
social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and
folksonomies.
These changes and introduction of “new” channels of communication
resulted marketers to take into consideration the ever growing and
popular “social media” taking their brands message and further engaging
with their target audiences. This paved way to PR 2.0, how public
relations integrate with technology and the internet.
How does PR 2.0 influence a marketer?
The web creates an opportunity for the prospect customer, consumer,
publics to communicate back, giving feedback about their experiences and
what he/she feels about the product or service. This is a form of
two-way communication providing valuable information, the pulse about
their customer and consumer.
PR 2.0 is the understanding and practice that communications is a
two-way process it includes the tools, principles, strategies, and
philosophies for reaching, engaging, guiding, influencing, and helping
people directly in addition to the traditional cycle of PR influence.
What are the tools used in PR 2.0?
PR 2.0 uses social media elements such as blogging, viral marketing,
social networking sites and search engine optimization to communicate to
your target publics. It blends traditional and new media relations to
reach journalists as well as consumers.
Where does Sri Lanka stand in this
evolution?
Sri Lanka is still not a fully-fledged computer user. But there is an
increase in the IT literacy and Sri Lanka has seen a growth of 15-20 per
cent and heavy plans are on the way to increase it to 50 per cent with
the launch of the year of ICT and English early this year.
As we speak there are plenty of news wire sites being updated,
constantly not only keeping citizens updated on the latest news as it
happens, but also taking the message regionally and globally, as the
internet is knowledge for the world.
There are niche wires and forums catering to different industries.
For example ITPro for ICT relevant news, LinkedIn connecting the
business community.
How useful you think PR 2.0 would
help marketers in Sri Lanka?
In Sri Lanka we see an escalating growth of bloggers, with sites like
elakiri.com having more than 192,000 members.
What started from chatting, chat rooms has now developed to Facebook,
Twitter, Digg, Youtube, RSS that feed on your mobile to podcasts. Many
forums and networks are created amongst groups with similar interests
where they share and comment about their experiences.
The internet is turning out to be a general need amongst many
individuals. There are many examples where brands in Sri Lanka have used
the internet to reach out to their targets, promoting their products and
services and have resulted in good ROI.
Additionally marketers will clearly be able to identify ways to
measure PR including new PR metrics and advanced methods for measuring
PR, such as counting hits per page, improving communications with
bloggers, generating publicity in websites, building awareness with
opinion leaders, getting inbound links to landing pages, and increasing
internet traffic to the website. |