The potential pitfalls of high tech PR in 2012.

Technology has always been a mark of progress in the world, but what we have seen in the 21st century has proven to be incredibly advanced. For a consumer to keep up with content and stay completely caught up has changed. In the old days, which are as recently as a generation ago, usually people would read a newspaper (or two, at most) in the morning and watch the news once or twice at night. Now, people are always carrying a device that can access the latest news and information and Facebook and Twitter have completely changed how information is disseminated. High tech PR firms have had to adapt as well and become completely fluent in social media, where one mistake in judgment and message can go viral and damage a client's reputation irrecoverably. Of course, there are other aspects to high tech PR. As mentioned, things have changed greatly from the days where PR firms worked with a couple of media contacts at the appropriate TV networks and a couple journalists and editors at some newspapers. In this day and age, the importance of print media has lessened exponentially, radio has fallen even worse, and television has remained important but has fractured from the days where there were three major networks and maybe a handful of cable channels. So that part has become easier, but public relations firms have had to deal with websites and bloggers that far outnumber print at anytime in its history. This is especially true in the world of High Tech PR, where obviously there are an incredible number of savvy sites and blogs that need to be handled in a world where people's attentions for good publicity are very niche in nature. On the other hand, any bad publicity is picked up by everyone making the stakes higher than ever. Finding a way to reach people through the internet has become by far the most important way of doing business, especially on the tech side. Another pitfall that public relations firms need to contend with is to make sure they are only promoting their client's message on reputable sites. Twenty years ago, every newspaper and TV station could probably considered reputable, considering how large their relative reader and viewership's were. Nowadays, two sites that have the same traffic numbers may have completely different levels of relevance and respectability and this is definitely something that public relations firms have to constantly be aware of. And obviously websites are easy to create (and subsequently delete) so today's high tech PR firms must also stay on the cutting edge of new hot sites and those that have lost relevance. Furthermore, even as these public relations firms are able to navigate the web, they have to deal with the demands of social media where strategically making a corporate campaign stand out has become very difficult. Every brand and company has a Facebook and Twitter page (plus other smaller social media presences) but getting a message to stand out has become incredibly difficult. The over saturation of corporate messaging is one pitfall, but a lot of people who use those sites are distrustful or negative towards any corporate presence and that has to be considered by the savvy high tech PR firms. Given all of these concerns, a shaky economy has made the stakes higher and made many companies demand a quick and significant ROI, which can add to all of the pressure.