Week 10 - The one where Terence analysed the pros and cons of New Media

Society, as we know it, is totally a different place from the generations of yesterday. Heck, I don't have to go back so far...the generation of today is ALREADY the equivalent of Back To The Future when compared to my childhood.

Back then, I was an avid fan of Transformers and G.I Joe while also eating, sleeping and breathing football. Nowadays, kids will be lucky to even get out of the house to go have a ball of a time at the playground within their vicinity as all they can think of is the INTERNET, COMPUTER games and FACEBOOK.

Gone are the days where friends will call each other up, setting a date out for coffee to catch up or kids to meet neighbours at the playground and potentially being best friends for live. Now, it's all about chatting on Windows LIVE Messenger or Skyping across the world to online friends they've made throguh multiplayer games.

Such is the prominence of the Digital Age that the term New Media got coined. New Media consists of media technology that is linked to the one biggest development since the early 1990s - The Internet.

People are staying connected to each other, no matter the geographical locations, through social-networking websites like Friendster or Facebook while others are sharing daily happenings lin their lives with the world unknown through blogs and Twitter.

It isn't just normal people who are getting involved with the Internet. Organizations, it seems, are slowly getting into the act in line of upgrading their PR policies.

With changing times, newer tactics are required to engage with the publics and stakeholders of organizations and what better way than the global platform that everyone is on? Public Relations is heavily based on an open-ended communication/feedback system and a system such as the Internet will allow organizations to create greater opportunitiues for participation and consultation between key stakeholders and the organization.

Locally, Starhub is one of the leading lights of organizations taking the initiative to engage its customers through forms of New Media. One of the major telco companies in Singapore, Starhub registered itself on Twitter, a micro-blogging website, to allow itself to directly address rants and complaints from Singaporeans who have a tendency to log on to Twitter to let fly their frustrations at Starhub's Internet service, or rather the lack of it.

An important aspect of Public Relations management and execution is that responses to crisis be as immediate as possible so as to reassure the stakeholders that the organization is on top of it. New Media is certainly helping organizations bridge gaps like this with countries such as Singapore and the United States enjoying proliferation of Broadband-on-Mobile like services through smartphones such as the iPhone and Blackberry phone models.

If technological advances have the potential to transform the ball park of communication between organizations and its publics and key stakeholders, shouldn't we be embracing this as a new age of PR management?