How social media came to be so powerful

Four major forces have converged to make social media as powerful and dynamic as it is.

1) Moore's Law, which indicates that the power of silicon substrates doubles around every 18 months.
2) Metcalfe's law, which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²).
3) The free availability of storage, which continues to drop in price and soar in terms of ubiquity. Today's cellphones typically contain 2GB to 16GB of storage.
4) Widely available bandwidth - 3G, for instance, costs a fraction of what it did a decade ago.


These four factors mean anyone, anywhere, can be connected to anyone anywhere else, at a marginal cost. This has blown the market wide open for any kind of communication between any two or more parties.

Tomorrow, we will examine how the ability to communicate in a limitless fashion is being fulfilled, and how to start doing something about it.

PR 2.0: where to begin

Building on yesterday's post, the single most important thing to understand is the set of interrogatives:

* Who do I want to reach?
* What do I want to say to them?
* Why do I want to reach them?
* To what outcome?
* With what frequency?
* At what cost?
* When do I want to communicate?
* Through what channels?

The Greeks understood implicitly that these were the building blocks of knowledge. As PR practitioners, we can conflate issues, and view the new media as something revolutionary. In fact, the basis of PR 2.0 is the same as the basis of PR 1.0, and it all begins with the creation of a target universe.

In essence, this starts with the question: "Who do I want to reach?" And this will be the subject of tomorrow's post.

The first in a daily series of articles on PR 2.0

Many of our clients and business colleagues have asked us what we mean by PR 2.0. They have also asked us, repeatedly, how to reach their target market.

What we do know is the nature and value proposition of PR has changed quite dramatically in the last five years, with the advent of social media.

It is almost inconceivable that Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are relatively new phenomena. They seem to have been around for decades. But they are new, in relative terms, and they are the way that existing and potential customers can be reached with rifle precision.

They are without any doubt the new methods to reach target markets, supported by the traditional PR process.

Traditional PR depended, simply, on a single, big release, placed in a target medium. You reached enough of the people you wanted to reach to impact your business.

Typically, this target medium was of the print variety. There was sufficient hit rate for companies to build awareness with one, hugely expensive release, offered exclusively to the target publication. And “exclusive” was the key word. If the publication viewed itself as just one cog in a machine, the article was downgraded.

Today, PR excellence is about hundreds of small things done well.

In the long journey we are undertaking through this new blog, we will examine these “hundreds of things”, and try and provide guidance in a lengthy learning experience. We look forward to your company as we evolve not just to the world of PR 2.0, but PR 3.0.
 
And we encourage you to contribute – Frank Heydenrych


Image: http://www.invisiblepr.com/pr-event-public-relations-2-0-the-new-tools-of-the-trade/