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There are major changes taking place in PR Industry and PR professionals must make a concerted effort to educate itself about new PR channels such as search engine marketing and marketing with social media. PR agents that embraced these shifts at their core, will be best prepared to represent brands in a win win situations over those that skim social media with tactics and without a full understanding of the medium.

Emerging Online PR Tactics:
Email and smile/dial pitching as we know it may be on the way out, but journalists will always benefit from reputable sources and being presented with great story ideas relevant to their audiences.

Technology has increasingly provided PR practitioners with tools to make it easier for journalists and the media to cover their clients’ news. RSS and blogs for example, provide excellent channels as well as the social bookmarking of concentrated clusters of information. The social media news release attempts to achieve this effect, but has yet to be accepted as a standard format.

When establishing a relationship with a particular publication or journalist, including links to short podcast and video interviews in email pitches have proven productive in that they provide examples of what it might be like to interview executives relevant to company news and provide sound bites. Subsequently hosting these various media using blog software in the form of an online media room makes the content discoverable on its own via traditional search as well as social media channels.

However, regardless of effective technology is for communications, there is no substitute for human contact whether it’s in person or via phone. In the end, technology can only facilitate what’s been important for the media since day one of the PR business: Find reliable sources and interesting story ideas that help the publication serve it’s readership and advertisers.

Crisis Communications Has Changed:
In the past, PR professionals could call their contacts within the media to keep a negative story from getting coverage. With more and more editorial decisions in the hands of user generated content, there’s nothing any company or PR professional can do to stop negative news from being posted, ranted, commented and spread.

Todays participatory web requires companies to be involved with online communities in order to gain any kind of foothold on what’s being said and discussed about their brands. The notion that, “Conversations are happening with or without you, so get involved or get left behind”, rings true for brands and PR as well as for advertising and marketing.

Brands need to be monitored continuously and when dissention is detected, it must be qualified and responded to quickly. Corporate PR and communications need to allocate ongoing resources to this end in proportion to the value of their brand equity. The bigger the brand, the more you have to lose by not paying attention to what social communities and the blogosphere is saying.