What Tradition PR Can Achieve That PR 2.0 Can Not

Jeremy Dent at Juice Digital in the UK asks a great question on LinkedIn last week.

What can traditional Public Relations achieve that Digital PR, or PR 2.0, is not able to?

Dent clearly sees PR 2.0 as the future of public relations.

Digital PR, or PR 2.0, is a child of Web 2.0 and is concerned with ensuring that all PR content—blogs; podcasts; photographs; multimedia; motion graphics; online presentations; articles; releases—are marked-up semantically for search engine robots as well being attractive to your target audiences. The task is to make an organisation digitally-visible and is related to search engine optimisation.

First, let’s catch everyone up on the terminology.

What Is PR 2.0?

In a nutshell, PR 2.0 refers to a collection of technology used to communicate over the Internet. This group includes blogs, RSS, Wikis, Podcasts, Instant Messaging (IM), and Social Networking.

Technically, you are reading a PR 2.0 website; a blog written for a specific audience by an industry professional. Equally, you could follow me on Social Networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook and participate in my PR 2.0 environment. Operationally, deploying these tools is like deploying traditional media in an integrated marketing communications plan: you choose the right medium for maximum impact to a target audience.

Shift Communications has a wonderful reference guide for PR 2.0. You can download a copy here.

What PR 2.0 Is Not

PR 2.0 is not a replacement for proven public relations techniques such as press releases, media planning, sales collateral, or message mapping. In fact, PR 2.0 is not technique at all. It is a medium similar to radio, television, and newsprint—albeit a more immediate, personal, and interactive medium.

A blog is a medium like radio, for example. A host can broadcast (narrowcast) a message and the audience can respond. It’s like combining talk radio with an old-fashioned party line. A blog does not take the place of a radio station; it serves a unique purpose inside an overall media plan.

Similarly you have Twitter, the largest cocktail party on Planet Earth. But again, it is a medium designed to focus a message to a specific audience. Like reading a newspaper or selecting a television news program, Twitter allows the audience to find its program content.

Message: The Old Lion Still Roars

The key to successfully employing new communications technology is to understand its purpose. The argument of Old PR vs. New PR is silly because the latter puts the sparkle ahead of the message. It would be as if saying color television is the end of radio. Well, in the short-term, radio took a beating until it found new ways of being an integrated part of the overall content paradigm.

No matter what technology you use to convey a message, the message remains king. Nothing will change that no matter how “new,” “improved,” or “2.0″ you want to make something.

Here are other articles I have written on this topic:

• Using Social Media in a Public Health Emergency
• Should Brands Use Social Networking to Advertise?
• What Twitter’s DoS Attack Can Teach Us
• Facebook Caves on Usage Agreement
• 10 Social Media Mistakes to Avoid
• Book Review: The New Rules of Marketing and PR
• U.S. Military Establishes New Social Media Policy
• The 16 Cornerstones of a Solid Twitter Network
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 7: Social Media Checklist
• Writing a Strategic Communications Plan: Evaluation