Now that you've seen the interviews for my dissertation I conducted with Heather Yaxley, Shelley Fletcher-Bryant and Annie Bowden, here's the next one.
Below you’ll see the responses of Rob Brown. He has worked in PR for over 20 years and for over fifteen years held senior PR positions within three major global advertising networks: Euro RSCG, McCann Erickson and TBWA. He launched his own business ‘Rule 5’ in MediaCityUK, Manchester in November 2012. Rob is the author of ‘Public Relations and the Social Web’ and is joint editor of the forthcoming 'Share This Too'. You can check out his blog here http://prandtheweb.com/ and follow him on Twitter @robbrown.
Q: How do you think the emergence of social media changed PR? Is it a positive or a negative impact and why?
It has changed PR considerably. A core element of PR has traditional been media relations. The media has evolved and so must PR. From a structural point of view there is more dialogue and more peer to peer communication and PR must engage with and learn to influence these conversations. From a practical point of view media is generally richer and more distributed. In the past our content was mainly test (press releases) and images. No we need to consider including more video and linked content. PR people are even learning to share HTML code.