NEW MEDIA AND PUBLIC RELATIONS

The beautiful thing about the Internet, as a communications medium of New Media, is that it bridges the gap between people from different countries, permitting them to exchange views and share information. Scholar Cancross (1988) expresses this fast development as "the death of distance"

In the past year, there has been countless examples of the rising influence of new media on public relations. These include (1) the outing of Prince Harry during his brief stint in Afghanistan (2) China's child kidnappings which the country's traditional media refused to explore until a firestorm of net postings forced them to report.

I shall explore the latter in detail. As we all know, talking about politics in China can be dangerous. Critics of the Communist Party are often silenced. However, the blogosphere is changing all this and increasingly Communist leaders are fearing the power of the blog as bloggers are becoming impossible to control - a strange concept for the Chinese government.

Currently, there are over 30 million bloggers in China - a considerably large number for a country where free speech is suppressed so vigorously.

The child kidnaps were originally ignored by members of the traditional press refusing to assist with the search until the parents of the kidnapped children appealed through a written letter to bloggers. After several online attention, the mainstream media eventually decided to investigate the issue. This incident cast a sad light on the Communist party and finally ignored the dominance of the Propaganda department of the party.

It latter turned out after investigations that local police officials were involved in the kidnappings revealing the real reasons why the Department of propaganda had been initially reluctant to give information.



On a general note, I wonder what the rising influence of new media means for our profession. I think it means that practitioners can become more efficient at predicting what could be a potential crisis. Learning what public opinion is can better equip practitioners on all parts of the job from launching a product, developing an effective campaign strategy to dealing efficiently with future public relations crisis.