New Media Journalists, Aren't We All?

10:10 AM | by The A-Team
How ya doin'..?

It's just some random thoughts that pops out in my mind, that I thought maybe I should share with you guys.

Last week, Miss Anusha had told us about how anybody can be a journalist.

With New Media Technology, anybody can be anything.

I am a true primate when it comes to technology, don't ask me why, but frankly speaking, I never have the intense curiosity of surfing the Net unless it's for academic purposes. I never knew about the latest softwares, applications...heck, I still think Print Shop Deluxe and Solitaire are the only coolest softwares of all time.

And. I have no Facebook account.

I'm so pathetic.

However.

I have always loved to write. So I wrote on Microsoft Word until I found out about blogs. So I signed up. Then I had a few followers, subscribers (I just realized that I signed an RSS Feed to my blog while actually I didn't know hell about RSS) and even readers from other countries e-mailed me about my posts. So I thought dayumn am I cool or what.

Then I got the unwanted readers to comment and advertise their sites on my blog. First they were all right. But then, after a while, I realized their comments were kind of peculiar. I did some research and I found out they were actually trying to link me to porn sites.

Porn siteSss. Notice the plural people, there are many of them.

And I found that out after a year. Tahniah ye.

I can't do anything about it, so I just keep those comments moderated (which, took me weeks to understand the function) while they keep on commenting and praising my opinions.

I, am just a nobody, who loves writing thoughts and opinions. But now my readers think I work for the soft porn industry. I lost my fans, even though I write not expecting much of fame, I still don't like to think that my once faithful readers ran off thinking I'm faking or making up my opinions just to lure them into porn sites. How would I gain credibility if my readers believe in that, while I myself wrote against the issue?

Then it hit me. Like just now.

Only New Media can do that. Only New Media can satisfy curiosity and rapidly change people's beliefs, attitude, and judgments within a click. Only New Media can condemn and shape people's minds that quickly. Only New Media can make people instantly believe that behind those articles there is an author who actually is a porno freak.

And that New Media can make people get confused with what's real and true or otherwise.

New Media can do weird things to you. Until you get dependent towards it.

People say being literally corrupted is illegal, and the ones who are involved are black and white. How about being mentally corrupted? Who is to be blamed? New Media?

Just who is this New Media?

It's you. You and you.

With Miss Anusha's permission, let me rephrase on what I think of the statement 'anybody can be a journalist.'

With all due respect, journalists are noble, educated people of the media who have information and spread them to other people for the betterment of their publics. So no, I don't think every body is that noble and educated enough to be in par with professional journalists' standards.

But every body is noble and educated enough in their own way, and that with New Media Technology, - every body can be A Journalist Of His Own.

Whether for the betterment of the publics or not, it's up for YOU to decide.

So don't lose yourself into easily trusting something that is rapidly evolving and changing within seconds.

Happy Ramadhan everyone!
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Crisis Communications Management on the Web: How Internet-Based Technologies are Changing the Way Public Relations Professionals Handle Business Crise

12:12 PM | by The A-Team
Crisis Communications Management on the Web: How Internet-Based Technologies are Changing the Way Public Relations Professionals Handle Business Crises.

González-Herrero and Suzanne Smith.

This paper is about how internet and new media technologies changed the public relations landscape to handle the business crises. Internet has drastically changed the business and communication compare to previous decade. Nowadays, internet became the popular choice for organization to communicate with the customers, investors, analysts, employees, media, and stakeholders. Company used PR to cater their audiences through mass media-printed and non printed. Before the evolving of internet technologies, the PR practitioners used One-to–Many Model as one of their strategies to disseminate the information to the constituencies through media. But, the media will only publishing the information that their determined as newsworthy and credible. Due to the advancement of technology and thanks to the internet, the model was changed into Many-to-Many. The development of this model makes the PR practitioner’s task become harder and bigger. They must take into consideration not only the traditional media but also the new media such as the blogs, social networking sites, and many more. The internet also can be a triggered to a crisis or facilitate the crisis. Sometimes, the internet will be functioning as an agent that will break geographical boundaries or became additional channel to the events that already occur in the real world. Unfortunately, the internet can be a triggering factors that can relate into crisis if it’s not been handle appropriately by the PR practitioners. This will be lead by the rumours, hacking, copycat websites, web security breaks, and all form of cyber terrorist.González-Herrero (1994) and González-Herrero and Pratt (1995, 1996) was illustrated a four stage model for crisis management–issues management, planning–prevention, the crisis, and the post-crisis.

