Can you be a competent PR practitioner and not be on Internet? Theoretically, maybe. But then, theoretically, you could also be a competent PR practitioner and use a typewriter, correcting fluid, and a hand-- cranked telephone, (Independent PR Practitioners Network, 1999, p. 3). The Independent PR Practitioners Network may be overstating point, but there is no question that Internet offers public practitioners a new communication medium, implications of which have yet to be fully understood. The Internet, meaning broadly its World Wide Web and e-mail functions, offers advantages over traditional print and broadcast media. But capitalizing on Internet's advantages means learning about various Internet tools and technologies and understanding their capabilities. Known also as Net relations (Spataro, 1998) and PR, Internet public relations, as used here, refers to use of Internet tools and technologies by public professionals in public process, including researching publics and issues, communicating with a client's internal and external stakeholders, and evaluating results of PR efforts. This article reviews results of an exploratory e-mail survey that sought to determine for what purposes public agencies are using Internet for their clients and which of Internet's tools and technologies they employ. It also sought to determine what these practitioners consider important for Internet public relations. The issue examined is how public educators can best prepare graduates for demands of profession, especially if Spataro is right that, companies are beginning to hire people who have Internet skills and that, recent college graduates who have been using Web for years are sometimes best qualified to fill some of these new roles (Spataro, 1998, p. 2). Literature review Public and Internet. That Internet and its World Wide Web component are changing public is well-documented in professional literature (e.g., Barks, 1999; Leslie, n.d.; Adams, 1999; Gawlick, 2001). Bloom (1999) argues that, the Internet and PR were made for each other. They are both about making a connection, about establishing one-on-- one (p. 12). It is equally clear that fundamentals of public have not changed. Public involves managing relationships through communication (Independent PR Practitioners Network, 1999). But Holtz (1999) argues that Internet, although a medium like newspapers, radio, and television, changes traditional mass media concept of one-to-many communication to many-to-many. It also offers advantages over traditional media, such as interactivity, immediacy, accessibility, targeting, and reach (Leslie, n.d.), and opens door to Grunig and Hunt's two-way symmetrical communication (1984). In fact, in a 1999 survey of 1,730 public clients conducted by Impulse Research Corporation, 79 percent indicated that Internet had already improved two-- way communication between my company and its publics. The same study revealed that, used Internet to monitor online news coverage (80%), to monitor competition (71%), and to communicate with media (69%), customers (63%), prospective employees (56%), and shareholders/financial community (53%) (Harris & Novick, 1999). But many public professionals are ill-equipped to handle changes. Holtz (1999) describes profession's use of Internet as embryonic, and Stein notes that most professionals are still learning how to adapt news releases for Web sites (Adams, 1999). According to Geibel (1999), problem is that many established public tools were developed in a different time. Conventional PR tools -- press release, white paper, press kits -- were designed at turn of century for journalists, he writes (p. …
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Apr 20, 2015
Bonnie Brennen + 1
Open Access