Hey Joe, Whaddya Know?

By Sylvia Ogilvie, Intern (@sylviaillini)

While I’ve been working at Fusion, my main focus thus far has been to learn as much as possible about what having a career in the public relations industry would be like. Every week, I pick up more and more skills and tools to help me learn about what’s going on in the PR world.

For example, the homepage I have set for Internet Explorer and Mozilla is NetVibes. It’s basically a platform where you can add RSS feeds from any news outlets, giving you access to a plethora of current information in various industries within one page.

Every morning when I sit down at my desk, I can immediately access the prominent headlines from dozens of top tier news outlets (my homepage is currently sent to Fusion's NetVibes profile, which combines RSS feeds from news in business, technology, PR). So not only do I gain a vast amount of knowledge about the most pressing issues facing our nation and world, but I also get a ton of information about issues in the PR world. One such bit of information I came across was an blog post about the importance of Twitter and Facebook for public relations titled, "Hypermicro Public Relations".

Essentially, the article discussed the increasing need to target everyday social networking service user. Or as the blog puts it--the "average joe." This all ties in to the concept of participatory media, which I’ve been learning more and more about since I got here. Because the masses are becoming so much more attentive to the media arena, PR firms and clients have begun to realize that instead of just targeting brand names and big influencers, it is just as important – if not more so – to go after the millions of “regular” people on Facebook and Twitter. These services are making the barrier to create content lower than ever, thus allowing anybody with Internet access to express their opinions and ideas to so many others.

Never before have the opinions of the average joe meant so much, and from what I can tell this phenomenon is only going to grow. I’ll be very interested to see how the public relations industry continues to adapt and evolve along with it.