PR 2.0 - what is it?

To sum it up shortly I'll borrow from deirdrebreakenridge.com: new media, new tools, new audiences. The appendix 2.0 is obviously a hint to technology where programs are usually marked like that, with a version number. And who is familiar with the term web 2.0 is right to connect the two terms. PR 2.0 is PR through new media channels like Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, Twitter and Blogs, with Twitter being the fastest-growing of them all. In 2008 it gained 752% user growth and this year it continued with fast growth reaching to 10M users worldwide.

PR 2.0 also creates a new job title - community manager. A CM is a web 2.0 expert who knows how to monitor brand visibility on the world wide web. They read technocrati, twitter, messageboards, blogs and social networking sites to collect bits of information about their company and react accordingly. Being proactive by offering updated information to people who for example tweet on topics concerning your brand/company is a good idea. In Estonia this would be needed only in big companies that create fuzz in the web, so you probably won't see many people that are called CM-s in the next couple of years.

There is a variety of free tools to monitor PR 2.0, which could be useful for all of you in the future, for example:
How Sociable? - measure your brand visibility in popular social networking sites.
Twitter search -enables you to search the twittersphere for keywords that you want to monitor

And for example, you can share this post via new media from here:





The problem of PR 2.0 in Estonia is the audience, not a sufficient number on internet users use web 2.0 services(maybe youtube), they usually just surf on news websites etc. Rate.ee, which has the most users in Estonia, current count being 347 296, unfortunately is a very closed portal, although considered to match web 2.0 standards, compared to facebook for example. Rate.ee can be used to do PR 2.0 but not as efficiently as other social networking sites, as it is oriented to direct marketing and is with a more central approach with its architecture. Another pinch is is the age of the reachable audience, people over 30 almost never use the applications mentioned before, this sets certain limits to what it is worth doing PR 2.0 for. If your MAPs include youth then you most certainly want to look into it. Check out these these sites for more information: briansolis.com, shiftcomm.com and kommunikatsioon.com(in Estonian, an interesting reading where I learned much stuff I wrote here in this post and also got the video).

And now... your future!?!?


Chicago PR - A Day in the Life from Allie Osmar on Vimeo.