Week 13 New Media, -the Culmination of a Poststructuralist Reality?

Chia and Synnott’s entire chapter on new media and PR was very interesting to me, mostly because they mentioned Astroturfing and addressed it as unethical. This is in line with my earlier findings on astroturfing and google bombing. Chia and Synnott describe what must be seen as rather obvious to my generation of digital natives: the proliferation of digital media, empowerment of the individual, PR practitioners taking up these new platforms despite any reservations, and decentralisation of the construction of meaning. I do not dispute their claims, but I would like to highlight an increasingly worrying trend both in new and old media: that of information warfare and manipulation. Yes, the RANT category is back!

Week 11:Critique of Issue/Crisis Management, application in managing Feiyue’s Branding

Chia and Synnott devote a whole chapter in their book to PR with respect to Issues and Crises. In summary, the chapter how certain trends, events, concerns, both plausible and actual, have an impact on an organisation and its relationship with publics. Chia and Synnott note that PR practitioners cannot afford to ignore such facts, both online and offline, as they have the potential to devastate an organisation. They prescribe that an organisation and its PR practitioners must be constantly proactively looking out for such potential issues, and risks thereof contained. Only then can messages about the organisation in a public arena is controlled.

Week 10: General Strategy

General Steps: In this post I will highlight the key aspects of the strategy, and elaborate certain key theoretical underpinnings in communication and information theory.

Week 9: On Audiences, Publics, and Demographics

The perspective of PR practitioners is one where the target Publics, or audiences as they are more often referred to in advertising lingo, refer to the group of people which the message of PR is directed towards. A planned target audience is by no means the sole limiting factor on who and what hear one’s PR message, but it is a necessity to sculpt some semblance of direction of message….These are the only subjects through which goals and objectives can be constructed, and therefore they must be drawn out. Hence, I will attempt to spell out my target audience in this blog post.

Week 8: More FEIYUE(飞跃) Branding, Ethics of Astroturfing, Google Bombing

This week I deal with two seemingly distinct topics, yet there is strong evidence of the occurrence of both in the playing field of Feiyue. Perchance your expect the content of this post to deal with the target audience and the general strategy? Well that will have to wait till next week’s post. The act of Information Gathering takes precedence over strategy planning, so here is my preliminary finding on the brand image of Feiyue.

Week 7: Red Bull, Feiyue Branding

This week saw the most on-ground applications of tactics in deriving PR coverage. For starters, Ms Tanya Wilson gave us the most detailed example of Red Bull’s surprisingly memorable PR. I spoke to some peers more involved with the entertainment industry and they actually remembered Red Bull’s campaign at World Cyber Games 2008, as well as the 2009 Formula 1 Night Race in Singapore. An account of the campaign by my peer is given after the jump.