In his recent address to attendees at the Counselors Academy in Savannah, Josh Hallett (http://hyku.com/blog) echoed what many others have been saying: the investment in advertising is shifting to on-line dialog … what he called a "great customer experience." I left the entire session with a strong sense that the communications foundation I had grown with is now shifting powerfully into symmetrical, two-way communications models heavily enabled by Internet blogs, RSS, podcasts and wikis. Of course other tactics, long employed by public relations, are and will continue to be helping maintain the dialog between institutions and their publics.
But the most powerful finding in Josh’s comment was not the above. The most powerful was that in the room of 50 seasoned PR people, only five were bloggers and only about half were using feedreaders. As Joseph Thornley, CEO of Thornley Fallis Group, observes in his blog (http://www.propr.ca/hallett/), "This level of use by senior practitioners suggests that blogging has a distance to travel before it will have penetrated into the mainstream of the public relations industry."
Not only are the "tools" of communications changing, so too are the social patterns by which people are communicating. For professionals, there is no time to delay developing a facility with both.