By: Mohamad Alif Bin Dahri (2008299076)
Obtained online: www.ebscohost.com
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The blogosphere and public relations: Investigating practitioners’ roles and blog use

5:56 AM | by The A-Team

The blogosphere and public relations: Investigating practitioners’ roles and blog use


This paper is discussed about the use of blog among public relations practitioners. The authors also discussed on the public relations practitioner perception about blog, how they use a blog, and they ways female practitioners use the blog. This research employed an online multi-page survey to answer the research questions and the respondents are randomly selected. The PR practitioners use the internet when they want to handle issues management, relationship management, environmental scanning and etc. This paper also has discovered marked differences in how different types of practitioners use communication technologies (Porter et al., 2001; Porter and Sallot, 2003). In late 1990s, males were more likely to use online databases than females (Perter et al., 2010). In the early 1990s, blog have become more popular and more than 57 million people read blogs (Lenhart, 2006). Nowadays, the PR professional also use a blog as a communication tools. Practitioners use blogs for more passive research tasks or sometime they also hosting an organizational blog. Blog provide an opportunity for communication professionals to monitor the feedback from their clients. They also use a blog to maintain and improve the good relationship with their target publics (internal and external publics).

Blogs are very useful because it offer practitioners a way to target specialized publics. In addition, this paper states that, the use of blog among PR practitioners appears to be on par with the general population. Therefore, we cannot say that public relations professionals insulate behind in adopting blogs. Even so, it is evident that the use of blogging as a professional tool has not yet become a staple – even among these “early adopters” of the technology. That is, the findings indicate that 70 percent of those surveyed who said they blogged actually maintained a personal blog. Interestingly, the blog adoption mean scores for reading and interacting on blogs were very low, but the perception items about the future of blogs and the use of blogs as a standard public relations tool were higher. The professionals believe blogs are important but they are not yet ready to tactically employ them in public relations. Professionals become aware of technologies and believe it important, but seem to put off adopting the technologies before they see a broad adoption among the general public.

Practitioners also using blogs passively for research purposes, and have not yet strategically developed blogs across the profession. This research found women and man using blogs equally. Usually, they use blog to increase productivity and efficiency in their work but also for communication purposes. The only area in which men are using blogs more frequently is for issues management. As in previous work by Porter and Sallot (2003), these findings are not a function of their professional roles as there were no significant interaction effects between gender and roles. However, this finding shows that women are not thinking about blogs as strategically as men in communications, which may have important implications for their future advancement in the profession. It can be conclude that, the practitioners seem to follow Rogers’ (2003) predictable patterns in adopting technology. They wait until the general population has adopted a tool before fully embracing it. Both managers and technicians seem to be taking a “wait and see” attitude toward blogs, much like they did in the early days of the World Wide Web. However, the use of blog among PR practitioners should be emphasize because it is one of the effective tools to communicates with the others. Blogs also enable the PR practitioners to communicate and gain a feedback from the targeted publics.


Posted by: Akmariela bt Ahmad Sayuti (2008285676)

Reference:

Porter, L., Sweetser, K., & Chung, D. (2009), “The blogosphere and public relations:

Investigating practitioners’ roles and blog use”, Journal of Communication Management, Vol. 13 No. 3, pp. 250-267.

Obtained online at www.emeraldinsight.com

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Blogs and corporation: managing the risk, reaping the benefits

8:29 AM | by The A-Team

Blogs and corporation: managing the risk, reaping the benefits

This article, Blogs and corporation: managing the risk, reaping the benefits is written by Joshua L. Cox, Eric R. Martinez and Kevin B. Quinlan. Generally, this article talks about the advancement of technology nowadays and the needs of corporations to use these new media technology in their communication plan because of the people nowadays are developing as well as the technology. Therefore, in order to reach their audiences, corporations must adapt this new environment by recognizing that certain facts regarding to their audience and new media. Practically, this article talks about blog which is one of the medium used to communicate. Further, in this article also talks about blog history, internal and external blogger in corporation, the risks of blogs, ethics of blogging, external third-party blogs, internal and external corporate blogs, pioneers in corporate blogging policy and few case studies in illustrating the opportunities and risks of blogging. At the end of this article, it also talks about their recommendation of policy of blogging.

Blog started in 1980s from the online diaries that become very popular in the mid 1990s. From BBC Online 2006, there are about 1.3 million posts and 100,000 new blogs appear on the internet each day. Later, at the end of the year, a search blog engine, Technorati was tracking more tha 57 million blogs. The popularity of blogs is may be because of its nature attribute like personal and informal way of communication. On the other hand, many users rely on blogs when making purchase decisions because they consider the blogger would be the experts of any product or category. Internal blog is generated by people inside the organization.

