In public relations, social media is the king in 2009. If you visit any pr blog, you will see extensive discussions on social media. Most of the pr bloggers are twittering and blogging.
Even I, your humble PhD student, is spending the summer researching social media at the Institute for Public Relations.
But in our enthusiasm for social media, we should not forget several things:
1. A large segment of the world lacks rudimentary access to the internet.
2. Even in the US, there are segments where internet access is limited
3. Some parts of the population (e.g. blind, deaf) are not being factored in many social media tools. Ajax, the primary programming language for many social media applications, has been extensively criticized for making it harder for the disabled to access information online.
Social media is viewed as the cure pr needs or the instrument for its demise (depending on which blog you read).
What we need are tools to engage all relevant publics in dialogue. Social media is great if it allows us to have honest conversations with groups were are talking to right now and groups that we have had difficulty engaging before.
The challenge isn't simply to reach the twitterer with his iPhone or the facebooker on her Blackberry. Rather, we should be concerned with engaging all relevant publics (especially the disadvantaged and marginalized).
When we champion social media tools, we should be cognizant of issues such as who has access to these tools and who can't access them.
Public relations can't simply be concerned with the privileged because pr issues do not simply arise from privileged sectors of society.
As we all know, some of the biggest pr challenges of the century(e.g Union Carbide at Bhopal, BHP in Papua New Guinea, conflict diamonds in Sierra Leone) emerged from areas where many households lacked telephones, running water, and electricity.
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