The Public Relations Practitioner’s Responsibility to Social Media

{ October 28, 2009 @ 3:30 PM } · { Uncategorized }

As a journalism student who was very technologically inept, social media is mostly new to me. I could hold my own on Facebook, but the use of blogs, Twitter and podcasts was completely new to me. Our public relations professors encouraged us to participate in social media, so I began to explore the social media realm a little over a year ago. Now, I see the benefit and responsibility that PR has to the social media universe.

Jason Falls, a public relations consultant, says in his blog that public relations is largely responsible for the social media universe because practitioners are the people who pay attention to social media outlets the most and use it to their advantage in the most effective ways. This is because social media is a means of communication between the general public and companies.

However, with so many social media outlets, how can one PR department at one company keep up? Applications like Google Alerts, which tags certain words that can be found on Google, and Twilert, which tags words and phrases that are tweeted, make keeping up with social media much, much easier. Both of these applications will send the alerts to an E-mail address. These applications and social media outlets are easy to use and can be used by public relations practitioners to stay on top of the public’s opinion of the product or company that they are promoting.

So why is social media the responsibility of PR practitioners? Because it is the job of the public relations practitioner to monitor the opinion of the public and address the concerns that are brought up by the public.

As a student of PR, I felt the need to become proficient in social media so that, once I join the workforce, I can contribute to the public relations movement into social media.