Online Communications Allows PR Pros to Bypass Media

Online PR and the Future of On-line PR

Online public relations is known to be a rather new sector in the field of PR, even though PR has existed for as long as there was humans on this earth. Of course at that time PR was only used to sell peoples skills and their services. Brian Cooper the director of online PR at Medium Blue said, that we can look at the examples of cavemen who painted their haunting skills to sell their services to people in that era or time, even though it wasn't called PR at that time but they were still using it to sell their skilled services such as haunting, spear throwing, etc.

Looking at what the Internet has done for us today we should begin by looking at the different fields of study such as science, the media, engineering, etc. What the Internet has really done is enable many fields to progress, but especially looking at the field of PR we can see that it has benefited and progressed a lot from this new technological advancement. The Internet has helped traditional media and the new media emerge together slowly, to create new forms of communication which is called today the New Media. Examples of this new media are Blogs, online newsletters, podcasts, online press releases, etc.


According to Brian Cooper, he states in his Blog on "Online PR and Marketing: Strategies for Internet Visibility", that press releases haven't changed much over the years even though now you can find them online compared to the past, but the differences is in the way in which its being distributed and how the media and the public can find those press releases.

The benefits that Online PR has compared to traditional PR (traditional print media), is that it's able to reach out to a wider audience in a short period of time if not even instantly, to the public and also to local and international media outlets.

Now looking at online newsletters. Online newsletters usually contain both some advertising and information content. The things that we can usually see included in these newsletters are; articles, information about sales and promotions, news alerts, and surveys. This PR strategy has an advantage thats why its also quite a popular new strategy, the advantage it has is that it can be created very quickly and it can also be distributed very quickly and directly to the people who are asking for it, like clients, potential clients, etc, basically it will only be spread to people who are interested in it.

While looking at Blogs. Blogs are like an online dairy or journal that if written for a company it’s actually written by the company’s executive, but in most cases Blogs are written by people who want instant feedback on what they have to say like some kind of an issue, topic, etc. Blogs communicate the writer's opinion about the industry or the company or even any issue that the writer wants to talk about. The benefits of having a Blog is that it helps create informal communication between the company, organisation and it's clients or potential clients, it basically gives the company or organisation a face not just a name or brand and the same goes for the writer of the Blog and it’s viewers.

What I believe as technology evolves, the future of online PR will become more and more sophisticated, it will involve Podcasts and maybe some other new features which we might have not heard of yet. I actually recently heard that there were some companies who already use Podcast as there online PR strategies. Podcast is one of the newest online PR strategies. Podcasts are used today mainly by independent radio programs, but also large media corporations are trying to use it to distribute advertisement.