"THE ROLES OF SOCIAL MEDIA AS THE MAIN TOOL FOR PUBLIC RELATION PRACTICES IN MALAYSIA"
Some terms that we should know:
Public Relation- Public Relations (or PR) is a field concerned with maintaining public image for high-profile people, commercial businesses and organizations, non-profit associations or programs.
Social Media- Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues. They support the democratization of knowledge and information and transform people from content consumers to content producer
Before the invention of internet people connected to each other by face-to-face, using telegram, by sending a letter, via cell phone etc. Nowadays in modern era we can see that all people around the world use social media as their main medium to stay connected to each other. Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video, for instance Wikis (Wikipedia), Social networking (MySpace and Facebook), Presence app (Twitter and Jaiku), Video sharing (You Tube), Virtual Reality (Second Life), Events (Upcoming), Online gaming (World of Warcraft) etc.
Social media is a very famous and effective medium that people use to share content, opinions, insights, experience, perspectives and media itself. As we know also, social media is a powerful tool that can influence all the people and it can make people to say YES instead of NO even though at first they want to say NO and this social media has the same level of power as the media (communication) such as news paper, magazine, radio, TV etc. As the prevalence of social media continues to rise, organizations of all types and sizes are recognizing the ways in which social media can help them better understand, respond to, and attract the attention of their target audience as what happen in Public Relations.
In Public Relations perspective social media plays an important role in PR practices as what we can see in Malaysia, PR practitioner use social media as the medium to build and maintain the relationship between one organization with its stakeholders as well as the publics. We cannot deny that social media is an important tool nowadays in connecting people and as a main medium for people to share everything and it is very fast to spread any news through social media and we can connect with many people in one time. Other advantages that we can get from social media are democratization of media, relationships and conversation, creativity and re-mix culture, embrace your passion and identity, community, sharing, and connecting and increase transparency in government and organizations. Even though we can see many advantages of social media but can these advantages is use in PR practices in Malaysia? In fact, how far social medium can be use as the main tool in PR practices in Malaysia and is it the effective medium/tool for PR practices?
"Social media play an important role as the main tool for Public Relation(PR) practices in Malaysia..."
Give your comment or opinion regarding the statement and something related to the topic. (E.g :the role of social media)
