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Interactive Public Relations
OVERVIEW
Technologies for online public relations are introduced. The function of public relations is connected with the concept of interactivity. Building on prior mass communication scholarship, a theme is developed for the text that approaching online public relations is more a matter of what people are doing with online media technologies than what these technologies are doing to people.
WHERE TO START?
Perhaps a colorful vignette is a good place to start a book on online public relations.
She wakes up by the alarm on her PDA and checks e-mail and a couple of pod-casts while slurping down a cup of coffee. Then she races off to her office, which is actually the spare bedroom in her apartment. After adjusting the Web cam and microphone on her desktop, she chimes into her first meeting of the day with fellow account executives in Europe and South America as well as some of her colleagues in the United States. An instant message from a reporter pops up on her monitor while she watches a real-time PowerPoint presentation on the best way to launch her clientâs new social networking site.
With the rate of change in media technology, we might as well start with:
He gets to the office at 9 A.M. His secretary hands him a facsimile from the New York office that rolled off the spool the night before. Itâs a news release on the launch of an affordable cellular telephone that fits easily in an average briefcase. While he waits for his high-performance 486 to boot up, he reads through a couple of newspapers and slurps down his coffee. (We canât have our busy powerbrokers just âsipâ coffee.) His modem buzzes and beeps and screeches as it connects to the Internet at a blazing 14,400 bits per second.âŚ
Although the first vignette shows some progress made since the second example, both are snapshots that will seem equally dated in a few short years (if they donât already).
Another approach might be to herald the dramatic changes the Internet has made to public relations and to society as a whole. This way, we can avoid getting caught up with the messy specifics of technology that change faster than the publishing cycle of books like this one.
The Internet revolution is here! Strap yourself in and hang on for a wild ride as our field and our world change at an accelerated pace never before experienced by mankind. Public relations will never be the same, and neither will youâŚOnline media are everywhere you look.
The hype itself sounds dated. And, of course, in a field often criticized for hyperbole, we have to be especially careful not to overstate the implications of the new technologies we embrace.
DE-HYPING HYPERMEDIA
Getting beneath the hype has been an issue for those studying communication since the early days of mass communication scholarship.
In October 1938, Orson Wellesâs and Howard Kochâs radio adaptation of H. G. Wellsâs War of the Worlds panicked some Americans. People in New Jersey fled into the streets with wet rags on their faces to protect themselves from the Martiansâ noxious heat rays, doctors and nurses offered police their assistance to aid the victims, and hospitals treated real patients for shock and hysteria (Sourcebooks, 2001). Moreover, War of the Worlds helped hype the âmass-nessâ of mass media. For most people who experienced or read about the Welles broadcast shortly thereafter, the War of the Worlds fiasco just underscored the powerful effects of media (Lowery & DeFleur, 1995).
But Hadley Cantril (1940) formed a different opinion, one that helped lay groundwork for generations of mass communication scholars. Cantrilâs research on the way audiences responded to the radio broadcast is considered a milestone in mass communication research today because it clearly undermined the so-called âmagic bulletâ theory of mass media. He found that different people responded differently to the broadcast, largely based on factors such as critical thinking (e.g., many listeners simply checked other news sources). As we will see, the research that informs much of our look at online public relations builds on the ideas that different people make different uses of media and that the study of mass media and public relations now usually overlaps with the study of interpersonal communication (Coombs, 2001).
Newer media sometimes panic publics too. In 1999, we were really concerned about the Y2K problem. In the United States, the CIA advised its employees to stockpile cash and pay bills early. As fears about the collapse of the nationâs digital infrastructure mounted, businesses providing bulk foods, generators, and any other items a survivalist might find handy saw enormous increases in sales (McCullagh, 1999a, 1999b). Whereas media content was the primary culprit in the War of the Worlds episode, media technology is what people feared with the Y2K issue. What if the network of computers that comprise the Internet were to crash?
Fortunately, the Y2K missile was a dud. Writing for the University of Southern California, Annenbergâs, Online Journalism Review, Scheer (2000) said:
The Y2K crisis should serve as a cautionary tale in evaluating all aspects of the much-ballyhooed Internet age that is upon us. The changes implied by a wired world are indeed profound, but they are not, as the Y2K alarmists insisted, of inevitable Earth-shattering proportions. Weâve lived with computers long enough to know that as with other technological revolutions, life goes on pretty much as it did before.
Far from panic, the Internet also has been the subject of grand expectations by pundits from many corners of the global political map in the early 2000s. Progressives have hoped the Internet would act as a political participation machine, mobilizing the voiceless masses to get involved in political discourse. Conservatives have seen the Internet as a free-market competitor to traditional mass media, relaxing the need for tight government regulation on media ownership and content, but as Internet-and-society researchers Cooper and Cooper put it in 2003, âAfter two decades of presence in civil society, the Internet has not lived up to its hope or hypeâ (p. i).
