There were a lot of learnings for me this week, with one being that I really need to spend more time using social web applications to see what they offer in order to get a better understanding of how they work and the possibilities they may offer in practical terms specifically to the practice of public relations. There is one thing I am clear on and that is, there are MANY applications available out there in the social web but the practical uses for many of the applications to PR activities specifically are not obvious and have yet to be defined. My biggest learning, therefore, is that as a PR practitioner I need to be active in the social web to continually monitor social media application offerings, try them out and think about how I can effectively integrate the given application into a PR strategy.
I decided to register on Foursquare (location-based service) and Stumbleupon (discovery engine) and downloaded a QR code reader onto my mobile phone. Simply doing that made me feel more social media savvy!
Registering was a fairly simple task; identifying effective uses for the platforms to PR practice was challenging. A few effective applications of LBS to PR may include the ability to recommend to the public a particular social event you are organizing, like a charity event. It could also be used to generate interest in your brand by offering influencers who recommend your business to their network a discount. During this exercise I really couldn’t figure out how a discovery engine can be used effectively as a social media platform for PR practitioners, except for perhaps the possibility for free research given that the platform uses ratings to get consensus on the quality of websites the discovery engine offers to users in a given category. A QR code can be incorporated in a PR campaign to provide additional information to the user that is interesting, useful and free. At an event launch for a new product, say cookware, you might incorporate a QR code element to allow attendees to get free recipes or view a demonstration of how to use the cookware properly.
I’ll definitely be reading all the blogs from the class to see what other effective uses these platforms to PR have been identified.
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