The Youth of Today Will Always Affect Our Tomorrow J:4460

In an ever-changing world of technological advances, the public relations field has had to evolve with it. According to PRSA, public relations is defined as “help[ing] an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.” (http://www.prsa.org/AboutPRSA/PublicRelationsDefined/) As our publics change their ways of educating themselves, we, as public relations consultants must stay tuned to how they are doing it.

            In a video released by Mashable as the Youtube Video of the Day, a one-year-old child plays with a magazine like it’s an iPad. (http://mashable.com/2011/10/13/baby-magazine-ipad/) Now you are wondering how this video involves us as public relations professionals. As the video shows, a child cannot discern a magazine from an electronic. This child is a representative of our future and how we must evolve to keep them (our publics) in the know.

Children today are more concerned with technology than ever before. This means that as public relations professionals we must change our ways of doing our job. Public relations tools are now converting to online rather than the customary tools that would have usually been sent through traditional mail. Newsletter’s can now be sent to our publics through their email address as opposed to traditional mail as it was in the past.

The ways in which we contact journalists and the media have also changed as technology continues to expand. Now, pitches and media releases can be sent to journalists and the media through e-mail as well, instead of faxing them to people on our client media list.

            Mailers and brochures, I feel are a thing in the past. They can help market our clients, but when everything is converting to online it doesn’t make much sense to use old marketing strategies to reach our publics. For example, if a person is interested in finding out more information about an organization they can visit the organizations website, rather than fiddling with traditional mailers or brochures that they receive in their mailbox.

            As technology continues to expand, there will be more ways of communicating with our publics than there are now. More and more magazines, newspapers, and books are converting from paper to online. As they continue to convert their products online, we will have to learn to convert our information to keep up with our publics as well. Today, we are focusing more on social media, online opinion editorials and newspapers, rather than the traditional methods public relations consultants used to employ. We have social media releases to reach our publics through outlets such as Facebook and Twitter as well as the traditional press release that we send to our contacts. We also have the ability to inform the media of our organizations events through email, rather than sticking to the traditional phone pitch.

            Throughout time, public relations consultants have had to continue to educate themselves on new technological advances in society. I believe that we will have to continue to learn how to inform our publics in this ever-expanding market. If our children are continuing to stray away from traditional media, our thoughts and practices are going to have to sway that way as well.