Usually confidential, corporate blogs can convey information from employees and management to company audiences. The blogs makes them a more appealing way of communicating than formal call centers or white papers. However, blogs also pose to substantial threats. The lack of governing the blogosphere has created the analogy to the ‘wild west’. Misguided or malicious employee blogs have the potential to damage corporation’s carefully crafted brand. Moreover, people can voice out their complaints to the world in any second with just one click. Competitors also can employ any bloggers that can attack corporation or hire bloggers to start negative blog campaigns for no apparent reason. The uncontrolled nature of blogosphere raises ethical issues.

Blogs are often seen as unreliable sources of information. The other dangerous thing is astroturfing which is considered as unethical in blogging. Astroturfing is the fabrication of grassroots marketing campaign. Its intentionally falsifies the source and authenticity of the message. Ethical policies for corporate blogging must therefore address the truth, authenticity, verifiability and transparency. In the world of blogging, there are few pioneers that have created policies regarding to blogs. There are five corporations that started the Sun (Policy on public discourse), Feedster (Corporate Blogging policy), Plaxo (Public Iternet Communication Policy), Yahoo! (Personal Blog Guidelines) and IBM (Corporate Blogging Policy and Guidelines). There are lots of independent bloggers out there are professional in their area of interest. Hence, corporations should not overlook these bloggers because they might influence their readers.

There are few things that corporations must do to control the external third-party blogs. Corporations must be aware of bloggers, engage with them when possible like adding them to company’s mailing contact for new press releases or new products and most important of all to respond to them quickly and appropriately. On the other side which is the internal and external corporate blogs, there are nine guidelines written in this article. There are, corporations must have consistent and authentic first-person voice; allow comments but have to monitor them; be honest and transparent; add value in terms of opinion from the experts or unusual access; identify information sources; welcome feedback and issue rectification; respects toward audiences; protect confidential of information and lastly use appropriate disclaimers and publish a “term of use” policy.

Another gist from this article is the reality of electronic publishing is always difficult to control centrally, it is important to have trust in employees to communicate with publics. Moreover, it is also often confusing; corporations are always at the risk in controlling its public image. Hence, the corporations are slow in creating policies of new media. However, new technologies are always making corporations in keep tracking of any inappropriate and improper blog entries.

Through all of the guidelines, they give a stand for corporations to develop strategies in communicating with its both internal and external publics through blogs. They encourage corporations to focus on building long-term relationship, add values with readers. After all, these things would allow companies to remain good relationship with their audiences.

Posted by AINI AFINI BINTI MOHAMAD (2008299072)


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Kami Prihatin: Anda Bagaimana?

9:47 AM | by The A-Team
On behalf of publicity bureau
I, Nor Anita would like to invite all mass communication students and also Miss Baby Anusha Nur to our event which is Kami Prihatin: Anda Bagaimana?
Details are as follows:


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5:41 PM | by The A-Team
hye everyone...


just nk engatkn korang sume..
validation da start tauw..1 August-10 August.
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Scope and structure of public relations: a technology driven view

2:47 AM | by The A-Team

Paper by Anne Gregory in Public Relations Review 30 (2004) pp. 245-254

Obtained online at www.sciencedirect.com

Summary by Aida Hani Johnston, 2008401348


This paper is about a computer mark-up language for the public relations industry called XPRL. It was developed by an industry backed organization called XPRL.Org. The paper discusses how the creation of the Internet and electronic communication has changed the industry. It focuses on three main points which are how the technology can and should be used, the effect to the industry, and the inherent nature of this type of communication. There are two schools of thought; the first is that these technologies are actually extensions of our traditional communication; the second is that these technologies offer new opportunities for the industry. These technologies offer many advantages to an organization if it is willing to help develop and promote these advances. In this paper, the author gives a few examples of how the internet can help the public relations processes. How XPRL can integrate public relations information into a common language so as to not lose data and so that people can easily find and understand the information given by organizations. Basically, XPRL is software developed by the industry to help the industry. In XPRL, there will be different domains which are divided by the types of publics which are being targeted for example, investor relations or community relations. After that organizations will have to fulfill three success prerequisites to communicate with these publics which are strategy, resources and control. Then an organization will come to the communication implementation and tactics, where choices will be given which are best suited to the targeted publics. The implementation and tactics are then divided into four more categories which are message, production, delivery and impact which will determine the effectiveness of the tactics. The author discussed the value of XPRL, which gives practitioners a framework to work from. XPRL can help communication between an organization and the management and also other interested groups. The creators of XPRL created this language to facilitate two-way communication between an organization and its publics. After the creation, they realized that this software only helps organizations initiate and maintain contact with their publics, and that a mirror application needs to be created for use of the public. The opportunity presented by this software to automate the public relations process has infinite possibilities for the industry.

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