Yet somewhere between hype and apathy, lasting lessons are waiting to be learned. Early mass communication researchers used the tools of psychology and public opinion research to understand the lasting implications of the changing media landscape of their time. This book discusses how public relations academics and professionals, borrowing from a wide variety of related disciplines, are working to discover the lasting implications of online media for their field.
DEFINING ONLINE MEDIA
Web sites, e-mail, intranets, Internet forums, wikis, and blogs look and act a lot different than the media of early mass communication research such as newspapers, books, radio, and television. E-mail and blogs, for example, are usually more about interpersonal communication than mass communication. But as communication science pioneer Wilbur Schramm (1973) noted decades ago, and decades before the Internet, the distinction between mass communication and interpersonal communication is largely arbitrary:
Indeed, it could be argued that many qualities of an inflammatory face-to-face speech to a mob are less personal, more mass, than a singer crooning through a radio into the ear of a teen-ager alone in her room. (p. 114)
In this text, the term online media will be used to cover a broad range of communication systems, channels, and formats. Some, such as instant messaging, may be used for very interpersonal purposes, whereas others, such as high-traffic Web pages, are designed to reach masses. In a sense, the Internet is the medium for online communication, and technologies like instant messaging and the Web represent the systems, channels, formats, and messages that it contains. In this text, the term online media will comprise all of these elements of Internet communication technology. Here is a set of definitions to get us started.
Internet. The Internet is a global network of publicly accessible networks. Itâs the worldwide system of computers, cables, and wired and wireless devices that connect to each other to help people and machines exchange information. For the purposes of this book, if communication is happening on the Internet, then itâs happening online.
World Wide Web. The Web is a collection of resources available for us to retrieve with our Web browsers. These resources (e.g., Web pages) often are formatted with hypertext, which allows users to click on a word or image to retrieve another resource. Uniform resource locators (URLs) are the working Internet addresses for such Web resources. Of course, these resources can be audio files or 3-D animations or video, as well as text and pictures. We all know the Web when we see it, but it is important to realize that the Web is only part of the Internet.
FTP, or file transfer protocol. FTP allows users to put files on a computer server that other people can then retrieve from different locations. As with Web browsing and Web downloading, this transfer of files happens on the Internet. An FTP program can be used instead of a Web browser. Such file transfer sites have URLs that start with âftpâ instead of âhttp,â which stands for âhypertext transfer protocol.â Organizations can host an FTP site to make just about any type of computer file available for download. Millions of pages of documents, software programs, multimedia files, and databases that might have required a warehouse and several clerks to physically dig through stacks of information every time someone requested a document, film, or spreadsheet now can be stored and retrieved on a server machine stashed in a hall closet. Files to be transferred can be password protected or made accessible to any anonymous computer user who knows the FTP address.
E-mail. E-mail programs allow users to compose, send, and retrieve messages formatted for electronic delivery as well as attachments formatted for an array of uses such as text documents, photos, spreadsheets, and audio and video files. E-mail is generally thought of as an asynchronous mode of communication. That is, generally the senders and receivers need not be online at the same time for e-mail to work. If you send someone an e-mail, you normally donât assume that they will see the message and respond instantly when you hit âsend.â For text-based conversations that need to happen in real time (more like phone calls), online chats might be a better option.
Chats and instant messaging. Internet relay chats and instant messaging systems work like e-mail programs in that they can be used for one-to-one communication or for one-to-many communication. They also can be used for many-to-many communication, depending on the number of people included as senders and receivers. The main difference is that the term chat in online contexts usually means instant, text-based communication. Since online chats and instant messages still are not quite as âinstantâ as phone calls or face-to-face conversationsâthey require at least the amount of time it takes to type a message and send itâmany-to-many online chats can be frustrating when several users try to âtalkâ at once.
Internet forums. These are sometimes called discussion forums, bulletin board systems, newsgroups, or message boards. These systems provide virtual places where people can post comments or questions, which in turn start conversational threads. A thread may start with a single question that goes unanswered for a while until someone posts a single response, or it may almost immediately ignite a heated debate in which many interested users get involved. Forums are generally set up to host conversations dedicated to particular topics. Like e-mail, and unlike chats, forums are generally designed for asynchronous communication.
Intranets and extranets. Intranets are networked information systems that an organization hosts for its internal publics. A business might host an intranet for people who work there. This site might include a directory of employee contact information, sales databases, internal classified ads, announcements about workplace events, an internal ...
