Public Relations, at its most basic, is concerned with the most effective means of reaching and communicating with relevant audiences. Along with traditional avenues from townhall meetings to fliers, press releases, editorial and analyst meetings, new outlets such as search engines and blogs are providing additional channels for a growing number of companies.
The mass usage of search engines by people researching products, services or ideas online means that it is foolish to ignore the power of search engine optimization. At the same time the sheer volume of information online can confuse or frustrate users and prevent them from finding the information they want. There are already some tools available to help reduce the noise, but you can expect major steps forward in this area over the coming years. Of course that presents new challenges for PR people attempting to reach online audiences – what if you’re filtered out?
Trevor Cook has an excellent article for the Australian Financial Review which looks at how technology can reduce the noise overload and includes digestible introductions to the tools that are becoming available to help people reduce the noise and increase the relevance.
“On the other hand, as one participant said, we may need to adopt a more Zen-like approach to the problem and just accept that we will (shock) miss some good information from time to time. We may need to get off the technology-driven information treadmill and occasionally �catch a sunset�.”
Murphy's Law 