Blogging in Social Media

The successful blogs are written to connect, help and gain information. Blogs that contain informative and knowledgeable content and address real issues are read and passed along to others as credible. However there has been a noticeable increase in reporters where journalists pick up a piece of a story through social media and run it with whatever is out there without checking the credibility. This is how the profession becomes a defence, and the PR becomes the ‘bad guy’ again in the world of media. This comes from company’s leaks and are much more difficult to stop. Once this happens the PR practitioners only chance to correct this is to come forward before every piece of the story is ready for the public, which leads it back to the perception of PR being illegitimate. It also means that stories with major publications will not be newsworthy, as the leaks sometimes contain inaccurate information resulting in journalists lose their interest in the story once they realise they no longer have an exclusive.

For many years PR has been fighting to be credible, by using new media it is easy for everyone to access and post information, which means in order for the information to be credible the readers need to spend more time on researching in order to be reinsured that the information is reliable. In the book "Flat Earth News" Davis is talking about how naive the readers are when reading a newspaper, which most readers believe to be credible news, but how can they know better when the journalist many times run a story with out themselves knowing how credible the information is.

Will blogging be a positive or negative tool for PR? At this particular time during recession, blogs are here to financially support the communication channels. Everything mentioned in this report suggest that there is more pros for the social media and blogs, however as everything else, it has its own downsides.

After talking about social media, it sounds like traditional media is no longer relevant. It is not true, media is critically important for many organisations. A positive story in the Guardian or an article in the Financial Times will still bring more publicity to any company than any web-blog. Blogs as a trend is here to stay and there is much that the PR industry can achieve by using social media and its channel of communication. Blogging may change the nature of PR as an industry and it could perhaps take it to a new way of building relations with the public, a way that is not only direct and honest but one that includes responsibility. What will happen with social media and PR in the future? Social media era is here and PR needs to adapt and follow its trends.