After reading the first few chapters of the book my new way of thinking about PR is how important it is being connected with people and really know what your audience wants. We know that in the past few years social media became a huge part of everyday life. Our book talks about the change PR is going through and what things are still really important in our day-to-day basis.
The first thought that comes to my mind thinking about PR is how different it is now and how much it has evolved. A great example of it is on page 86 and what it talks about is the shift in power. The audience that used to be on the receiving end of things is now the people who control everything.
In our book we are given advice on what’s important about PR 2.0. On page xxiii it says “New PR Is the path to better relationship with your stakeholders and the opportunity to really listen and help your customers.” I think this is really true because as we have learned not only from this book but also from the previous classes is that relationships are everything. It is so important to be connected on this lever where you can comfortable around a certain individual.
Something that can be taken away from our book and applied in any other class is building relationships. You want people to trust you and want to keep coming back. Going back talking about the change PR is going through something that everyone needs to know if how difficult PR 2.0 is. We are talking about the skills that you can not learn in a classroom setting. Don’t get me wrong I think that the basics of PR are still very important and we need to know them. I just think some people now might focus a lot on the relationship aspect of it and forget about the fundamentals. What we all need to learn is how to combine both of those things together to become great PR professionals. That’s when you know that you have mastered the skill. Being open-minded to all the change that is happening is something that really helped me with my other course work. Change is really hard for me and I can relate to those people that do not like change.
On the other hand something that stuck out to me from our book was on page 17. Being involved with social media. The only way to succeed now is by being involved. “Engaging in Social Media.” I can definitely agree with this statement because I myself recently became more engaged with social media. I feel like this a great opportunity for me to be heard and get connected with people. In the past month Twitter has really grown on me quite a bit. My goal is to be involved Twitter user. I found this really interesting article online called “28 ideas for engaging visual content to post on social media.” I figured it might help out. It was a very interesting article that was worth the time to read it. Even though that the tips they give are for companies, it’s something that we can take for consideration for our personal profiles. The once that really stood out to me were: infographics, comics, testimonial video.
Taking a look back to where I was a year ago or even a few months ago, its crazy. I have learned so much in the past few weeks then I have in awhile. This class on its own has taught me a lot. Starting from building relationships to putting yourself out there to learning new SM tools. It’s all coming together.
allisonwalter 