2.0 puts the public back in public relations

Dierdre states that "as a result of PR 2.0, brands are able to have conversations directly with their customers in niche web communities." She continues to state "they are invited to participated in dialogue in places where they have never been invited to participate before." PR 2.0 puts the "public" back in public relations with the ability to speak to more people. The concept is driven by technology (the web 2.0 platform and social media applications) and 21st century consumer behavior.

Take a look at Dierdre's video that explains the importance of a video for corporate use.


Brian Solis, a globally recognized and prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media believes that PR 2.0 forces traditional media to evolve. I agree with him that it creates an entirely new set of influencers with a completely different mechanism for collecting and sharing information while also reforming the daily routines of how people searched for news. I believe that it is changing the landscapes for how companies interact with consumers, and how the voice of consumers is being heard much more clearly through their honest voices.

This is also changing the role of public relation practitioners. Before PR 2.0, public relation professionals would be the middle men between companies and customers, consumers, however now, they are directing companies to how best hear the voices of customers and consumers through either podcasts, blogs, tweets, or other online mechanisms for their voices to be heard. I believe that in order to thrive in the area of public relations, one must evolve with this new form of interaction. It is not a trend and is here to evolve and stay. Further more, it decreases the cost that company's have to spend on interacting with people, because this form of social media is free.

Web 2.0 Web 2.0 applications such as wikis, blogs and forums, have made it possible to support business-internal collaboration and knowledge management. This complements PR 2.0. Instead of 'losing' or 'hiding' public, customer or employee knowledge inside of people's heads, web 2.0 functionality in the form of wikis and blogs can provide an easy to use outlet for experience and expertise. This new way of working and sharing knowledge mirrors the Facebook approach to communicating.

Public Relations is migrating from a broadcast mechanism to a hybrid assembly of traditional PR combined with web-savy, social-awareness, intelligence and a real understanding of markets.

PR 2.0 is the understanding and practice that communications is a two way process and incorporates the tools, principles, strategies, and philosophies for reaching, engaging, guiding, influencing and helping people directly in addiction to the traditional cycle of PR influence.

PR 2.0 is a philosophy and practice to improve the quality of work, change the game, and participate with people in a more informed and intelligent way. It's not about the new web tools at all. They are merely tools used to facilitate conversations. However, everything, especially intent, knowledge and enthusiasm, are unique to you. With the democratization of media, people are becoming the new influencers, complementing the existence of experts and traditional journalists, but still regard as a score and resource for customers equally.

In a globe and mail article, article, Greg Elmer, a media expert and professor at Ryerson University says that "It's only in the past four or five months that the corporate and private sectors, including public-relations firms, have come to recognize platforms like Twitter as the place where the public's first impressions are born." He continues to state, "a PR firm, particularly one that's engaging in crisis communications and offers services for crisis situations like Bryant's, the number one thing you do in crisis communications is to get out front of the message and Twitter is the absolute front line of people's reactions." This is a direct example of how PR 2.0 has forces traditional media to evolve.

Social media is better seen as a two-way conversation, where as traditional media is about "broadcast" (content transmitted or distributed to an audience) social media is better seen as a two-way conversation. In a social media study conducted by Italian blogger, Vincenzo Consenza published a visual map that portrays the most popular social networks around the world based on the most recent traffic data (December 2009), stated that 94% of countries reported that micro-blogging (think twitter) were among the least pervasive within the exception of Japan, where it ranked fourth- just below social network profiles and above video.

Brian Solis states that, "PR 2.0 was born through the analysis of how the web and multimedia was redefining PR and marketing communications, while also building the toolkit to reinvent how companies communicate with influencers and directly with people." This is a corporations chance to communicate directly with the public through online forums, blogs, twitter, groups, communities, and facebook.
In summary, PR 2.0 is the realization that the web changed everything, inserting people equally into the process of traditional influence. Suddenly society was presented with the opportunity to not only reach our audiences through gatekeepers, but also use the online channels where they publish and share information to communicate directly and genuinely.

Take a look at my video illuminating the importance of PR 2.0 in the 21st century

Ho to embed a you tube video

Take a look.....



Here are some interesting facts and useful advice:

1. The signup is simple: Provide an email address and a zip code, then pick a username and password. YouTube will send you a confirmation email, and you are immediately able to upload videos.


2. Uploads are limited to 100MB, and they can take a while – the site says about 1-5 minutes per MB, which could translate to a couple of hours spent uploading a five-minute video if your internet connection is feeling a little lethargic.

YouTube accepts .wmv, .mov, .avi and .mpg formats.

3. YouTube will compress any videos you upload, and this can really do a number on image quality, which is why so many YouTube videos look patchy or grainy.

The only real way to get around this is to make sure you’re uploading the highest-quality video that will fit within their size restrictions. Depending on your video’s length and format, different compression settings will yield different results – you may have to experiment a little.

4. If you don’t want everyone to be able to search for your video, you can set your video to "private" and enter names and emails for the people who are allowed to see it.

If, on the other hand, you’re interested in as many people seeing it as possible, you can embed YouTube videos in other websites, such as eBay or Myspace.com.

5. Content that is obscene, illegal, harmful, violates copyright, etc. is not allowed.

Learn more about avoiding copyright violations

It’s important to know that while you retain the ownership rights to whatever you post to YouTube, by uploading you grant YouTube the right to do whatever they want with your video. Also, any YouTube member can easily copy it, steal it, reproduce it, sell it, whatever, without any kind of permission or reparation. So if you have a really brilliant piece of work you’re hoping to sell, don’t put it on YouTube.

6. To share a YouTube video, you can email it or embed it in a blog. To email it to friends, click the “Share video” link under the player and enter email addresses in the window that opens.

Click the “Post video” link directly under the Share link to post it to a blog. You can then post it to Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Reddit or StumbleUpon by clicking the icon that shows up, or set up a blog such as LiveJournal to post the video to.

There is a URL you can use to link to the video to the right of the player; just underneath that is HTML code you can copy and paste to embed the player in another website.

My group includes: Julie Ibrahim, Zack Sandor and Sarah Long

To see Julie's blog

To see Zac's blog

To see Sarah's blog

To check a master list of how to, click here