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Saturday, September 27, 2014

Grappling with Tech. PR

Tech. PR is the future. All PR professionals know it and have apparently been gearing up for it. Everyone wants to know what the new-age PR techniques are and how those can be effectively leveraged on behalf of clients. How does one use social media and mobile communications to put individuals and companies in a position of being instantly able to connect with their target audience in an intimate and interactive manner? Driving this change in the way that PR and Communications are being conducted is the inexorable migration of traditional media to the online platform. At the same time there is the growing influence of the hitherto ignored bloggers and even podcasters.

While using technology has enormously benefited all PR professionals-after all one can easily send a press release to thousands of journalists at one go, it also has its own pitfalls to deal with.  Journalists are more likely to dismiss this sea of press releases as spam and reject even genuinely meritorious stories.  However the area where most traditional PR practitioners find themselves at a tremendous disadvantage is in addressing the Internet generation who source all their information online and inherently resent being instructed in a heavy handed fashion in their social media dominated world. They are most likely to take an opinion from bloggers and contemporaries on social media. One is required to join the community when it comes to this set and learn to talk their lingo in all honesty.

At the same time as web and mobile technology continue to rapidly evolve newer digital PR strategies have to keep apace. Perfecting social media and mobile outreach requires for content to be appropriately optimized. Skills increasingly will involve the right insight, technology and creativity abilities. Increasingly the trend is for small PR firms to partner with companies, especially start ups and stay the course right through the product life cycle of the products or services in question. The organic nature of how technology PR helps products connect in an evolutionary manner make this possible. While all this goes on there will be increased scrutiny of the level of privacy maintained by PR firms that handle large volumes of data.

With e-commerce becoming an integral part of most companies' marketing strategy, tech PR will see a burgeoning of demand for its services and expertise, with the spotlight on social and visual media. There are in fact going to be ever new imaginative ways of reaching out to one's focused target audience, and the PR companies who get their act together and master these techniques first will get a first mover advantage.