Benefits of Social Media for Public Relation Press Release

New approach to social media webcast is launched on YouTube

A new webcast "Benefits of Social Media" was launched today, to show how beneficial social media is to a public relations strategy. Katodin PR designed the webcast in order to illustrate how social media has a massive impact on business and how companies can benefit from a social media public relations strategy.

The webcast "Benefits of Social Media" is about social media, what it is and what benefits comes with it. However it also covers the downside of social media and how you can turn it around for your benefit. The webcast covers different areas regarding social media.

• What social media is and why it is called ‘social media’. This part is covering the global aspect of social media, explaining how each country has its own most used social media platform. Despite the different platforms the bottom line is that social media is about community of people with same interest, regardless of geographic and their social and economic background.

• What are the sociological and cultural concepts behind social media and what their relevance is to PR. One of the biggest advantages of social media is globalization. Globalization has a power of speed in which social media enables communication. Part of the power that social media has is that so many people participate in it.

• The webcast covers the issues regarding cultural barriers, about how they are breaking down. Despite difference in culture, religion, social class and other ways we used to divide our society, social media gives everyone a chance to be heard. The other benefit is the freedom of information; there are 'almost no restrictions' on what users can search for and no regulations telling you otherwise.

• How the agency need to constantly feed information to its community and followers. The most important part of social media is to always be where things are happening, monitoring what people are saying about the business and react when things go wrong.

• What the benefits are to the client. The approach to digital media is the same as to traditional. It is still about finding right people to send information to and reach the right audience, in social media the new tools differ. The additional element that comes with digital media is that it helps to amplify your point. News in traditional media disappears fast, where as social media works as long tail. When information is online it will stay there for a long time, it has no time limit! While magazine readership and the number of available print publications continue to decline, the number of consumers using the Internet to access and share information continues to rise. Which means, if the business is to be successful, social media is crucial for the business strategy.

• What are the negatives to the client and how will they be dealt with. When information is public, it can get out. It is important to be there when things go wrong! Posting videos of response; create blogs answering the audience’s questions etc. Instead of watching what people are talking about, jump into the conversation by responding. The audience is a huge asset, they will speak up therefore listen – and respond.

In the case of a crisis traditional media always comes to the rescue, use it so support the argument.

Quotes

The director of Katodin PR Yekaterina Odintsova said: "I hope this webcast "Benefits of Social Media" will provide a new view of social media and the way it is constructed should provide an easy understanding for everybody who watches it. I hope that this new approach of using social media to tell about social media will inspire others to contribute or question the changing media and the benefits of using social media."

For more information contact the press officer:

PR Director

Yekaterina Odintsova

y.odintsova@hotmail.com

News Facts

• Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email.
• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The Internet took four years to reach 50 million people... In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
• The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report into the Blogosphere also revealed that on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest in the world. More people communicate via social networks than via email. There is no denying that the whole world is moving on-line and business and the way people communicate is changing at the fastest pace in history
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations and Only 14% trust advertisements

The Video

Benefits of Social Media Webcast

A new webcast "Benefits of Social Media" was launched today on YouTube, to show how beneficial social media is to a public relations strategy. Katodin PR designed the webcast in order to illustrate how social media has a massive impact on business and how companies can benefit from a social media public relations strategy.

The webcast "Benefits of Social Media" is about social media, what it is and what benefits comes with it. However it also covers the downside of social media and how you can turn it around for your benefit. The webcast covers different areas regarding social media.

If you can't see the video click here (YouTube)

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.