Maximising your media impact FINAL:Layout 1
7/7/09
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The multimedia challenge to companies
Facebook attractive will be usurped by commercialisation. It happened to punk rock so it can happen to websites. The initial pioneering frontier spirit becomes contaminated by interloping plagues of advertising, sponsorship, viral marketing, spam and corporatism. It was ever thus. Media 2.0 is forcing the PR community to think hard about how it adapts its traditional approach. The twoway feedback, interactive model is remote from the longstanding command and control, push model of PR. Media 2.0 has democratised communication, blurred boundaries into communities, toppled hierarchies. The space-time continuum has shifted. Audiences can be reached globally and in real-time rather than discretely and in controlled drip-feeds via tonight’s TV news, tomorrow’s broadsheets and then the Sunday papers. Communication is migrating from the tangible, physical sphere to the online, virtual realm with all the implications for rapid evolution, corruption and mutation of news values. This requires more robust and adaptable corporate messages but it also means that effective communications does not have to be about huge spends. Targeting forums, chat rooms and comment boxes of blogs can provide huge leverage to small companies who are smarter and more original in their approach. Traditional media outlets are relying more heavily than ever on blogs for their sources and are lifting stories
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